Back in the Library

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The arms of Lord Loomba, drawn by Cakelot1

After more than two years of waiting, this month I finally found the opportunity to go into the reference floor of Hull Central Library, where there sit a few physical volumes of Burke’s and Debrett’s Peerage. My particular quarry was the 2015 edition. I have, of course, already perused the Google Books sample of Debrett’s 2019, but there were a great number of pages omitted from that (the 2015 edition has no sample at all), and indeed there were some peerages which had become extinct before the writing of the 2019 edition so did not feature in it.

Over two long sessions of careful copying out, for which I prepared by compiling a list of peers of the time whose ensigns armorial I did not already have on record, I have been able to update Wikipedia with thirty-three new blazons, which were:

I have already illustrated some of these by myself, but I also gave the list to the relevant WikiProject community for the benefit of our other artists, some of whom have already enriched these peers’ pages with their own illustrations.

There were some interesting findings among them. Lord Deighton’s blazon includes three London 2012 Olympic torches Or enflamed Proper, which I assume must have been cleared with the International Olympic Committee for intellectual property reasons. Lord Forsyth has a square block of roughly dressed sandstone. Lord Ramsbotham takes the radical step of specifying that the tincture Vert should be the shade thereof being known as rifle green, against the heraldic convention that one shade of a colour is as good as any other.

This is my most significant haul of new material for quite some time. I must hope that my next discovery will not take even longer.

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