The death of Tolkien’s father & Sarehole: 1895-1900
In 1895 Mabel brought her sons on a long visit to England. They were staying at her parents’ house on Ashfield Road, King’s Heath, when news came of Arthur’s illness and death in Bloemfontein. Financial assistance from family members, such as the Incledons and her mother-in-law, allowed Mabel to rent a semi-detached cottage in the hamlet of Sarehole. According to Tolkien, the area was then ‘on the borders of a land and time more like… the lands and hills of the most primitive and wildest stories’.
For Tolkien and his brother the upper valley of the River Cole became one large playground, of which his most enduring memories were Sarehole Mill and Pond and the woods of Moseley Bog. The boys called the son of the miller ‘The White Ogre’ and a local farmer ‘The Black Ogre’. The latter was married to the daughter of another farmer who had changed his surname from Buggins. He was reputedly less than five foot tall.
As J.R.R. Tolkien showed signs of intellectual promise, Mabel entered him for the entrance exam to King Edward’s School in central Birmingham, which his father had attended and which had a reputation for academic excellence. Once he began attending K.E.S. in September 1900, it became apparent that the family could not continue living in Sarehole; the daily commute was too great. Moreover, Mabel had been secretly undergoing instruction in Roman Catholicism and had converted in June 1900, leading her Protestant family to curtail some of their financial assistance.
Moseley & King’s Heath: 1900-1902
While Moseley was one of Birmingham’s most affluent suburbs, Tolkien remembered his new home on the main thoroughfare (the Alcester Road) near the village green as ‘dreadful’, polluted by the noise and smoke of passing steam-trams. The family only lived there for the winter of 1900/01, before moving to Westfield Road, King’s Heath, where there was a small Catholic church, St Dunstan’s. They lived in a new, terraced house, built on the estate of a recently demolished 18th-century mansion called ‘The Grange’ (like the one destroyed in the ‘Scouring of the Shire’). However, Mabel found she disliked both their new house and St Dunstan’s. She began attending Mass at the Birmingham Oratory in north Edgbaston, the neighbourhood to which she again relocated in early 1902.
Rednal & the death of Tolkien’s mother: 1902-1904
According to the biographer Humphrey Carpenter, the house to which the family next moved, on Oliver Road, Edgbaston, was ‘only one degree better than a slum’. Having switched J.R.R. Tolkien to the Oratory’s grammar school in April 1902, Mabel quickly decided he would be better served by sitting the King Edward’s exam again in the hope of gaining a scholarship, which he duly achieved in November of that year. He would remain at K.E.S. until 1911.
In April 1903 Mabel became unwell and was admitted to hospital. She was diagnosed as suffering from Type 1 diabetes, which was at that time untreatable and fatal. By the summer of 1904 she had temporarily recovered enough to be discharged. Father Francis Morgan (1857-1935) arranged for Mabel and her sons to stay in a cottage near the entrance to the Oratory’s ‘Retreat’ in the village of Rednal, eight miles from Birmingham. There, they had their meals prepared by a local postman’s wife, allowing Mabel to rest and the boys to roam Rednal Hill at leisure, gathering bilberries, climbing trees and flying a kite with Father Morgan. Sadly, this happy spell came to an end in November 1904, when Mabel slipped into a coma and passed away. The Tolkien brothers were now orphans at the ages of twelve and ten respectively.
Initially beset by fear and despair, J.R.R. Tolkien soon rallied and made the memory of his mother’s death ‘from poverty and persecution’ the keystone of his Catholic faith, which would inform the rest of his life’s work. In this he was guided by Father Morgan, who became the boys’ devoted guardian in accordance with Mabel’s wishes. This settlement seems to have been briefly disputed by family members, including the boys’ uncle Laurence Tolkien, in whose Cotteridge house they stayed for a matter of weeks at the end of 1904.
Stirling Road, Edgbaston: 1905-1908
By January 1905 the Tolkien boys had a room on the top floor of a house belonging to their Uncle Willie’s widow, Beatrice Suffield, in north Edgbaston. The neighbourhood contains a pair of hundred-foot towers, one of which (the eighteenth-century Perrott’s Folly) was surmounted by a rooftop observatory and may have influenced the concept of palantiri (or ‘seeing-stones’) in Tolkien’s fiction. Also nearby was the family of Dr Joseph Sampson Gamgee and a pub called The Ivy Bush, two names which Tolkien would borrow for The Lord of the Rings.
On an average morning, Tolkien would have attended Mass at the Oratory, before continuing by foot, bicycle or horse-drawn bus along Broad Street, past Birmingham Town Hall and, finally, along New Street to King Edward’s School. If walking with his closest friend, he and Christopher Wiseman would pass the journey locked in fierce debate, often concerning theology (Wiseman was the son of an eminent Methodist).
Pupils at King Edward’s were organised into classes based on ability rather than age and, from 1905 onwards, Tolkien made rapid progress through the echelons. He encountered several teachers who encouraged his interests in literature and linguistics, including the headmaster, Robert Cary Gilson, whose son Robert Quilter Gilson became another of Tolkien’s good friends. Unfortunately, life under the roof of an unsympathetic aunt was less than ideal for the Tolkien brothers and, by 1908, Father Morgan had grasped the necessity of finding them new lodgings.
Duchess Road & meeting Edith: 1908-1909
The brothers were moved to a boarding house run by a Mrs Louise Faulkner on Duchess Road, Edgbaston. Also living there was another orphan, a girl three years older than J.R.R. Tolkien, called Edith Bratt. She was a gifted pianist and singer who had attended a music school in Evesham and now performed in recitals arranged by Mrs Faulkner for the enjoyment of the Oratory priests. With their similar backgrounds and situations, Tolkien and Edith soon became close friends.
By late 1909 Tolkien had fallen in love with Edith. At night, sitting by the open windows of their respective rooms, Tolkien above and Edith below, they would hold hushed conversations which lasted until dawn, though interrupted every hour by the tolling bell of the Council House clock tower, one mile distant.
Finally, Tolkien and Edith devised a scheme to spend a whole day together, alone. One autumn morning, he set off for the school playing-fields as was his wont, turning his bicycle south at the end of Duchess Road. A short while later, Edith announced to Mrs Faulkner her intention to visit her cousin Jennie Grove in Handsworth and rode off in the opposite direction. Once out of sight of the house, however, she doubled back to meet Tolkien and cycle the seven miles with him to his cherished Rednal Hill.
All this might have remained a secret had the couple not stopped for tea at a house which Tolkien knew, having stayed there while revising the previous summer. Word of their tryst got back to Father Morgan, who was furious that Tolkien was apparently misspending his time with someone he deemed unsuitable. In November 1909, after Tolkien ‘muffed’ the Oxford University exam for which he had been preparing, Morgan arranged for the Tolkien boys to leave Mrs Faulkner’s house immediately. Edith meanwhile accepted an invitation to live with a retired solicitor and his wife in Cheltenham, forty miles away.
After a few days in a boarding house on Frederick Road, Edgbaston, the brothers were settled with parishioners of Father Morgan on Highfield Road, as close as possible to the Oratory. The priest was going to watch the elder of his charges like a hawk during the final years of his schooling. Nevertheless, Tolkien persisted in meeting Edith (somewhat accidentally) prior to her departure in March 1910, further enraging Morgan, and the eighteen-year-old was forced to cease all contact with Edith until he turned twenty-one.
Final years at King Edward’s School: 1909-1911
Tolkien’s resolve to make his separation from Edith a ‘source of effort’ was particularly apparent in his school extracurricular activities. Having gained an Exhibition (a lesser scholarship) to Oxford University in the autumn of 1910, he threw himself into learning the ancient Gothic language and into debating, drama, the Combined Cadet Force, swimming, athletics and, most of all, rugby. He spent an increasing amount of time at the K.E.S. playing-fields on Eastern Road, Edgbaston. During the 1909/10 season he played for the school 2nd XV, alongside the future Field Marshal William Slim. Tolkien gained his 1st XV colours in November 1910 and, in March 1911, he captained his house team in a match which became the subject of his mock heroic poem ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’.
The catalogue of boys to whom Tolkien refers by Latinate monikers in ‘The Battle’ includes one or two of his fellow school librarians, a group which founded a ‘tea club’ during Tolkien’s final term. By the time he left King Edward’s in the summer of 1911, the regular venue for the club’s meetings was the café in Barrow’s Stores on Corporation Street, Birmingham; hence its name of Tea Club, Barrovians’ Society. Over the ensuing several years the T.C.B.S. would become a more select coterie of ill-fated friends, whose meetings gave Tolkien a sense of artistic purpose.
Visits from university: 1911-1914
After taking up his place at Exeter College, Oxford, Tolkien returned to the West Midlands on a regular basis. He attended K.E.S. events at Christmas 1911 and Easter 1912, though it is not clear where he stayed on these occasions. We know for certain that Tolkien spent the Christmas and New Year of 1912/13 with his Aunt May and the Incledon family at their cottage in Barnt Green. From there he wrote to Edith as soon as he turned twenty-one, arranging the reunion near Cheltenham at which they became engaged. During the period before and shortly after their wedding in 1916, Edith would rent a house in Warwick with her cousin Jennie.
Tolkien returned to the Incledons’ cottage in July 1913, making a number of watercolours of the garden and the nearby Lickey Hills, and once more that Christmas, when he played rugby for the Old Edwardians’ Oxbridge undergraduate XV against the K.E.S. 1st XV. He was again in Birmingham in October 1914, visiting Father Morgan.
War: 1914-1918
Tolkien did not immediately volunteer for service when war broke out but waited until he had finished his degree in 1915. His three subsequent years as a signals officer in the Lancashire Fusiliers were unsettled by temporary encampments, deployment in France, hospital stays and medical assessments, but he was able to spend his leave with Edith in Warwick and with his family in Birmingham and Barnt Green. Tolkien was predominantly billeted on Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, first at Rugeley Camp and then Brocton Camp, so that Edith was obliged to move to the village of Great Haywood in 1916 to be nearer to her husband. When Tolkien was ordered to report for embarkation to France in June of that year, the couple spent what could have been their last night together at the Plough & Harrow Hotel in Edgbaston.
After four months of participating in the Somme offensive, Tolkien was taken ill with trench fever and shipped back to England. Upon arrival he was transported by train to Selly Oak station and, from there, to the First Southern General Hospital on the Birmingham University campus. He was a patient in Edgbaston for six weeks before being discharged into Edith’s care in Great Haywood in December 1916. There followed a posting to the north of England but Tolkien was back on Cannock Chase in the spring of 1918.
Returning home: 1918-1973
During the 1920s and early 1930s, J.R.R. Tolkien visited the Worcestershire farms of his aunt Jane Neave (in Dormston), his brother Hilary (in Blackminster) and his wife’s school-friend Mabel Sheaf (in Hinton-on-the-Green). However, there must have been an interlude of around fifteen years where he made few, if any, visits to Birmingham. For, when he did return in 1933, he was unpleasantly shocked by the transformation of formerly picturesque Sarehole into a ‘meaningless’ suburb of Birmingham. Nevertheless, Tolkien did make subsequent excursions to his home town. He was a member of the K.E.S. Board of Governors between 1937 and 1941, and in 1944 he attended a reunion at the school’s new Edgbaston premises, which he described as ‘ghastly’. In later life Tolkien also made at least one visit to the Lickeys.
