Category Archives: Arts & Media

Television, film, music, paintings, poetry, photographs, theatre.

Second Look at Royal Variety

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Three weeks after its recording, the Royal Variety Performance for 2024 has been broadcast. I have also found on the charity’s website some publicity stills from the event along with the official brochure.

The brochure contains a great deal of heraldic illustration, much of which is clearly of Sodacan origin. The artistic schizophrenia is evident even from the front cover, which prominently displays a full-colour Sodacan version of the royal arms with the Tudor crown while also having in the header a monochrome outline (similar to that on royal.uk) of the St Edward crown version as part of the Royal Variety Performance logo. Throughout the brochure the latter is included as part of the page header while the former is repeated many times as a main-body illustration. More curious is that in the borders of several pages another obvious Wikimedia graphic is seen – the coat of arms of the Prince of Wales. Quite why that one was used I am not sure, especially as Charles stopped using it upon his accession and it has yet to be conclusively shown that William now does so. The outline version also appears as the background pattern to some of the pages themselves. To make things even more confusion two more expressions of the royal arms appear in the brochure – in the letterhead of a message from Buckingham Palace on page 7 in the royal warrant part of the advertisement for Mikhail Pietranek Interior Furnishing and Design on page 65.

A quick glance at the brochures for past installments of the performance makes clear – even just from the front covers – that this armorial smorgasbord has been in effect for some time.

As far as the performance itself is concerned, I do not intend to write a detailed review. The one part I deem relevant to the ongoing themes of this blog is the section on the Lord Lloyd-Webber’s famous musical drama Starlight Express:

After the play’s own professional actors had done their carefully-choreographed routine, the night’s host Alan Carr came on for a comedy coda of sorts, wearing a much simpler steam engine costume and clearly much less steady on his feet. Lloyd-Webber himself was on stage at this point. Carr’s entrance was accompanied by the original Thomas & Friends theme tune. I found this amusing for two reasons:

  1. That theme debuted when the series began forty years ago, but then was replaced in Hit Entertainment’s retool of the franchise twenty years ago. Even though the theme has been out of use now for as long as it was in, it still achieves far greater cross-generational recognition than do any of its successors.
  2. Britt Allcroft’s 1984 production was not the first attempt at adapting Awdry’s books for television – Lloyd Webber had approached the vicar a whole decade earlier with his own pitch and had produced a pilot episode for Granada by 1976, but the studio declined to put it into production. This disappointment was the reason he made Starlight Express in the first place!

 

Heraldry in “Stoke Me a Clipper”

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Red Dwarf is a science fiction comedy series about a man from the twenty-third century who gets put into stasis and wakes up three million years in the future. As such, one would not expect it to include much in the way of medieval heraldry. Indeed, mostly it doesn’t. However, much like Star Trek, the normally-futuristic series occasionally delves into history, and historical fantasy, by means of either time travel or simulation.

The episode “Stoke Me a Clipper” (1997) involves Lister spending a few minutes in a virtual reality game based vaguely on medieval England, featuring an unnamed King & Queen of Camelot. That term is normally associated with Arthurian legends, which are nominally set in the fifth and sixth centuries but have much of their imagery and iconography backported from much later eras. The scene we witness in this episode looks most likely to be set in the fifteenth century, though no detail is actually given about the overall plot nor the setting of the story and no claim is made to historical accuracy.

A great many heraldic banners are seen in this scene, which manage to almost, but not quite, resemble real historical blazons.

The most obvious of these is “The Good Knight” (John Thompson) who wears an off-model version of the royal arms of England: His tabard is quarterly Gules and Azure, the first quarter bearing two lions passant guardant in pale Or and the second quarter bearing three fleurs-de-lys two and one Or. Curiously the lower quarters were left blank, as were those on his back. Perhaps they were meant to be out of frame?

Screencap circa 6m17s

The King (Brian Cox) & Queen (Sarah Alexander) sit on a raised platform under a canopy on two ornate wooden thrones. Their gowns have no heraldic motifs but several are visible on the wall behind them. Above and between the thrones is a depiction of the coronet of a Marquess, the style of which probably dates to the seventeenth century. Lower down is a shield Argent a saltire between four fleurs-de-lys in cross although I am not certain of the latter’s tincture. At the top right of the screen is a shield with two piles reversed the point of each charged with a rose and in the top left is a shield parted per pale and charged with one large fleur-de-lis. Again the tinctures are uncertain. There are four rectangular images behind the thrones. The first looks to be Azure with at least two fleurs-de-lys Or (France again?) the second and third have a metal background with a fess chequy of a colour and a different metal (Clan Stuart?). The fourth cannot be seen as the consort’s throne obscures it completely from this angle.

Screencap circa 6m22s

Four banners are held aloft to the side of the throne area: That on the far right of the screen is divided per bend, the upper part being Azure four crosses fitchee Or and the lower being Gules fretty Argent. Closest to the platform is Azure seme-de-lis Or a double cross Argent over all a label of three points Argent. In between we have Quarterly 1st & 4th Vert a bend between two crosses flory Or 2nd & 3rd bendy of six Vert and Argent a label of three points Argent and Quarterly 1st & 4th Gules a bend between six crosses crosslet fitchee Argent 2nd & 3rd Gules three lions passant guardant in pale Or a label Argent. That last one bears more than a passing resemblance to the arms of the Howard Dukes of Norfolk.

Screencap circa 8m58s

We also see a trumpeter with a cloth shield hanging from his instrument. My best guess is Per fess Argent and Purpure in chief a cross throughout Gules impaling Gules three lions passant guardant reversed in pale Or. This is perhaps the least heraldic-looking of the bunch.

Screencap circa 6m7s

There are knights either side of the royal couple on the platform. That by the king’s right hand wears a tabard Ermine two piles Sable each charged with a lion rampant Or and that to the queen’s left Paly of four Azure and Argent on a bend Gules three birds displayed wings elevated Or. I cannot identify the birds from this distance but given heraldic trends they are most likely eagles, possibly falcons. Affixed to the roof of the stage is a shield which I would guess as Or a bend between two lozenges Sable each charged with a saltire of the field. The most obviously anachronistic element here (beside the decaying castle ruins, of course) is the tasselled embroidering at the front of the stage which shows a Georgian or Victorian depiction of the arms of the United Kingdom.

Screencap circa 8m16s

A man in the crowd (holding his helmet in front of his chest) wears a tabard which seems to be Per pale Sable and Or a label of three points Gules.

Screencap circa 8m37s

The trumpeter and a knight in the crowd both wear a tabard Gules two broken swords inverted Or on a pile reversed Azure fimbriated a broken sword of the second. Two children wear Chequy Or and Azure on a chief of the second three fleurs-de-lys of the first and yet another bystander wears something like Gules a crescent Argent between an orle of martlets Or.

Screencap circa 7m48s

A shot from the back of the crowd shows a knight with a helmet on wearing Vert on a pile Or a falcon’s head erased of the first and a man in a brown hat wearing Per pale Purpure and Argent a dragon passant counterchanged. Both animals are depicted as langued Gules.

Screenshot circa 9m14s

Lister’s own armorial bearings are difficult to make out – what we see on his outfit looks almost like the Russian double-headed eagle. There are a few other examples of heraldry in this scene but they are too faraway to read properly. Overall the resemblance of this scene is more to a Renaissance fair or a gathering of the Society for Creative Anachronism than to a typical period drama. Ugly faux-heraldry is avoided with almost all the arms shown being in keeping with the principles of good heraldic design, even if the matching up of arms to people is apparently entirely random.

I suppose Blackadder, particularly the first series, is the logical next stop for checking out heraldry in British television. Unfortunately that one doesn’t seem to be on iPlayer at the moment, nor can I find a convenient source of screencaps.

SOURCES

Forty Years of Thomas & Friends

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At noon on 9th October 1984, ITV premiered Thomas & Gordon and Edward & Gordon, the first two episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, Britt Allcroft’s adaptation for television of The Railway Series Wilbert Awdry.

Although fans have aired their private celebrations, official commemorations (e.g. those by the franchise owners) have been muted. I suspect that is to avoid community burnout when anniversaries pile up. This autumn’s quadragenary of the television adaptation is swiftly followed next spring by the octogenary of the books themselves, and likely there has been a collective decision to focus efforts on the latter instead.

I will keep my own remarks on the short and stumpy side to avoid rehashing the colossal article I posted in 2021. Though T&F has had its rocky periods over the decades (including an especially bad one at present), the classic seasons are a timeless artistic masterpiece in their own right, down mostly to the model-work of David Mitton and the music of Mike O’Donnell & Junior Campbell.

Even forty years on, there still is nothing quite like it.

The Death of Dame Maggie

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Reported today was the death at age 89 of the actress Dame Maggie Smith, best known in recent decades for her roles in the Downton Abbey and Harry Potter series – the latter especially poignant as her co-star Sir Michael Gambon died exactly a year ago.

This post is not meant as a eulogy or obituary for her – many others can do that far better than I – but a discussion of two points of interest relating Dame Maggie to the topics covered on my blog.

First, her status as a Dame: In 1970 Smith was appointed Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Twenty years later she was promoted to Dame Commander. This is one means by which to certify her status among the “National Treasures” of British acting, nearly all of whom have had the chance to become a knight or dame even if a small number have declined. The Order of the British Empire was founded by King George V in 1917 and was the first British order of chivalry in the modern era to explicitly allow female recipients to have the title. The top two grades of the order are Knight/Dame Commander (K/DBE) and Knight/Dame Grand Cross (GBE). The DBE is by far the most common form of damehood and it is the only grade of any order at which dames outnumber knights. This is partly because the other orders (e.g. the Bath) are reserved for senior government and military officials, a group which tends to skew male anyway, and partly because there is no female equivalent of the honour of Knight Bachelor (i.e. knighthood unconnected to membership of an order of chivalry) which is the rank that the majority of knights possess (including fellow treasures like Gambon as aforesaid). Most of Britain’s orders of chivalry (the Royal Victorian Order is an exception) have statutory limits on how many there may be at any particular grade at any given time. For the grade of K/DBE that limit is 845, with male and female members counting the same towards the total. I do not actually know how close we are to hitting the limit. The English Wikipedia has a page listing all the people who have been awarded the status of DBE and they number over a thousand, but without going through each biography individually (and some don’t have their own pages anyway) I cannot tell how many are currently alive and still holding the same dignity.

In 2021 Netflix released an animated sitcom named The Prince, focusing on a fictionalised caricature of Prince George of Cambridge. It was produced and largely written by Gary Janetti, who previously wrote fourteen episodes of Family Guy, and it strongly resembles that series both tonally and aesthatically. Despite its star-studded cast the series received overwhelmingly negative reception for its offensive premise and unfunny execution. The series was neither renewed nor widely distributed and now is viewable only as a scattering of short clips on video-hosting site by either the studios’s own paltry few advertisements or other people’s reviews of it. The first episode features a minor subplot about the possibility of Elizabeth II conferring a damehood on either Kelly Ripa or Greta Thunberg. On two occasions the suggestion results in another character asking if Smith had just died, presuming there to be a moratorium. As explained above this reasoning is technically correct, although Janetti seems to have missed that neither Ripa (American) nor Thunberg (Swedish) were the late monarch’s subjects so could not receive substantive appointments to the order anyway. They could only receive honorary appointments (giving them the post-nominals but not the salutation) which would be supernumerary to the quota.

The news of Smith’s death has brought renewed interest in her earlier appearances, the most famous of which was the 1969 film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, based on the 1961 novel by Muriel Spark (who herself became a DBE in 1993). News features about Smith’s death kept playing the same speech by her character, which is also featured on the book’s TV Tropes page:

I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all my pupils are the crème de la crème. Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life. You girls are my vocation. If I were to receive a proposal of marriage from Lord Lyon, King of Arms, I would decline it. I am dedicated to you in my prime. And my summer in Italy has convinced me that I am truly in my prime.

Grant with the future George VI in 1933

I have not yet watched the film or read the novel in full, but searching a digital scan on Archive.org for the word “lyon” gives two instances, both of them in the context of Brodie turning down his hand, with the implication that he must be highly desirable and that declining him requires a serious force of will. The only other reference to heraldry in the book is a passing mention of the school’s “crest” which I think is really a shield. The book is set in the 1930s and the Lord Lyon King of Arms from 1929 to 1945 was Sir Francis James Grant, whose Wikipedia article is such a short stub that I don’t even know if he had a wife or not. He was sixty-eight by the time the novel was published, so not in his “prime” by any reasonable definition. Why his title was used in the book is unclear, and may be a matter I need to raise at a subsequent virtual heraldry lecture, whenever that comes up.

Extracting the Anthem

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Many times I have written about the travails involved in finding free-licence images for Wikimedia Commons, but this time it is sound files that concern me.

When Charles III acceded to the throne two years ago, the royal anthem of the Commonwealth Realms changed from “God Save the Queen” to “God Save the King”, having been in the feminine form for longer than the internet had existed. Extant recordings of the masculine form were hard to find, and those that did exist were inevitably very old.

Lacking the budget to form my own choir or hire a recording studio, I went looking for recordings of the song in the place it seemed most likely to find them – videos of His Majesty’s outdoor accession proclamations.

Of the dozens (perhaps hundreds) of these which actually took place, I managed to find just four for which either the venue host or a charitable bystander had uploaded the video to YouTube under Creative Commons. I firstly copied these videos themselves to Wikimedia Commons, then set about extracting the audio of people singing. Both of these involved a bit of a learning curve and the use of some third-party tools.

The Royal Exchange in the City of London (by Alison Pope)

This is the most high-profile of the four, and the one with the best sound quality. The band are playing (I think) Sir Henry Wood’s arrangement of the anthem (which is good because the composition itself is public domain) and the crowd are all in time. There is some noise due to wind, local dogs and the sliding of camera shutters.

Cornwall St Ives (by Cornishpastyman)

This version is sung a cappella. Most of the crowd have picked up by the third syllable and stay remarkably in time for the rest, though not necessarily in tune – one in particular says “noble” and “victorious” in a way that sounds almost like a dog yawning.

Charnwood (by Crep171166)

Music is provided by a lone trumpeter. Almost nobody picks up singing until the second line, and even then they all sound a bit low on energy.

Chatteris (by Chatteris Watch)

Again a lone brass-player and really only one voice is heard singing, picking up midway through the first line.

None of these are studio quality, of course, and none go beyond the first verse. Still, it’s a start.

UPDATE (August 2025)

The YouTuber Gobernador-Heneral has put together a 17-minute compilation of public performances of the anthem in the mourning period.

Reading the Room

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The Queen’s Reading Room today celebrated its second annual festival at Hampton Court Palace.

Rather than focus on the festival event specifically, of which I could not find much footage, I wanted to use the opportunity to write more broadly about the reading room as a concept.

At the start of 2021 Camilla, then Duchess of Cornwall, launched the reading room under her title as an online book club. In 2023, her husband having acceded to the throne, she reconstituted it as a charity and updated the name to reflect her change in status.1

I had been intrigued by the royal couple’s literary interests since the pandemic forced so much of public interaction into the virtual space, and the bookshelf backdrop became an important element of one’s self-presentation. Conferences held from her study at Birkhall show her with at least three books by J. K. Rowling and six by Philippa Gregory2 — the latter suggesting an unorthodox approach to family history. Charles’s shelf was also the subject of some news articles.

The website contains numerous video interviews with authors, celebrity readings and, of course, a weekly podcast.

The most intriguing part of the enterprise, naturally, is in the particular choice of books: There is a page dedicated to Her Majesty’s own picks, which are named in batches of four every season (i.e. sixteen per year). As of June 2024 there have been fourteen literary seasons, resulting in a list of fifty-six books so far. I have listed them here oldest to newest.

Pride & Prejudice Austen, Jane 1813
Frankenstein Shelley, Mary 1818
A Christmas Carol Dickens, Charles 1843
The Queen’s Necklace Dumas, Alexandre 1849
A Tale of Two Cities Dickens, Charles 1859
The Woman in White Collins, Wilkie 1859
Black Beauty Sewell, Anna 1877
Dracula Stoker, Bram 1897
A Book of Food Shand, P. Morton 1927
Rebecca Maurier, Daphne du 1938
I Capture the Castle Smith, Dodie 1948
My Family and Other Animals Durrell, Gerald 1956
Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris Gallico, Paul 1958
The Far Pavilions Kaye, M. M. 1978
War Horse Morpurgo, Michael 1982
Love in the Time of Cholera Márquez, Gabriel García 1988
The Remains of the Day Ishiguro, Kazuo 1989
The Light Years Howard, Elizabeth Jane 1990
A Suitable Boy Seth, Vikram 1993
Charlotte Gray Faulks, Sebastian 1998
The Poisonwood Bible Kingsolver, Barbara 1998
Atonement McEwan, Ian 2001
The Secret Life of Bees Kidd, Sue Monk 2001
The Kite Runner Hasseini Khaled 2003
Suite Française Némirovsky, Irène 2004
The Various Haunts of Men Hill, Susan 2004
Labyrinth Mosse, Kate 2005
The Island Hislop, Victoria 2005
Half of a Yellow Sun Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 2006
Restless Boyd, William 2006
The Book Thief Zusak, Marcus 2006
The Lords’ Day Dobbs, Michael 2007
The Year of Eating Dangerously Parker Bowles, Tom 2007
My Brilliant Friend Ferrante, Elena 2012
The Architect’s Apprentice Shafak, Elif 2013
The Red Notebook Laurain, Antoine 2015
A Gentleman in Moscow Towles, Amor 2016
Magpie Murders Horowitz, Anthony 2016
The Little Library Cookbook Young, Kate 2017
Where the Crawdads Sing Owens, Delia 2018
City of Girls Gilbert, Elizabeth 2019
Girl O’Brien, Edna 2019
Girl, Woman, Other Evaristo, Bernadine 2019
Lady in Waiting Glenconner, Anne, Baroness 2019
The Secret Commonwealth Pullman, Philip 2019
A Half Baked Idea Potts, Olivia 2020
Dark Tides Gregory, Philippa 2020
Hamnet O’Farrell, Maggie 2020
Miss Benson’s Beetle Joyce, Rachel 2020
The Mirror & the Light Mantel, Hilary 2020
Great Circle Shipstead, Maggie 2021
Left You Dead James, Peter 2021
The Fair Botanists Sheridan, Sara 2021
The Paper Palace Heller, Miranda Cowley 2021
Lessons in Chemistry Garmus, Bonnie 2022
The Whalebone Theatre Quinn, Joanna 2022

The selection skews modern. While there are some obvious classics in there (e.g. Dickens and Austen) the majority of entries are from the present century. In this long list the only one which I personally recall reading in full is The Book Thief, about eleven years ago. Fittingly enough, that story is itself about the importance of literacy for intellectual development and freedom, in the context of living through World War II under the German regime that encouraged book-burning.

There are many others from which I have at least read extracts (or listened to them in audiobooks) or which I know by reputation.

The one which sticks out to me the most, given the regal patronage of the Reading Room is The Lords’ Day (2007) by Michael Dobbs. This is a political thriller about the Palace of Westminster being captured by terrorists on the day of the State Opening of Parliament, with fictionalised versions of Elizabeth II and her then-Prince of Wales among the characters. Dobbs (himself ennobled in 2010) earlier wrote the famous House of Cards/To Play the King/The Final Cut trilogy whose second instalment also features a fictionalised version of Charles — ascending to the throne thirty years earlier than in real life and then swiftly being forced to abdicate after a losing a constitutional battle against an evil prime minister. Also featured is Lady in Waiting (2019) by the Lady Glenconner (which I bought at a charity shop last year but haven’t gotten around to reading yet), a memoir which goes into great detail about her time with the Princess Margaret.

The historical novels also often touch on potentially-sensitive topics: e.g. Dumas’s The Queen’s Necklace and Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities both centre on the French Revolution while Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow deals with the Russian one. Seth and Kaye both write about British India, Kingsolver about the Belgian Congo. It would be hard to find a set of popular historical books set in Britain (whether fictional or factual) without encountering at least one about the royal family themselves. In this case Her Majesty chose Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light, the last in a trilogy about the career of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII. There are quite a lot more books about Word War II as well.

The King also gets a look-in. Before his accession to the throne, the Prince Charles shared five of his favourite books: The Battle of the Atlantic by Jonathan Dimbleby, Along the Enchanted Way by William Blacker, Lustrum by Robert Harris, Travels with Myself and Another by Martha Gellhorn and Napoleon by Adam Zamoyski. That second book is likely particularly important to Charles, given his attempts to live that life himself.

There is a further section dealing specifically with children’s books, figureheaded by the Princess of Wales.3 On World Book Day 2022 Catherine similarly made five personal recommendations, and there are dozens more recommended by other friends of the charity. The proportion of these which I have personally read is higher than in the adult section but there are fewer interesting points I have to make about them.

It is also worth noting that while quite a few of the entries end up being about the royal family, there are so far as I can tell none of the books by them e.g. A Vision of Britain, The Old Man of Lochnagar, Crowned in a Far Country or Budgie the Little Helicopter. The Queen did, however, recommend one book by her non-royal son.

I daresay that Her Majesty is at times being a little, well, courageous in associating herself with some of these books. The monarchy strives to be above politics, yet literature is fundamentally about ideas and politics are never far away. A reading room project which took a wide berth from any possible controversy would probably end to watered-down to be worth doing, so Camilla has taken the riskier but more rewarding path. This was exemplified by her Clarence House speech in 2023 for the relaunch of the project, at which she told writers collectively to “remain true to your calling, unimpeded by those who may wish to curb the freedom of your expression or impose limits on your imagination” in what was widely perceived as an intervention in an ongoing controversy over the proposed Bowdlerisation of some classic Roald Dahl books. The edits ultimately did not go ahead.

FURTHER READING

UPDATE (June 2025)

I originally meant the title of this post to be a weak pun on the project’s actual name, but lately I have discovered that there actually is a newly-launched podcast called Reading the Room.

UPDATE (October 2025)

The Queen has, reportedly, gotten herself included in The Hawk is Dead, an upcoming crime novel by Peter James.

FOOTNOTES

1 It went straight from “The Duchess of Cornwall’s Reading Room” to “The Queen’s Reading Room” without being called “The Queen Consort’s Reading Room” in between, perhaps the earliest hint at the eventual abandonment of this honorific crutch at the coronation.

2 I can’t get a perfect view even in 1080p, but I think I recognised The Lady of the Rivers, The Red Queen, The Kingmaker’s Daughter and Three Sisters, Three Queens. What Camilla chose for the above list, however, was Dark Tides, one of the non-royal Fairmile series.

3 Catherine’s URL slug has been updated for the new reign but Charles’s has not, giving the impression that they are husband and wife instead of father and daughter-in-law.

Review: Charles III by Robert Hardman

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Robert Hardman is no stranger to royal biography, having already penned quite a handful about Elizabeth II in the last decade or so of her life, including Queen of Our Times which came out in March 2022 as part of her Platinum Jubilee season and then in December of the same year was released again in a “commemorative edition” to update for the fact that she’d died. Now he moves into the present reign with a biography of her eldest son. I am a little confused about the title of this one as the British publication is called “Charles III: New King. New Court. The Inside Story”1 but on Google Books I can see that the United States version is called “The Making of a King: King Charles III and the Modern Monarchy”. I suspect the titles must be written this way for SEO purposes, or perhaps he just couldn’t decide which description he wanted so used all of them at once. It must be quite a fraught process to come up with a distinctive and meaningful name for a biography when you know that lots of other biographies will be documenting the same person and all competing to emerge in future history as the one definitive authority thereon. Most likely in the long run the general public (maybe academics too) will discard the pretentious subtitle and just remember it as “[AUTHOR] on [SUBJECT]” (e.g. “Jenkins on Churchill”) instead.

Hardman’s lengthy volume covers the first year of the New Carolean era. As one might expect, this period in royal history was particularly dominated by two big ceremonial events: His mother’s funeral and his own coronation. In the book, the funeral (as well as the period of Operation London Bridge leading up to it) takes up chapters 3, 4 and 5 while the planning and execution of the coronation takes 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14. That makes for nine chapters out of a total of eighteen across the whole book. The coronation section in particular is loaded with dense historical comparisons, detailing not just the crowning of Charles III but also quite a lot about those of George VI an Elizabeth II. A less charitable reader may accuse Hardman of padding here, though doubtless a lot of the innovations (and omissions) of 2023 cannot be fully appreciated without an understanding of what came before. Anyone buying this book at first printing will, doubtless, have already watched the public side of these events on television as they were happening, so the real value of these chapters is in reading the personal accounts of the people involved as to what went on behind the scenes, such as the aide who spontaneously hugged Princess Anne to console her in her grief, the brigadier getting a summons back to London while giving a speech at his daughter’s wedding in Corfu, the Duke of Norfolk getting his GCVO investiture in a rush so he could wear his sash in the procession or the royal pages being packed off into a side room with some video games. It is worth mentioning as well that Hardman directed a BBC documentary about the coronation and some other aspects of royal life that year which aired at Christmas and can be seen in some ways as the prelude to this book.

The other chapters are about the personalities of Charles & Camilla, the looming political challenges for the institution of the crown and some of the other projects in which the sovereign couple have engaged themselves (such as the Prince’s Trust/Charity/Foundation organisations which now all have to be renamed). The running thread is the process of establishing Charles’s approach to kingship and the need to assert, like most new incumbents whose predecessors served an unusually-long time, that he is his own person and is not obliged to become a clone of his forbear with whom the institution had become synonymous. Charles, of all our sovereigns, had the longest pre-accession life and a brings with him a much more complete (and publicly-known) individual persona, which makes this task all the more pressing. I was amused to read in Chapter 15 that an unnamed senior courtier refers to this as “Doctor Who syndrome”, showing that the habit of explaining the British constitution in terms of that franchise is one that runs all the way to the top. Given the relative perceptions of the new king and his late mother, I would especially see parallels to Colin Baker succeeding Peter Davidson, or Capaldi following Tennant and Smith.

Being acutely aware of some of the less-sympathetic perceptions that have swirled around the royal family as a whole in recent years, and around Charles in particular for many decades, Hardman occasionally includes explicit references to and arguments against ideas emanating from either that acclaimed Netflix drama or statements by the exiled Duke & Duchess of Sussex. At times it can feel as if he has a bit of an axe to grind. It’s probably redundant in any event, as the people likely to be credulous of the claims he’s refuting are not likely to picking up his book in the first place. I’d like to think this is merely a demonstration of Hardman’s passion for truth over sensationalism, but I can’t entirely trust him on that front given he writes for the Daily Mail after all.

These minor quibbles aside, New King New Court is an engaging and enlightening work which I would recommend to anyone interested in the topic area, though any customer (or library) sinking their money into the original edition now may wind up feeling short-changed he does another expanded version in the near future.

1The use of full stops means that the title mercifully evades what TV Tropes calls “Colon Cancer”, though I would have preferred commas.

Awdry Arms Again

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Back in November I discovered the coat of arms of Sir John Wither Awdry, paternal grandfather of children’s author Wilbert Vere Awdry. The illustration was based on a blazon found in Burke’s Landed Gentry, 1862.

Page 39 of that book gives the shield Argent three cinquefoils Or on a bend Azure cotised of the same and crest out of a ducal coronet a lion’s head Azure for AWDRY OF SEEND.

The next entry is AWDRY OF NOTTON, and it is this one which includes Sir John. For the arms and crest of this branch, Burke merely says “same as AWDRY, of Seend”.

Today I have found the family referenced in the Burke’s Landed Gentry 1921. Page 53 of this book gives a slightly different blazon – shield Argent on a bend Azure cottised Sable between two crescents of the second a crescent between two cinquefoils Or and crest on a wreath of the colours in front of a lion’s head erased Azure gorged with a collar gemel Argent a cinquefoil between two crescents fesseways Or. Curiously the entry for Awdry of Seend in this edition gives no armorial details at all. Wilbert was ten years old when this version came out, and his date of birth is given in his father’s paragraph but no other detail about him personally is included.

The Awdrys are also mentioned at least twice by Arthur Charles Fox-Davies in his Armorial Families series. Page 51 of the 1895 book gives entries for multiple Awdry men, each time with the same information about Sir John’s arms – shield Argent on a bend cottised Azure three cinquefoils Or a crescent of the second for difference and crest out of a ducal coronet Or a lion’s head Azure. He also takes care to note that these are armorial bearings as used, and as quoted in Burke’s “Landed Gentry”, but for which no authority has been established. These comply with the blazon as I first encountered it, except that the crescent for difference was not originally there. The crescent, of course, is the traditional English mark of cadency for an armiger’s second son. I find it a little odd that Fox-Davies types the exact same information out for each of Sir John’s many sons whom he records, but does not say if any of them added extra cadency marks for their own position in the family tree. Pages 55 and 56 of the 1910 book gives the exact same blazon as Burke’s 1921.

For now I will accept the later version as the correct one and I have modified my illustration accordingly. Pending further research, I would speculate that the Awdrys of Seend are the senior branch of the family with the relatively simple arms while the Awdrys of Notton are the long-established offshoot with permanent (although inconsistently recorded) augmentations.

FURTHER VIEWING

Liberating a musical relic

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In discussions of artistic and intellectual property it is often remarked that “There is nothing new under the sun.” in reference to the frequency with which works under copyright turn out themselves to have been copied or derived from older material which may or may not have been public domain already – such as popular film scores taking cues from classical compositions.

One example is Howard Shore’s In Dreams, part of his soundtrack to The Fellowship of the Ring. The melody, especially the first seven notes, came from the 1901 hymn This Is My Father’s World.

The lyrics were written by Presbyterian minister Maltie Babcock and set to music by composer Franklin Sheppard. Despite the musical similarity, thematically they are entirely different: Babcock’s lyrics are mainly about the beauty of natural creation, with a few explicit references to scripture, and obviously multiple references to the Christian deity. Shore’s song, in common with everything else in Jackson’s films, avoids any direct mention of Eru Ilúvatar. Principally the song seems to be about perseverance through adversity and the emotional pain of separation from close friends. Given how the story ends, it could be interpreted as anticipating reunification after death. That the song should allude to spiritual principles without actually naming a real religion is in keeping with Tolkien’s conception of the book (albeit he was Catholic not Presbyterian).

This was the favourite childhood church song of prominent atheist Penn Jillette, who even parodied it for the opening them of his podcast. Personally I only discovered the hymn when searching backwards from the FOTR score, and on further investigation it does not seem to have made much of a cultural penetration outside North America. Searching for it on YouTube mainly brings up American religious schools.

Given the song’s publication and Babcock’s death both occurred in 1901, with Sheppard dying in 1930, the music and lyrics have both been in the public domain for some time, so I was a little surprised to see that Wikimedia Commons did not have an audio file. I set about creating one, based on a photograph they did have of a printout of the sheet music. It had been a long time since last I used MuseScore, but in about an hour I had relearned enough to copy out the page, render it as a sound file and upload it. Obviously mine is instrumental only as MuseScore does not have a singing function and I did not wish to record my own voice for this.

EXTERNAL LINKS

  • This Is My Father’s World, performed by pupils of Fountainview Academy, British Columbia. They really seem to be leaning into the LOTR comparisons with the rowboats and the fallen leaves.
  • Extract from LOTR making-of documentary, showing the recording of In Dreams.
  • Rendition by Sean Holshouser. Twelve years and forty videos later (many of them being actual Christian songs), this remains by far his most popular.

Public Domain Day 2024

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Public Domain Day this year is a little different: Relatively few artists of interest (to me, at least) have been released from copyright in Britain (probably the most culturally significant is the poet Dylan Thomas), but there have been major happenings overseas.

J. R. R. Tolkien died on 2 September 1973, so The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set free today in countries with copyright terms of fifty years – most notably New Zealand, where Sir Peter Jackson adapted them for film. This might also have been the case in Canada, but the law was changed with effect from the end of 2022 to extend Canada’s posthumous copyright duration from fifty to seventy years. Tolkien’s works were thus among the first cohort to be delayed in their release. Of course, this only applies to works published in J. R. R.’s own lifetime – the great many posthumous works which were “edited” by his son Christopher (such as The Silmarillion and The Children of Húrin) will likely remain copyrighted until 2091 and those after Christopher’s death edited by Brian Sibley (e.g. The Fall of Númenor) could stay well into the twenty-second century (that’s before we even consider any other significant involved persons who may wish to claim co-authorship credit). The absurdity of this situation is compounded when one remembers that John Tolkien originally wrote some of these story ideas as early as the First World War.

The other big IP-related news story this year is the very long-awaited expiration of the copyright on Steamboat Willie, the 1928 cartoon film in which Mickey and Minnie Mouse made their first proper appearances. This film is now arguably less famous as an artistic work than as a symbol of copyright disputes, with the copyright term having been extended multiple times by acts of the United States Congress. From 2007 onwards Disney has been using an excerpt of the film as part of its production logo, which many perceived as a shift in strategy to have the image protected as a trademark once their luck with copyright extensions ran out. The Wikipedia page for the film has undergone a vast series of edits in the past twenty-four hours as multiple screenshots and stills are newly available on Wikimedia Commons.