Meanwhile it was time for Ronald to be sent to school. In the autumn of 1899 at the age of seven he took the entrance examination for King Edward’s, his father’s old school. He failed to obtain a place, for his mother had probably been too easy-going in her teaching. But a year later he took the examination again and passed, entering King Edward’s in September 1900. A Tolkien uncle who was uncharacteristically well-disposed towards Mabel paid the fees, which then amounted to twelve pounds per annum. The school was in the centre of Birmingham, four miles from Sarehole, and for the first few weeks Ronald had to walk much of the way, for his mother could not afford the train fare and the trams did not run as far as his home. Clearly this could not continue, and regretfully Mabel decided that their days in the country would have to end. She found a house to rent in Moseley, nearer the centre of the city and on the tram route, and late in 1900 she and the boys packed their belongings and left the cottage where they had been so happy for four years. ‘Four years,’ wrote Ronald Tolkien, looking back in old age, ‘but the longest-seeming and most formative part of my life.’
King Edward’s School could scarcely be missed by a traveller arriving in Birmingham on the London & North Western Railway, for it rose majestically above the subterranean smoke and steam of New Street Station. Resembling the dining-hall of a rich Oxford college, it was a heavy and soot-blackened essay in Victorian gothic by Barry, architect of the rebuilt Houses of Parliament.1 The school, founded by Edward VI, was generously endowed, and the governors had been able to open branch-schools in many of the poorer parts of the city. But the educational standard of King Edward’s itself, the ‘High School’, was still unrivalled in Birmingham, and many of the hundreds of boys who sat on worn benches construing their Caesar while the railway engines whistled below went on to win awards at the major universities.
By 1900 King Edward’s had almost outgrown its buildings and was cramped, crowded, and noisy. It presented a daunting prospect to a boy who had been brought up in a quiet country village, and not surprisingly Ronald Tolkien spent much of his first term absent from school because of ill health. But gradually he became accustomed to the rough-and-tumble and the noise, and indeed soon grew to like it, settling down happily to the routine of school, although he did not as yet show any outstanding aptitude in class-work.
Meanwhile, home life was very different from what he had known at Sarehole. His mother had rented a small house on the main road in the suburb of Moseley, and the view from the windows was a sad contrast to the Warwickshire countryside: trams struggling up the hill, the drab faces of passers-by, and in the distance the smoking factory chimneys of Spark-brook and Small Heath. To Ronald the Moseley house remained in memory as ‘dreadful’. And no sooner had they settled than they had to move: the house was to be demolished to make room for a fire-station. Mabel found a villa less than a mile away in a terrace row behind King’s Heath Station. They were now not far from her parents’ home, but what had dictated her choice was the presence in the road of the new Roman Catholic church of St Dunstan, corrugated outside and pitch-pine within.
Ronald was still desperately forlorn at being severed from the Sarehole countryside, but he found some comfort in his new home. The King’s Heath house backed on to a railway line, and life was punctuated by the roar of trains and the shunting of trucks in the nearby coal-yard. Yet the railway cutting had grass slopes, and here he discovered flowers and plants. And something else attracted his attention: the curious names on the coal-trucks in the sidings below, odd names which he did not know how to pronounce but which had a strange appeal to him. So it came about that by pondering over Nantyglo, Senghenydd, Blaen-Rhondda, Penrhiwceiber, and Tredegar, he discovered the existence of the Welsh language.
Later in childhood he went on a railway journey to Wales, and as the station names flashed past him he knew that here were words more appealing to him than any he had yet encountered, a language that was old and yet alive. He asked for information about it, but the only Welsh books that could be found for him were incomprehensible. Yet however brief and tantalising the glimpse, he had caught sight of another linguistic world.
Meanwhile his mother was becoming restless. She did not like the King’s Heath house and she had discovered that she did not like St Dunstan’s Church. So she began to search around, and once again she took the boys on long Sunday walks in search of a place of worship that appealed to her. Soon she discovered the Birmingham Oratory, a large church in the suburb of Edgbaston that was looked after by a community of priests. Surely she would find a friend and a sympathetic confessor among them? What was more, attached to the Oratory and under the direction of its clergy was the Grammar School of St Philip, where the fees were lower than King Edward’s and where her sons could receive a Catholic education. And (a deciding factor) there was a house to let next door to the school. So, early in 1902, she and the boys moved from King’s Heath to Edgbaston, and Ronald and Hilary, now aged ten and eight, were enrolled at St Philip’s School.
The Birmingham Oratory had been established in 1849 by John Henry Newman, then a recent convert to the Catholic faith. Within its walls he had spent the last four decades of his life, dying there in 1890. Newman’s spirit still presided over the high-ceilinged rooms of the Oratory House in the Hagley Road, and in 1902 the community still included many priests who had been his friends and had served under him. One of these was Father Francis Xavier Morgan, then aged forty-three, who shortly after the Tolkiens moved into the district took over the duties of parish priest and came to call. In him Mabel soon found not only a sympathetic priest but a valuable friend. Half Welsh and half Anglo-Spanish (his mother’s family were prominent in the sherry trade), Francis Morgan was not a man of great intellect, but he had an immense fund of kindness and humour and a flamboyance that was often attributed to his Spanish connections. Indeed he was a very noisy man, loud and affectionate, embarrassing to small children at first but hugely lovable when they got to know him. He soon became an indispensable part of the Tolkien household.
Without his friendship, life for Mabel and her sons would have shown scant improvement on the previous two years. They were living at 26 Oliver Road, a house that was only one degree better than a slum. Around them were mean side-streets. St Philip’s School was only a step from their front door, but its bare brick classrooms were a poor substitute for the gothic splendours of King Edward’s, and its academic standard was correspondingly lower. Soon Ronald had outpaced his class-mates, and Mabel realised that St Philip’s could not provide the education that he needed. So she removed him, and once again undertook his tuition herself: with much success, for some months later he won a Foundation Scholarship to King Edward’s and returned there in the autumn of 1903. Hilary too had been removed from St Philip’s, but he had so far failed to pass the entrance examination to King Edward’s; ‘not my fault’, his mother wrote to a relative, ‘or that he didn’t know the things; but he is so dreamy and slow at writing’. For the time being she continued to teach the younger boy at home.
On his return to King Edward’s, Ronald was placed in the Sixth Class, about half way up the school. He was now learning Greek. Of his first contact with this language he later wrote: ‘The fluidity of Greek, punctuated by hardness, and with its surface glitter captivated me. But part of the attraction was antiquity and alien remoteness (from me): it did not touch home.’ In charge of the Sixth Class was an energetic man named George Brewerton, one of the few assistant masters at the school who specialised in the teaching of English literature. This subject scarcely featured in the curriculum, and when taught it was confined chiefly to a study of Shakespeare’s plays, which Ronald soon found that he ‘disliked cordially’. In later years he especially remembered ‘the bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of “Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill”: I longed to devise a setting by which the trees might really march to war.’ But if Shakespeare failed to please him there was other meat more suited to his taste. By inclination his form-master Brewerton was a medievalist. Always a fierce teacher,