They remained in England after his father's death and occupied a rented house in Sarehole, Warwickshire, outside Birmingham. In Sarehole there was an old brick mill with a tall chimney. Though it was powered by a steam engine, a stream ran under its great wheel. The mill, with its frightening miller's son, made a deep impression on Tolkien's imagination. In
The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) he wrote of a mill in Hobbiton, located on the Water, which was torn down and replaced by a brick building which polluted both the air and water.
In his letters Tolkien remembered his mother as "a gifted lady of great beauty and wit, greatly stricken by God with grief and suffering, who died in youth (at 34) of a disease hastened by persecution of her faith." Her nonconformist family was opposed to her move to Roman Catholicism, which took place in 1900. "It is to my mother," wrote Tolkien, "who taught me (until I obtained a scholarship ...) that I owe my tastes for philology, especially of Germanic languages, and for romance." The boys' education required that the family move into Birmingham.
Father Francis Morgan was a Roman Catholic parish priest attached to the Birmingham Oratory, founded by John Henry Newman.
