In which there are Nelson Mandela, South Africa, Birmingham, and JRR Tolkien
- Yesterday was Mandela Day and one of my favourite actions for social justice inspired by Mr Mandela's memory was the South African Premier Soccer League donating 67,000 packs of menstrual sanitary pads to underprivileged girls ( no, rly). :-D I also enjoyed Unicef tweeting an old Associated Press photo of a boy from the Maitibolo Cultural Dance Troupe, in front of a get well soon card from 2013, with the Nelson Mandela quote, "[...] as long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest."
- JRR Tolkien's childhood: Ronald Tolkien reputedly said his only memory of his father Alfred was of him closing the family steamer trunk and painting the Tolkien name on it before Mabel and their sons travelled to England in 1895. The same trunk still exists in a private collection at Birmingham Oratory and is one of few pieces of memorabilia remaining from Ronald Tolkien's unstable childhood.
With his mother and brother, Tolkien attended church at the Oratory, where the young Tolkiens were also altar boys. Ronald Tolkien briefly attended St Philip's School, which was at that time in the Oratory buildings, before returning to a posher school as a scholarship boy. After his mother's death he became a ward of one of the Fathers from the Oratory and even lived in the community until a more suitable boarding house could be found. Tolkien would have been a regular visitor while the current pale-walled church with it's low-towered dome was added to the existing red brick buildings. The building doesn't stand out as exceptional at ground level, with for example the Plough and Harrow very nearby, but it does become a notable feature of the landscape when viewed from Perrott's Folly tower.
Tangent: one of the priests at the Oratory once told me the roof was bought secondhand from a gin factory, but I managed to resist observing that it had been preemptively imbued with spirit.
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- JRR Tolkien's childhood: Ronald Tolkien reputedly said his only memory of his father Alfred was of him closing the family steamer trunk and painting the Tolkien name on it before Mabel and their sons travelled to England in 1895. The same trunk still exists in a private collection at Birmingham Oratory and is one of few pieces of memorabilia remaining from Ronald Tolkien's unstable childhood.
With his mother and brother, Tolkien attended church at the Oratory, where the young Tolkiens were also altar boys. Ronald Tolkien briefly attended St Philip's School, which was at that time in the Oratory buildings, before returning to a posher school as a scholarship boy. After his mother's death he became a ward of one of the Fathers from the Oratory and even lived in the community until a more suitable boarding house could be found. Tolkien would have been a regular visitor while the current pale-walled church with it's low-towered dome was added to the existing red brick buildings. The building doesn't stand out as exceptional at ground level, with for example the Plough and Harrow very nearby, but it does become a notable feature of the landscape when viewed from Perrott's Folly tower.
Tangent: one of the priests at the Oratory once told me the roof was bought secondhand from a gin factory, but I managed to resist observing that it had been preemptively imbued with spirit.
This entry was originally posted at http://spiralsheep.dreamwidth.org/588879.html and has
comments Please comment there using OpenID.