Christopher Tolkien Centenary: Heaton Park

The Critic and the Monster
A tale of a footnote, a boggart and a RAF base. 

Image: Christopher and JRR Tolkien (1945), Tolkien Estate
(from the Tolkien Collector’s Guide). Image source. 

It is not an understatement to say that this blog post has been three Tolkien Trewsdays* in the making and what I write here is only the beginning of my exploration.

It began whilst researching the theme of “Loss” for Tolkien Trewsday Week 90 (12 November 2024). The theme was chosen to coincide with Remembrance Sunday (10 November) and Armistice Day (11 November). I quickly realised I wanted to research and explore the idea of animals in wartime in both the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and in his real life experiences of World War One.

This definitely was encouraged by my interest in stories such as War Horse. There is a local connection to that tale, Lathom Park (Ormskirk: The War Horse route) and the play has had a lasting effect on me.

I should note, at this point, that I had decided to visit the Lancashire Fusilier Museum in Bury (just outside Manchester, UK) for the Armistice Day on 11 November as part of my research into Tolkien, the Somme and animals. I hoped I may get more background information on the Tolkien’s WW1 regiment at the Somme. 

During the gathering of reference material for this project I remembered a Tolkien quote about “animal horror” and was reminded about it several times as I looked through websites and other resources. The quote is from a letter (Letter 61, 18 April 1944) J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to Christopher:

Letter 61 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien 18 April 1944 (FS 17)

“I was always against your choice of service (on the ground it seems a war behind); but at least it should not later land you often in to the animal horror of the life of active service on the earth – such as trenchlife as I knew it.”

-- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Letter 61: To Christopher Tolkien, 18 April 1944)

The animal horror here is not Tolkien writing such as in the story behind War Horse where animals themselves face danger and death, but more the abject monstrosity that is war and the brutality Tolkien witnessed at the Somme. The letter reveals senior Tolkien’s views on war and his fears at a time his son has gone off to fight in another war.

Just after this part in the letter, a sentence jumped out at me, for no particular reason than a curiosity to understand what J.R.R. Tolkien was referring to:

Letter 61 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien 18 April 1944 (FS 17)

“Even HP2 were a Paradise to that and the Altmark not (prob.) much worse.”

-- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Letter 61: To Christopher Tolkien, 18 April 1944)

I was viewing Tolkien’s Letters on my PC Kindle app, so I clicked on Footnote 2:

Footnote 2 to Letter 61 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien 18 April 1944 (FS 17)

“2. Heaton Park Camp, Manchester, where Christopher Tolkien had been stationed.”

-- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Letter 61: To Christopher Tolkien, 18 April 1944)

I’ve lived in Manchester as a student at the University of Manchester for the most part of the 1990s and, in the early 2000s, I lived nearby the tram station called Besses’o’th’Barn (they have a very old Brass Band!) which is between Manchester and Bury, not far from Heaton Park in fact. 

My plans for an Armistice Day trip out were expanding and it became even more interconnected whilst researching what to see in Heaton Park and discovered there was now a Somme memorial and commemorative area built for the centenary of the Somme in 2016. Heaton Park was a training camp for the Manchester Regiments “Pals” Battalions who were at the Somme alongside J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lancashire Fusiliers. And later it became a convalescent home for the injured soldiers. 

At about the time I was exploring resources about the Somme and also Heaton Park, I rediscovered a mention of Manchester and John Garth’s book, “Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth” (Publisher: HarperCollins, 2004) together on the Tolkien Society Facebook group. A member there enquired in a post about the “'TCBS on the Somme” map in John’s book and an area on the map called “Boggart Hole Clough”:  

“On the 'TCBS on the Somme' map in John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War, I noticed that there's an area called Boggart Hole Clough. Does anyone have any more information about this?

There is a nature reserve by that name (said to be haunted by a boggart!) near Manchester, and I'm guessing that the Lancashire Fusiliers, being mainly Lancs men, named the area on the map after the clough. 

Clough is a northern word for ravine, so perhaps it was nicknamed that because of the terrain, but I've often wondered if there possibly ghostly/supernatural associations, too. If anyone has any further insight I'd love to know!”

-- Chris Dischord to the Tolkien Society FB group, 9 August 2023. Source.

Replies to this query (and a similar query elsewhere) suggested that the Salford Pals Battalion had given this area at the Somme a nickname after a park in Blackley, a practice that seems quite commonplace in WW1 and perhaps an attempt by British troops to make the devasted landscape around them a little more “homely”, as I suggest in the social media thread on both Twitter and BlueSky.

The area called “Boggart Hole Clough” at the Somme by the Salford Pals was north of the town of Albert. More specifically, it is identified (on the Great War forum here) as being close to the Lonsdale Cemetery by the village of Authuille, which is about 5km from Albert. 

Boggarts are part of northern (British) folklore though it should be noted they are not limited to the north. The Blackley boggart appears in an 1829 volume of “Traditions of Lancashire” by John Roby:

“Not far from the little-snug smoky village of Blakeley, or Blackley, there lies one of the most romantic of dells, rejoicing in a state of singular seclusion, and in the oddest of Lancashire names, to wit, the "Boggart-hole." Rich in every requisite for picturesque beauty and poetical association, it is impossible for me (who am neither a painter nor a poet) to describe this dell as it should be described; and I will therefore only beg of thee, gentle reader, who peradventure mayst not have lingered in this classical neighbourhood, to fancy a deep, deep dell, its steep sides fringed down with hazel and beech, and fern and thick undergrowth, and clothed at the bottom with the richest and greenest sward in the world. You descend, clinging to the trees, and scrambling as best you may,—and now you stand on haunted ground! Tread softly, for this is the Boggart's clough; and see in yonder dark corner, and beneath the projecting mossy stone, where that dusky sullen cave yawns before us, like a bit of Salvator's best, there lurks the strange elf, the sly and mischievous Boggart. Bounce! I see him coming; oh no, it was only a hare bounding from her form; there it goes—there!”

-- John Roby, “Traditions of Lancashire” (Volume 1, Fifth Edition, 1872). Source: Project Gutenberg.

I’d recommend the work of both Simon Young and Ceri Houlbrook if you are interested in Boggarts. Simon has produced two extensive books for the University of Exeter Press in the “Exeter New Approaches to Legend, Folklore and Popular Belief” series:

📗 The Boggart: Folklore, History, Placenames and Dialect
📗 The Boggart Sourcebook: Texts and Memories for the Study of the British Supernatural

Ceri gave an online talk for the Folklore Society about the Blackley boggart back in 2019 (which I attended) and you can read her open research paper, which discusses Boggart Hole Clough, here:

📗 The Suburban Boggart: Folklore in an Inner-City Park

Just so you can place these locations on a map, this is a snapshot from Google Maps showing Bury (the Lancashire Fusilier Museum), Heaton Park and Boggart Hole Clough:

Now we can visualise where they are, let’s gather together the threads. We have J.R.R. Tolkien at the Battle of the Somme close to an area nicknamed Boggart Hole Clough. That place is given the name by the Salford Pals Battalion who trained in Heaton Park before heading out to the trenches of the Somme. We also know from the letters of J.R.R. Tolkien to his son that Christopher was based, for a short while at Heaton Park before he went to South Africa in WW2.

I’m not for one moment suggesting any link between the boggart and J.R.R. Tolkien’s not-too-dissimilarly-named Hobbit, though it should be noted Hobbits appear alongside Boggarts in mad mix of folkloric-supernatural-bestiary that is the Denham Tracts. Multiple scholars have looked at the Denham Tracts-Tolkien link, you can see one, Adam Roberts, explore the name in his 2023 short article, “Hobbit” on the Medium website here.

If the boggart is the monster, then Christopher is the critic, and this one is easier to explain. In an earlier Christopher Tolkien centenary blog post, “The boy who dared to question Thorin’s tassel and the teardrop that fell on Rivendell: Moments within the life of Christopher Tolkien” I note down that J.R.R. Tolkien himself calls his “chief critic and collaborator” (Letter 105, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien) and also the famous moment when Christopher leaves J.R.R. Tolkien exasperated enough to curse, “Damn the boy”, over requested consistency in his readings of the Hobbit.

It has been repeatedly noted over the last weekend at the Tolkien Society celebration of Christopher Tolkien, “Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference” (23-24 November 2024), that he was a very private man who preferred to keep away from the limelight. We have the letters his father sent to him but not Christopher’s responses or correspondence that prompted those letters.  

Christopher’s own experiences of war were very different to his father’s but still a worthwhile subject for research. From the training camps in places like Heaton Park to his time in South Africa, perhaps we can learn something of the personal experience that Christopher faced through the experiences of others. 

Dates I am finding for Christopher and when (and how long) he was potentially at RAF Heaton Park is that he enlisted with the RAF in July 1943 when he was 19 and he went to South Africa in early 1944 to train as a pilot. I hope to get a better timeline in the near future.

One fantastic discovery is the existence of a guidebook to the RAF base at Heaton Park which gives some insights into life at the camp. You can see a transcription and download a PDF version of one these booklets at the University of Lincoln “International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive” here:

📜 RAF Heaton Park Manchester: A Guide for Newly-Arrived Cadets

You can compare the camp map (Left; from the above source) to a more recent Manchester City Council map (Right) of Heaton Park below:

 

[Click images for larger versions]

Heaton Park was an assembly station and despatch centre for the RAF during World War Two. This is why Christopher was temporarily there. I am hoping to get a better understanding of life at the RAF Base in Heaton Park over the weeks and months ahead via resources such as the Manchester City Council page for Heaton Park and organisations like the Friends of Heaton Park and Heaton Park Hall.   

You can get a lot of sense of the history of the buildings within Heaton Park from the Manchester City Council website here. The History of the Park and WW1 can be found here, including more information about the Somme memorial and commemorative area. 

This project will also bookend one of the other research topics I am slowly working on, looking at J.R.R. Tolkien’s time at the military hospital in Blackpool. He went there after his time in Hull and was there when the end of WW1 was announced. 

As noted at the start of this blog, the theme for Week 90 (12 November 2024) of Tolkien Trewsday began this adventure: “Loss”. Week 91 (19 November 2024) had the theme of “Christopher” to celebrate the centenary of Christopher Tolkien’s birthday (21 November 1924). The theme for Tolkien Trewsday Week 92, today (26 November 2024), is “Monsters/Critics”. This ties in with the fact on 25 November 1936, J.R.R. Tolkien delivered his lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” to the British Academy in London. A dual theme of Monsters and/or Critics was suggested by the Tolkien Trewsday steerage group.

I aim to do more blog posts on this subject as I discover further information but in the meantime I hope to get up the photographs soon that I took of Heaton Park and Bury when I visited on 11 November 2024. I’ll also do a thread summarising this blog post on various social media for the current (26 November 2024) Tolkien Trewsday theme of “Monster/Critics”. I’ll get some of the photos on there and I’ll edit/link here once it is done.

🖉 Previous research blog posts about WW1 and Tolkien

• Tolkien Trewsday Week One (28 February 2023): “Visions of War”
• The Tolkien Randír - Trip 1 (14 February 2023): J.R.R. Tolkien’s Webley .455 Mark 6 (VI military) revolver at the Imperial War Museum North, Manchester

🖉 Ongoing projects

These upcoming research projects have come out of the research that prompted this blog post:

1. Animals during wartime in JRR Tolkien’s work and life
2. Christopher Tolkien: The RAF at Heaton Park during World War Two
3. The Tolkien Randír blog - Trip 2 (11 November 2024): WW2 RAF station and Somme memorial at Heaton Park & the Lancashire Fusilier Museum in Bury

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* Tolkien Trewsday is a small weekly positive-action community event run across several social media platforms. A calendar of themes is produced by a steerage group and Tolkien fans are encouraged to participate.