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.