Frederic Hardwicke Knight, QSO (12 July 1911 – 25 August 2008) was a London-born photographer, historian and collector who emigrated to New Zealand in 1957 to take up a medical photography position in Dunedin.
An eccentric polymath, Knight was well known for his striking appearance, his ramshackle Broad Bay cottage crammed with his collections and his self-proclaimed exploits, most notably his claim to have found timbers on Mount Ararat that might have been Noah's Ark.
Charles's parents were enterprising shop-keepers originally from the Northamptonshire town of Wellingborough, who claimed among their forebears the 16th-century printer of Bibles Christopher Barker and the botanist Joseph Banks.
During the Great Depression he was made redundant more than once; other jobs included compiling ships' equipment inventories for Tankers Ltd and being a travelling salesman of silks and satins.
[citation needed] Never very dedicated to his paid employment, Knight spent long lunch hours exploring London and its second hand bookstalls and antique shops and taking photographs (a passion encouraged by his brother-in-law).
Summer holidays and periods of unemployment were spent working in the Chilterns with his Bohemian brother Eric, a self-taught builder,[3] and travelling in the West Country and Ireland with possible short forays into Europe.
He claimed to have worked as a photographer on an Armenian archaeological excavation and as a photo-journalist while travelling through Russia, the Caucasus, Armenia and the Near East, and to have found timbers on Mount Ararat that could have been the remains of Noah's Ark.
[citation needed] Shortly after Britain declared war on Germany, the National Union of Teachers and its staff were evacuated to Toddington near Gloucester.
[citation needed] In 1967 the Archaeological Research Foundation, a Seventh-day Adventist group dedicated to finding Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat, paid Knight's travel expenses so he could show them where he had found timbers in 1936.
Knight subsequently postulated the timbers were the remains of a shelter for animals, not a large boat, and claimed that after he left the ARF party he found archaeological evidence to support his theory that Noah and his family grazed their stock on Mount Ararat in summer.
[citation needed] Knight was an avid, obsessive collector, and his Broad Bay cottage and its makeshift additions became a virtual museum with his collections stacked floor to ceiling.
[citation needed] Knight's last years were troubled by failing eyesight, joint pain and digestive problems which were the legacy of a burst appendix in his early teens.