Toad Hall (The Wind in the Willows) Toad Hall (The Wind in the Willows) Toad Hall is the fictional home of Mr. Toad, a character in the 1908 novel, "The Wind in the Willows", by Kenneth Grahame. On his retirement from the Bank of England in 1908, Grahame returned to Blewbury in Berkshire, the county in which he had grown up. In October that year he published "The Wind in the Willows", a novel for children featuring an array of anthropomorphic characters, including Rat (a water vole), Mole, Badger and Toad. Toad lives in a house on the edge of the River Bank, Toad Hall. The novel
Night of the Big Wind at hand. The Old-Age Pensions Act 1908 introduced pensions for over-70s, but many Irish Catholics prior to the Registration of Births and Deaths (Ireland) Act, 1863 had no birth registration. One of the questions used to establish proof of age was whether the applicant remembered the Night of the Big Wind. A popular story holds that the storm inspired the Director of Armagh Observatory, the Reverend Romney Robinson, to develop the cup-anemometer, which remains the commonly used wind measuring device today. Irish language poems about the event include "Oíche na Gaoithe Móire" by Micheál de Búrc (c.1800 – 1881) and