The Suffields
Given that J.R.R. Tolkien was only four years old when his father died, it was perhaps inevitable that he would identify more with his mother’s family, the Suffields, than with the Tolkiens. He acquired an interest in his maternal ancestry particularly from his grandfather, John Suffield (1833-1930), who ‘would talk with pride about how King William IV had given the family a coat of arms because they did fine [engraving] work for him’. However, of greater importance to Tolkien was the Suffields’ distant past in the agricultural town of Evesham, Worcestershire, which had been founded by Anglo-Saxon monks in the 8th century. This family story rooted the foreign-born and Germanically named Tolkien firmly in the soil of central England.
Records of Tolkien’s Evesham ancestors, which go back at least as far as the mid-17th century, demonstrate that they especially inhabited the parish on the south bank of the River Avon called Bengeworth. However, in 1810, Tolkien’s great-great-grandfather William Suffield (c. 1777-1847) relocated his family northwards to the industrial town of Birmingham. By the mid-1820s, he and his son John (1802-1891), who was Tolkien’s great-grandfather, were running parallel printing and drapery businesses from Old Lamb House on Bull Street. Among their customers were the eminent manufacturers Matthew Boulton (jr.) and John Cadbury.
It was while living at Old Lamb House in 1839 that Tolkien’s grandfather, then aged six, got caught up in a Chartist riot. The account of those events which John (jr.) later gave to a newspaper has elements in common with Tolkien’s depiction of the Battle of Bywater in The Lord of the Rings. Perhaps partly because of such episodes of disorder, John (sr.) moved his branch of the Suffields to the southern outskirts of Birmingham during the 1860s. Details of family gatherings at the house named ‘Firfield’ in Showell Green suggest that literature and drama played an important role. By 1870, John (jr.) was living with his wife Emily Jane (née Sparrow, 1838-1914) in the house next-door to Firfield, known as ‘Mayfield’. There, they welcomed the arrival of their second daughter, Mabel (1870-1904), Tolkien’s mother.
By the 1880s, John (jr.) and family had moved a half-mile westwards to Trafalgar Road in the hilltop village of Moseley, where they were to remain for two decades. Two of his siblings were also settled in the area. He was not only physically close to his younger brother Mark Oliver Suffield (1838-1915), who lived around the corner, but also socially close: both became prominent members of the Central Literary Association, a debating society for the belletrists of late-Victorian Birmingham. John’s eldest sibling, Sarah (1833-1904), had married a successful metal bedstead manufacturer and moved across the River Rea valley to an upmarket address in Edgbaston, along with her twelve children. It is possible that her eldest son George Suffield Marris (1857-1936), who went on to produce Sirram stoves and kettles, helped to inspire that uncongenial Hobbit relation Otho Sackville-Baggins.
Of his mother’s brothers and sisters, J.R.R. Tolkien had the most contact with his aunts Edith May Incledon (1865-1936) and Emily Jane Neave (1872-1963). On visits to May’s homes, first in Moseley and later Barnt Green, Tolkien bonded with his cousins Marjorie and Mary by inventing languages, performing plays he had written and painting watercolours. His Aunt Jane (or ‘Jennie’) tutored him in geometry but no doubt he also absorbed some of her botanical and geological knowledge, which he would subsequently apply in his fictional world-building. It was the name of Jane’s house in Worcestershire (‘Bag End’) which Tolkien borrowed for the home of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. Likewise, he recycled ‘Cotton Lane’, the Moseley road on which his grandfather lived from 1905 to 1930, to provide the surname of another prominent Hobbit family.
The Tolkiens
The Tolkien family were more recent arrivals to Birmingham than the Suffields. The author’s grandfather John Benjamin Tolkien (1807-1896) set up on New Street as a piano manufacturer and music vendor in the mid-1840s. When his second wife died in 1854, he got married for a third time to a twenty-two-year-old woman who had been his neighbour around five years earlier, Mary Jane Stow (1833-1915). The wedding of J.R.R. Tolkien’s grandparents took place in 1856 in King’s Heath and after a period of living in Handsworth, where the author’s father was born, they settled in the Moseley area in around 1870.
The two younger sons of John and Mary remained living in south Birmingham during the author’s childhood, with Laurence Tolkien (1873-1939) helping to pay his nephew’s school fees. When J.R.R. Tolkien and his brother were orphaned in 1904, Laurence accommodated them in his Cotteridge house for a few weeks. However, J.R.R. Tolkien probably saw more of his aunt Mabel Mitton (1858-1937), whose large Moseley house both he and his brother would occasionally visit. Mabel’s younger son, Thomas Ewart Mitton, shared his cousin’s enthusiasm for poetry and was briefly J.R.R. Tolkien’s fellow pupil at King Edward’s School, Birmingham. Sadly, like many of the author’s school-friends, T.E. Mitton died in the First World War.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s parents
John Suffield (jr.) saw to it that each of his daughters received the best possible education. Mabel, the middle of the trio which survived into adulthood, was probably taught by a governess at the family home on Trafalgar Road, learning the languages and artistry that she would later pass on to J.R.R. Tolkien. It is possible that an interest in literature attracted her to the social gatherings organised by the Central Literary Association, of which the bank clerk Arthur Tolkien had been a member since 1877. In any event, they met and became engaged in 1888, though her father was less than delighted about the match. By this time bankruptcy had blighted both families, but John Suffield (jr.) apparently considered the Tolkiens his social inferiors. He insisted that the couple wait until Mabel had turned twenty-one before marrying. The engagement endured, even after Arthur emigrated to become manager of a South African bank, and the wedding finally took place in Cape Town in 1891. Their first child John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born to them the following year and his brother Hilary in 1894.
NEXT: A brief tale of Tolkien’s own life in the West Midlands