Riseholme (fictional village) Poppy, Duchess of Sheffield, at nearby Sheffield Castle (which Benson located at "Sheffield Bottom"—unconnected to the Yorkshire Sheffield). It was revealed in "Mapp and Lucia" that Lucia's great rival in Tilling, Elizabeth Mapp ("Miss Mapp", 1922) had once visited Riseholme and stayed at the Ambermere Arms. She also hijacked Lucia's "au reservoir" (for "au revoir") and presented it to Tilling society as her own. Cynthia and Tony Revell (1984) "Mr Benson remembered in Rye, and the world of Tilling" cited Sir Steven Runciman (1903–2000), a Cambridge historian who knew Benson well, and Benson's manservant Charlie Tomalin (d.1981) for the assertion
Thomas Tilling Thomas Tilling Thomas Tilling Ltd, later known with its subsidiary companies as the Tilling Group, was one of two conglomerates which controlled almost all of the major bus operators in the United Kingdom between World Wars I and II and until nationalisation in 1948. Tilling, together with the other conglomerate, British Electric Traction (BET), became the main constituents of the country's nationalised bus industry in the late 1960s and was sufficiently well known to have entered popular culture as part of London's Cockney rhyming slang (Thomas Tilling = shilling). The company continued as an industrial conglomerate after nationalisation of its