J. R. R. Tolkien was living at Fern Cottage in Rednall, when his mother died there in 1904, when he was 12. He later recalled:
When I think of my mother's death ... worn out with persecution, poverty, and, largely consequent, disease, in the effort to hand on to us small boys the faith, and remember the tiny bedroom she shared with us in rented rooms in a postman's cottage at Rednal, where she died alone, too ill for viaticum, I find it very hard and bitter, when my children stray away.
