John Suffield, Jr.

John Suffield of Birmingham lived to the grand age of ninety-seven. He was born in Old Lamb House, Bull Street in 1833 and died in Moseley just after his birthday in September 1930. The Suffield family had a drapery business in Old Lamb House, a half-timbered building on the corner of Bull Street and High Street. When he was born they lived above the shop. In the early 1840s the family moved out to Edgbaston, one of Birmingham’s new suburbs. In the mid 1850s they moved to Moseley, then still in the countryside, on one of the hills immediately to the south of Birmingham.

John Suffield was Tolkien’s grandfather, the husband of Emily Sparrow, and the father of May, Mabel, Jane, William, and two further sons. He had owned a prosperous drapery business in the city centre of Birmingham, but the business had gone bankrupt. He then became a commercial salesman for Jeyes disinfectant, visiting many factory managers and shop keepers, but still keeping his pride in his old and respectable family name. He did have his airs and graces, however, telling people untruly that William IV gave the family a coat of arms because they had done fine work for him, and that Lord Suffield was a distant relative. His ancestors had been engravers and platemakers, and John himself could copperplate the Lord’s Prayer in a sixpence circle. He was born in 1834, and when Tolkien was five and he was 63, John vowed that he would live to be 100. He was staunchly Protestant, having been brought up as a Methodist, but later swapping over to the Unitarian church, and was horrified when Mabel and May converted to Catholicism. In 1904, he looked after Hilary during Mabel’s illness, and in 1923, he was staying with Mabel and her family when Tolkien caught pneumonia. Tolkien could remember his grandfather standing by his bed and saying that Tolkien and his generation were degenerate weaklings, and that he, John, was off to catch a boat to go on a trip by sea around the British Isles. He lived for seven years after that, mostly with Jane on her farm.

Footnote Lord Suffield does have a very tenuous and distant connection to John Suffield Jr-through the Palmer family. Amazing!

John Suffield, Jr.

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John Suffield his father

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Samuel Wilson Suffield his brother

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John Suffield his son

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Lora Hill his daughter

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Phyllis Hufton her daughter

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Jennifer Adams her daughter

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Dr. Trevor Adams her husband

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Miriam Adams his mother

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Robert Palmer her father

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George Palmer his father

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Charles Palmer his father

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George Palmer his brother

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Alfred Palmer his son

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Katie Palmer his wife

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Ethel Watson-Munro her sister

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Machell Watson-Munro her husband

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Jessie Watson (Dobson) his mother

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Edward Hill Dobson her brother

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Lucy Dobson his wife

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Hon. Marcia Whittington her mother

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Lindsey Burrell, Hon. her father

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Peter Drummond-Burrell, 22nd Baron Willoughby de Eresby his brother

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Charlotte Drummond-Willoughby his daughter

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Robert Wynn Carrington, 1st Marquess of Lincolnshire her son

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Cecilia Harbord his wife

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Charles Harbord, 5th Baron Suffield her father