On a March day in 1891 the steamer Roslin Castle left dock to sail from England to the Cape. Standing on the stern deck, waving to the family she would not see again for a long time, was a slim good-looking girl of twenty-one. Mabel Suffield was going to South Africa to marry Arthur Tolkien.
It was in every way a dividing point in her life. Behind her lay Birmingham, foggy days, and family teas. Ahead was an unknown country, eternal sunshine, and marriage to a man thirteen years her senior.
Although Mabel was so young, there had been a long engagement, for Arthur Tolkien had proposed to her and she had accepted three years earlier, soon after her eighteenth birthday. However, her father would not permit a formal betrothal for two years because of her youth, and so she and Arthur could only exchange letters in secret and meet at evening parties where the family eye was upon them. The letters were entrusted by Mabel to her younger sister Jane, who would pass them to Arthur on the platform of New Street Station in Birmingham, when she was catching a train home from school to the suburb where the Suffields lived. The evening parties were generally musical gatherings at which Arthur and Mabel could only exchange covert glances or at most the touch of a sleeve, while his sisters played the piano.
It was a Tolkien piano, of course, one of the upright models manufactured by the family firm that had made what money the Tolkiens once possessed. On the lid was inscribed: ‘Irresistible Piano-Forte: Manufactured Expressly for Extreme Climates’; but the piano firm was in other hands now, and Arthur’s father was bankrupt, without a family business to provide employment for his sons. Arthur had tried to make a career in Lloyds Bank, but promotion in the Birmingham office was slow, and he knew that if he was to support a wife and family he would have to look elsewhere. He turned his eye to South Africa, where the gold and diamond discoveries were making banking into an expanding business with good prospects for employees. Less than a year after proposing to Mabel he had obtained a post with the Bank of Africa, and had sailed for the Cape.
Arthur’s initiative had soon been justified. For the first year he had been obliged to travel extensively, for he was sent on temporary postings to many of the principal towns between the Cape and Johannesburg. He acquitted himself well, and at the end of 1890 he was appointed manager of the important branch at Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State. A house was provided for him, the income was adequate, and so at last marriage was possible. Mabel celebrated her twenty-first birthday at the end of January 1891, and only a few weeks later she was on board Roslin Castle and sailing towards South Africa and Arthur, their betrothal now blessed with her father’s approval.
Or perhaps ‘tolerance’ would be a better word, for John Suffield was a proud man, especially in the matter of ancestry which in many ways was all he had left to be proud of. Once he had owned a prosperous drapery business in Birmingham, but now like Arthur Tolkien’s father he was bankrupt. He had to earn his living as a commercial traveller for Jeyes disinfectant; yet the failure of his fortunes had only strengthened his pride in the old and respectable Midland family from which he was descended. What were the Tolkiens in comparison? Mere German immigrants, English by only a few generations – scarcely a fit pedigree for his daughter’s husband.
If such reflections occupied Mabel during her three-week voyage, they were far from her mind on the day early in April when the ship sailed into harbour at Cape Town, and she caught sight at last of a white-suited, handsome, and luxuriantly-moustached figure on the quay, scarcely looking his thirty-four years as he peered anxiously through the crowd for a glimpse of his darling ‘Mab’.
Arthur Reuel Tolkien and Mabel Suffield were married in Cape Town Cathedral on 16 April 1891, and spent their honeymoon in a hotel at nearby Sea Point. Then came an exhausting railway journey of nearly seven hundred miles to the capital of the Orange Free State, and the house which was to be Mabel’s first and only home with Arthur.
Bloemfontein had begun life forty-five years earlier as a mere hamlet. Even by 1891 it was of no great size. Certainly it did not present an impressive spectacle to Mabel as she and Arthur got off the train at the newly built railway station. In the centre of the town was the market square where the Dutch-speaking farmers from the veldt trundled in aboard great ox-wagons to unload and sell the bales of wool that were the backbone of the State’s economy. Around the square were clustered solid indications of civilisation: the colonnaded Parliament House, the two-towered Dutch Reformed church, the Anglican cathedral, the hospital, the public library, and the Presidency. There was a club for European residents (German, Dutch, and English), a tennis club, a law court, and a sufficiency of shops. But the trees that had been planted by the first settlers were still sparse, and the town’s park was, as Mabel observed, no more than about ten willows and a patch of water. Only a few hundred yards beyond the houses was the open veldt where wolves, wild dogs, and jackals roamed and menaced the flocks, and where after dark a post-rider might be attacked by a marauding lion. From these treeless plains the wind blew into Bloemfontein, stirring the dust of the broad dirt-covered streets. Mabel, writing to her family, summed up the town as ‘Owlin’ Wilderness! Horrid Waste!’
However for Arthur’s sake she must learn to like it, and meanwhile the life she found herself leading was by no means uncomfortable. The premises of the Bank of Africa, in Maitland Street just off the market square, included a solidly built residence with a large garden. There were servants in the house, some black or coloured, some white immigrants; and there was company enough to be chosen from among the many other English-speaking residents, who organised a regular if predictable round of dances and dinner-parties. Mabel had much time to herself, for when Arthur was not busy in the bank he was attending classes to learn Dutch, the language in which all government and legal documents were worded; or he was making useful acquaintances in the club. He could not afford to take life easy, for although there was only one other bank in Bloemfontein, this was the National, native to the Orange Free State; whereas the Bank of Africa of which Arthur was manager was an outsider, a uitlander, and was only tolerated by a special parliamentary decree. To make matters worse, the previous manager of the Bank of Africa had gone over to the National, and Arthur had to work doubly hard to make sure that valuable accounts did not follow him. Then there were new projects in the locality which might be turned to the advantage of his bank, schemes connected with the Kimberley diamonds to the west or the Witwatersrand gold to the north. It was a crucial stage in Arthur’s career, and, moreover, Mabel could see that he was intensely happy. His health had not been consistently good since he arrived in South Africa, but the climate seemed to suit his temperament; seemed, as Mabel noticed with the faintest apprehension, positively to appeal to him, whereas after only a few months she herself came to dislike it heartily. The oppressively hot summer and the cold, dry, dusty winter tried her nerves far more than she liked to admit to Arthur, and ‘home leave’ seemed a very long way off, for they would not be entitled to visit England until they had been in Bloemfontein for another three years.
Yet she adored Arthur, and she was always happy when she could entice him from his desk and they could go for walks or drives, play a game of tennis or a round of golf, or read aloud to each other. Soon there was something else to occupy her mind: the realisation that she was pregnant.
On 4 January 1892 Arthur Tolkien wrote home to Birmingham:
My dear Mother.
I have good news for you this week. Mabel gave me a beautiful little son last night (3 January). It was rather before time, but the baby is strong and well and Mabel has come through