A birthday post for Tolkien’s ‘second father’, Francis Morgan
First, a big hello and thankyou to new supporters who have joined so far this year, and an equally big thankyou to my stalwart ongoing supporters. It’s another birthday today – Francis Morgan, the man Tolkien called ‘my second father’, was born on this day in 1857. To celebrate, here’s a previously unseen photo of him from the Birmingham Oratory archives. And below I also share an extract from the preface I wrote for José Manuel Ferrández Bru’s richly informative biography of Father Francis.
In a performance at the Oratory School, the young Francis played elderly nurse – according to one eyewitness conjuring up ‘the apparition of a veritable hag … with such spirit and humour as I never remembered before’. Tolkien himself had a strikingly similar moment of stage glory, playing Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s The Rivals when he was 19 – ‘a real creation, excellent in every way and not least so in make-up’, according to his school newspaper.
I suspect there is a connection here; that Tolkien took some of this high-spirited enthusiasm for performance from his guardian. The importance of this should not be underestimated. One of the engines that drove Tolkien’s creativity was the pleasure of performing. This is the man whose talent at writing first bloomed as a way of showing off in school and college meetings and magazines, who would open lectures on Beowulf by striding on stage declaiming the poem like an Anglo-Saxon scop, and whose Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were read aloud long before they ever reached print.
This new book paints a portrait not only of Francis Morgan but of the dynasty and the sherry trade of Cádiz – a small world unto itself – from which he emerged into independent life. It will satisfy the most hobbit-like hunger for family history.
Perhaps no other reader will get quite as big a surprise reading this new book as I did. It was an entirely personal one. When I saw that the teenage Francis Morgan had lived near Regent’s Park in London at 138 Harley Street, I did a double take. That address is right next door to the house in which I began writing Tolkien and the Great War. Trivial coincidence, but it suddenly made me recognise JRR Tolkien’s Spanish Connection for what it is: a doorway back to a time where familiar things suddenly take on unfamiliar perspectives.
(That last personal anecdote from the preface is just one of several curious intersections between my life and the subjects of my research. I’ll share more, perhaps, another time…)
José Manuel Ferrández Bru, ‘Uncle Curro’: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Spanish Connection (Edinburgh: Luna Press, 2018) was first published in Spanish as El ‘Tio Curro’: La Conexión Española de J.R.R. Tolkien (2013). You can read more about it here (Si apre in una nuova finestra).