The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull
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other presents in January 1910 (see Life and Legend, fig. 25); and Barrow’s Stores in Corporation Street (north from New Street), until the 1960s a flourishing grocer’s which had its origin in a shop founded in 1824 by John Cadbury (of Cadbury’s cocoa). An engraving of Barrow’s Stores is reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, p. 26. Tolkien and some of his friends at King Edward’s School, having formed a Tea Club, met regularly in Barrow’s Tea Room. *Christopher Wiseman recalled that ‘in the Tea Room there was a sort of compartment, a table for six, between two large settles, quite secluded; and it was known as the Railway Carriage. It became a favourite place for us, and we changed our title to the Barrovian Society after Barrow’s Stores’ (quoted in Biography, p. 46). The group ultimately combined the names Tea Club and Barrovian Society, abbreviated as *T.C.B.S.
On 9 November 1916, having contracted trench fever during military service in France, Tolkien was admitted to the First Southern General Hospital, a converted facility of over one thousand beds at the then newly built Birmingham University in Edgbaston. He was a patient there until 9 December 1916, when he was able to take sick leave. During these few weeks in hospital he may have begun to write *The Book of Lost Tales.
Referring to Sarehole, Tolkien wrote in a draft letter to Michael Straight that he had been ‘brought up in an “almost rural” vilage of Warwickshire on the edge of the prosperous bourgeoisie of Birmingham’ (probably January or February 1956, Letters, p. 235). Maggie Burns has suggested that some of Tolkien’s relatives, many of whom lived in Moseley, could be described as ‘prosperous bourgeoisie’. Arthur Tolkien’s sister Mabel lived with her husband, Thomas Mitton, in ‘Abbotsford’, a large house with a garden in Wake Green Road in Moseley. His grandparents on his mother’s side lived off Wake Green Road in Cotton Lane, from 1904 to 1930; and on his father’s side, his grandparents lived in Church Road, also off Wake Green Road, until 1900. Mabel Tolkien’s sister’s family, the Incledons (*Incledon family), had what Maggie Burns describes as ‘a luxurious new house’ in Chantry Road, Moseley, ‘with a garden running down to a private park’ (‘“… A Local Habitation and a Name …”’, p. 27).
At least in the period 1913–15, Tolkien occasionally visited his friend *Robert Q. Gilson at his family home in Marston Green, near Birmingham to the east.
When Tolkien lived in Birmingham, most of the buildings in the city centre were still of recent vintage, having been built or re-built within the previous fifty years. But some were replaced within the next half-century, to Tolkien’s dismay. On 3 April 1944, having recently visited the new King Edward’s School in Edgbaston Park Road, he wrote to his son *Christopher: ‘Except for one patch of ghastly wreckage (opp[osite] my old school’s site) [Birmingham] does not look much damaged: not by the enemy [in wartime bombing raids]. The chief damage has been the growth of great flat featureless modern buildings. The worst of all is the ghastly multiple-store erection on the old site’ (Letters, p. 70).
Two towers in Birmingham have been suggested as the inspiration for those in the *Lord of the Rings volume title The Two Towers. One is Perrot’s Folly, built in 1758 by John Perrot and used by Birmingham University as a weather observatory from the 1880s to the 1970s; the other is the chimney of the Edgbaston Water Works. It hardly seems necessary, however, for Tolkien to have based any of the towers in The Lord of the Rings – there are more than two – specifically on any of the towers he may have seen in Birmingham – there are more than these two – or indeed on any particular tower, when such constructions are common in European architecture and in literature.
Contemporary maps and descriptions of the places in and near Birmingham where Tolkien lived, and recent photographs of his former homes, are reproduced in the booklet Tolkien’s Birmingham by Patricia Reynolds (1992) and in Robert S. Blackham, The Roots of Tolkien’s Middle Earth (2006; see also his ‘Tolkien’s Birmingham’, Mallorn 45 (Spring 2008)). Photographs of Tolkien homes are included also in the article on Tolkien in Some Moseley Personalities, Volume I (1991). Moseley and Kings Heath on Old Picture Postcards, compiled by John Marks (1991), is a useful collection of photographs of those places dating from Tolkien’s years in Birmingham. Additional resources are Hall Green, compiled by Michael Byrne (1996); Edgbaston, compiled by Martin Hampson (1999); and Christine Ward-Penny, Catholics in Birmingham (2004). Also see further, Maggie Burns, ‘Faces and Places: John Suffield’, Connecting Histories website; and pages on the website of the Library of Birmingham, www.libraryofbirmingham.com/tolkien.
Birmingham Oratory. The Oratory Order begun in Rome by St Philip Neri was formally recognized by Pope Gregory XIII in 1575. Its main mission is preaching, prayer, and the administration of the sacraments. John Henry Newman, later Cardinal Newman, introduced the order into England by founding the Oratorian Congregation in Birmingham in 1848. In 1852 the community moved to Hagley Road in the suburb of Edgbaston, where a house and church were built. (Their first chapel, in Alcester Road, Moseley, was replaced by St Anne’s Church, which Tolkien, his mother, and his brother attended for a while; see *Birmingham and environs.) In 1859 Newman also founded St Philip’s, a grammar school attached to the Oratory Church. The church was later extended, and beginning in 1903 a new building, designed by E. Doran Webb, was constructed over the old, in the style of the Church of San Martino in Rome as Newman had originally desired. A photograph of the old church is reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, p. 23.
Tolkien’s mother *Mabel, a recent convert to Catholicism seeking a satisfactory place of worship, discovered the Oratory in 1901, and early in 1902 moved with her sons to Edgbaston. *Father Francis Morgan, a member of the Oratory community then carrying out the duties of parish priest, became a close family friend and after Mabel’s death the guardian of her children. Tolkien and his brother *Hilary briefly went to St Philip’s School, because it offered a Catholic education at low cost and was convenient to home, until it became clear that it could not provide the quality of learning that young Ronald Tolkien needed. (Tolkien returned to *King Edward’s School, which he had attended earlier; Hilary joined him after a period of tuition by their mother.)
As wards of Father Francis the Tolkien boys spend much of their time between 1904 and 1911 at the Oratory. Tolkien later recalled that he was ‘virtually a junior inmate of the Oratory house, which contained many learned fathers (largely “converts”). Observance of religion was strict. Hilary and I were supposed to, and usually did, serve Mass before getting on our bikes to go to [King Edward’s] school in New Street’ (letter to his son Michael, 1967, Letters, p. 395). In 1909 they also were in charge of three patrols of Boy Scouts under the aegis of the parish. In these years Ronald and Hilary would have witnessed the transformation of the Oratory Church from old to new.
Blackwell, Basil Henry (1889–1984). Basil Blackwell was educated at Merton College, *Oxford and trained at Oxford University Press in London. From 1913, for six years, he worked with his father’s publishing firm, B.H. Blackwell, which published Tolkien’s early poem *Goblin Feet in *Oxford Poetry 1915; the annual Oxford Poetry volumes, begun in 1913, were Basil’s idea. Although Tolkien came to dislike Goblin Feet, he expressed gratitude to Blackwell as his first publisher (silently omitting his schoolboy publications in the Chronicle of *King Edward’s School, Birmingham). In 1919 Blackwell became an independent publisher, and in succeeding years expanded his operation. In 1924, on his father’s death, he became head of the family bookselling business as well. During his long life he also presided over trade and scholarly associations, and held civic posts in Oxford. He received numerous honours, including a knighthood in 1956 and an honorary fellowship at Merton College in 1959.
For a few years, from 1926, Blackwell and Tolkien were neighbours in North Oxford, at 20 and 22 Northmoor Road respectively. When in 1929 Blackwell vacated no. 20, Tolkien purchased it; he moved his family into the comparatively larger house in 1930. Tolkien was also a frequent customer of Blackwell’s Bookshop in Broad Street, *Oxford, where by 1942 his account was seriously overextended. Blackwell offered to reduce Tolkien’s debt by publishing his translation of *Pearl (which existed in a finished form since 1926) and applying the translator’s payment against his account. The work was set in type, but Tolkien failed to write