Crawley Blue Plaques — Frederick Knott

6 min readDec 2, 2023

Frederick Major Paull Knott was born on the 28th of August 1916 in Hankou, China, the son of English missionaries, Margaret Caroline (née Paull) and Cyril Wakefield Knott and descended from a line of Lancashire mill-owners. His early education was at the Griffith John Memorial College, a Quaker establishment. He came from a wealthy enough background to be sent back to England to be schooled privately, and from 1926 he was educated at Sidcot School and then, from 1929, at Oundle School in Northamptonshire, and in 1934, he went up to Downing College, Cambridge, to read law.

Knott was an English playwright and screenwriter known for complex crime-related plots, and he became interested in theatre after watching performances of Gilbert and Sullivan works held by the Hankow Operatic Society. Knott and his sister Jean saw HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Gondoliers, and Jean later recalled that they acquired the lyrics and records of the songs and would perform HMS Pinafore in their garden with Knott directing. Although he was a reluctant writer and completed a small number of plays, two have become well-known: the London-based stage thriller Dial M for Murder, later filmed in Hollywood by Alfred Hitchcock, and the 1966 play Wait Until Dark, which was adapted to a Hollywood film directed by Terence Young. He also wrote the Broadway mystery Write Me a Murder.

Knott was an exceptional tennis player (a profession he gave the central character in Dial M for Murder), he became a Blue, and in 1937 was a member of the Oxford-Cambridge tennis team that played the Harvard-Yale squad at Newport. He graduated in 1938 with a third-class degree in law, but the outbreak of the Second World War prevented his competing at Wimbledon. Knott served in the British Army Artillery as a signal’s instructor from 1939 to 1946 and rose to the rank of major. Before moving to the States, he wrote the stage play Dial M for Murder at his parents’ house.

In 1948 Knott’s parents bought a smallholding in Crawley, West Sussex (on Langley Lane, a building that was later demolished and doesn’t exist now), and it was in a chalet in the property’s garden that he wrote Dial M for Murder. He later said that the inspiration for the play was the bang of a gun going off in an old, oak-panelled house (probably his grandfather’s country mansion in Wilmslow, Cheshire). It took him 18 months, and there were times when the creative effort was such that he remained in his dressing gown and his mother would leave meals for him at the door. The struggle to write the play was followed by an even greater one to get it produced. Knott sent it to seven different theatre managements, all of whom rejected it, one writing him a letter complimenting the “ingenious little plot” but adding that “the play as a whole would cause little interest”. Knott was thinking of tearing the script up when the BBC accepted it.

As a theatre piece, it premiered at the Westminster Theatre in Victoria, London in June 1952. This production was followed in October by a successful run in New York City at the Plymouth Theatre. Knott also wrote the screenplay for the 1954 Hollywood movie which Alfred Hitchcock filmed for Warner Brothers in 3D, starring Ray Milland and Grace Kelly, with Anthony Dawson and John Williams reprising their characters from the New York stage production, which had won Williams a Tony Award for his role as Inspector Hubbard. The film was made in 3-D, but the brief fashion for the process was fading by the time it was released and most cinemas showed the conventional version. Unfortunately, Knott had previously sold the screen rights to Alexander Korda for only £1,000, and so didn’t make any further money from the film release. It was also remade as a 1981 TV movie, and as the 1985 film Aitbaar in India, and furthermore as A Perfect Murder in 1998. A Soviet TV film Tony Wendice’s Mistake was released in 1981 with the same plot. Its plot was also used for an episode of the television series 77 Sunset Strip entitled “The Fifth Stair”.

In 1960, Knott wrote the stage thriller Write Me a Murder, produced at the Belasco Theatre in New York in October 1961. Then in 1966, his stage play Wait Until Dark was produced on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Later the same year it ran in London’s West End at the Strand Theatre. The film version, also titled Wait Until Dark and released in 1967. The play later ran on Broadway in 2001 where somewhat surprisingly it featured Quentin Tarantino.

In 1952, during the play’s run on Broadway, Mary Orr, wife of the director Reginald Denham, gave a party, her guests including Knott and the actress Ann Hillary, then appearing on television in The Aldrich Family. “I took one look at Frederick,” Hillary told me, and was absolutely fascinated. When I got home that evening, I rang Mary and asked her to tell me more about him. She replied, “He has just rung me asking the same about you.” A romance ensued, and the following year Knott and Hillary were married. They had one son, and the marriage was described by Hillary as “a marriage as perfect as any I can imagine”. After living in Princeton, New Jersey, while bringing up their son, the couple moved to New York, a city which Knott loved.

Knott and his wife led an active social life in Manhattan, and he was noted for his lively wit and zest for life. Though he had sketched out a couple of plays in his head, he never put them on paper. He made enough from his three plays to live comfortably and, said his wife, “I don’t think the drive was there anymore. He was perfectly happy the way things were.” He died in New York City on the 17th of December 2002.

Away from plays, he also wrote the film screenplay for the 1952 film “The Last Page”, and the 1967 film “The Honey Pot”, and the TV play for the 1958 “Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates”.

As the building he wrote the play in doesn’t exist anymore, the blue plaque to him sits on the front of the Ifield Green Masonic Centre. The building was originally built as the parish hall for Ifield’s St Margaret’s Church in 1922 at the expense of Dr. and Mrs. Mosse of Old Park House and was called St Margaret’s Hall it was sold to Freemasons in 1962 and was given the Warrant of Constitution on the 11th of September 1963 and consecrated on the 30th of January 1964.

Plaque Details

Location — Masonic Hall, 3 Ifield Green, Crawley. RH11 0LZ

Dedicated to — Frederick Knott

Dedication Text — In Langley Lane, at his parents’ house Little Balgair, now demolished, Frederick Knott (1916–2002) wrote ‘Dial M For Murder’. After performances on television, and on London and Broadway stages, the play was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1954.

Dedicated by — Crawley Arts Council and Awards For All

Date Installed — 2009

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