John Garth - Tolkien and the Great War

The incentive for today’s Oxford and Cambridge players is social as much as sporting: what with yesterday’s debate, today’s match, and tonight’s dinner, this is a major reunion of old schoolfriends. It is this, not the rugby itself, that brings the highly sociable Rob Gilson to take his place in the scrum. (He also stood in at the last minute for the ailing Tolkien in the debate.) His passion is for pencil and charcoal rather than mud and sweat. It is hard to say which feature most clearly declares his artistic nature: his sensuous, almost Pre-Raphaelite mouth or his calmly appraising eyes. His chief delight is in the sculptors of the Florentine Renaissance, and he can expound with warmth and clarity on Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, and Luca della Robbia. Like John Ronald, Rob is often busy drawing or painting. His avowed object is to record the truth, not merely to satisfy aesthetic appetite (though one visitor has noted sardonically that his rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, contain only one comfortable seat, the rest being ‘artistic’). Since leaving school he has travelled in France and Italy, sketching churches. He is studying Classics but wants to be an architect, and anticipates several years of vocational training after he graduates in 1915.

G. B. Smith, with Gilson in the scrum, considers himself a poet and has voracious and wide-ranging literary tastes, from W. B. Yeats to early English ballads, and from the Georgians to the Welsh Mabinogion. Though he used to belong to Richards’ house, he gravitated towards the TCBS and he and Tolkien are growing ever closer now that Smith has begun reading history at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, a few minutes’ walk from Exeter College. ‘GBS’ is a witty conversationalist and delights in the fact that he shares his initials with George Bernard Shaw, the greatest debater of the age. Although he comes from a commercial family and agricultural stock, he has his eye on specialist historical research after he finishes his degree. But rugby football has never appealed to him.

Also in the scrum against his own better judgment is T. K. Barnsley, known as ‘Tea-Cake’, an unflappably light-hearted young man who frequently dominates the TCBS with his brilliant wit. Tea-Cake likes to affect laconic expressions such as ‘full marks!’ and ‘I’ve got cold feet’ and to ride with reckless enthusiasm around Cambridge on a motorbike, never mind that such behaviour hardly befits a future Wesleyan minister. He and Smith have agreed to play on Tolkien’s team only if Rob Gilson is there too. Rob calls that ‘a left-handed compliment’: in other words, they know his rugby playing is even worse than theirs.

So Tolkien’s forwards are fatally compromised by the inexperience of Gilson, Smith, and T. K. Barnsley. The burden of the fight falls to the defensive three-quarter-backs, including the veterans Wiseman and Barrowclough. Barrowclough shakes off a reputation for apathy by charging half the length of the field through the enemy ranks to score first one try, then another. But from early on after the first try, the pressure from their younger opponents is unremitting, and only adroit tackling by Barrowclough and Wiseman keeps the school’s lead down. At half-time the score is 11-5 to the school First XV. The teams swap ends, and with the wind in his favour Barrowclough scores his second try and the scrum-half again converts. In the final minutes, though, the school increases its score to 14-10. For all their camaraderie, Tolkien’s ragged bunch retires defeated.

But there is dinner with old friends tonight, and the TCBS is not prone to take anything too seriously. These are happy days, and no less happy for being largely taken for granted. On leaving King Edward’s in 1911, Tolkien wrote nostalgically in the school Chronicle: ‘‘Twas a good road, a little rough, it may be, in places, but they say it is rougher further on…’

No one has foreseen just how rough the coming years will be, or to what slaughter this generation is walking. Even now, at the close of 1913, despite growing signs that war impends for this ‘over-civilized’ world, the time and manner of its unfolding are unforeseeable. Before four years have passed, the conflagration will have left four of Tolkien’s fifteen-strong team wounded and four more dead – including T. K. Barnsley, G. B. Smith, and Rob Gilson.

Of every eight men mobilized in Britain during the First World War, one was killed. The losses from Tolkien’s team were more than double that, but they bear comparison with the proportion of deaths among King Edward’s Old Boys and among former public schoolboys across Great Britain – about one in five. And they match the figures for Oxbridge-educated servicemen of their age, the vast majority of whom became junior officers and had to lead operations and assaults. It has become unfashionable to give credit to Oxford and Cambridge, and to social élites in general; but it remains true that the Great War cut a deeper swathe through Tolkien’s peers than among any other social group in Britain. Contemporaries spoke of the Lost Generation. ‘By 1918,’ Tolkien wrote half a century later in his preface to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings , ‘all but one of my close friends were dead.’

If he had been a healthier child, war would have come upon John Ronald Reuel Tolkien before his seventh birthday. He was born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, one of the two Boer republics that had won independence from British rule in South Africa. There his father managed a branch of the Bank of Africa. But Arthur Tolkien had come from England with his fiancée Mabel Suffield following shortly afterwards, and they had married in Cape Town. To the Dutch Boers in Bloemfontein they were uitlanders , foreigners, who enjoyed few rights and paid heavy taxes for the privilege; but the wealth generated by the region’s gold and diamond mines drew many to accept the deal. A baby brother, Hilary, was born in 1894 but the elder boy suffered from the torrid climate, and the next year Mabel brought both children back to Birmingham for a break. They never returned. In February 1896, Arthur died from rheumatic fever. So Mabel Tolkien and her sons were spared the harsh shock of the Anglo-Boer war which erupted in late 1898 over uitlander rights.

Safe in England, Mabel raised the boys alone, taking them to live in a modest cottage in the village of Sarehole, outside Birmingham. There she taught them at home during a four-year rural idyll, and the climate and character of this older world etched themselves in the young John Ronald’s heart: an utter contrast to what he had known until then. ‘If your first Christmas tree is a wilting eucalyptus and if you’re normally troubled by heat and sun,’ he recalled late in life, ‘then to have (just at the age when your imagination is opening out) suddenly found yourself in a quiet Warwickshire village…engenders a particular love of what you might call central Midland English countryside, based on good water, stones and elm trees and small, quiet rivers and…rustic people…’ But in 1900 John Ronald gained a place at King Edward’s and they moved back into industrial Birmingham to be nearer the school. Then, to the anger of Suffields and Tolkiens alike, Mabel embraced Catholicism, and for a while the boys went to a Roman Catholic school under the direction of the priests at the Birmingham Oratory. Tolkien far outstripped his classmates and was back at King Edward’s in 1903, but he remained a Catholic all his life. After his mother, who had been ill with diabetes, fell into a coma and died in November 1904, he felt she had martyred herself raising her boys in the faith.

Prior to Mabel’s death, the family had lived for a while in rooms at a cottage in Rednal, Worcestershire, outside the city borders. But now their guardian, Father Francis Morgan of the Oratory, found accommodation for the boys in Edgbaston, and in their second set of lodgings, at the age of sixteen, Tolkien met Edith Bratt, a nineteen-year-old who also had a room there. She was pretty, a talented pianist and also an orphan, and by the summer of 1909 the two were in love. But before the year was over, Father Francis got wind of the romance and banned Tolkien from seeing Edith. Stricken but dutiful, he threw himself into his school friendships, the TCBS, and rugby, captaining his house team. He won a place at Oxford (at his second attempt) and £60 a year to fund his undergraduate studies in Classics.