Category Archives: Heraldry

A Note on the Honours Given to Prime Ministers

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Cameron’s ennoblement got me thinking about the general trend of honours given to former prime ministers. Combing through Wikipedia, I have produced a list of them. To keep it from becoming overly long (and to avoid ambiguities about who counts as a prime minister), I have restricted it to honours conferred after the end of Victoria’s reign.

Although their legal status is much the same, British orders of chivalry can be politically divided into two categories: The Baronetage, Knights Bachelor, the Orders of the Bath, St Michael & St George, the Companions of Honour and the British Empire are appointed on the advice of government ministers, while the Royal Victorian Order, the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem and the Order of Merit are conferred at the monarch’s personal whim. The Orders of the Garter and Thistle fell into the former category in the early eighteenth century but were changed to the latter in 1946. Peerages both life and hereditary are presumed to be in the former category.

Here is a simplified list of who received which kind of honour and when. Honours which a person held before ascending to the premiership are not included:

HONOURS IN THE MONARCH’S GIFT

Garter (post-’46)

  • Churchill in 1953 (while still prime minister, in advance of the coronation)
  • Attlee in 1956 (resigned as Labour leader the previous year)
  • Wilson in 1976 (three weeks after leaving office)
  • Callaghan in 1987 (three weeks before stepping down from the Commons)
  • Thatcher in 1995
  • Major in 2005
  • Blair in 2021 (New Year’s Eve)

Merit

  • Balfour in 1916
  • Lloyd George in 1919 (while still prime minister)
  • Churchill in 1946 (while opposition leader)
  • Attlee in 1951 (while opposition leader, ten days after premiership’s end)
  • Macmillan in 1976
  • Thatcher in 1990 (nine days after premiership’s end)

St John

  • Thatcher in 1991 (Dame of Justice)

HONOURS ON MINISTERS’ ADVICE

Garter (pre-’46)

  • Balfour in 1922 (backbench MP) (adv. Lloyd George)
  • Asquith in 1925 (adv. Baldwin)
  • Baldwin in 1937 (adv. Chamberlain) (immediately after resignation)

Companion of Honour

  • Attlee in 1945 (adv. Churchill) (shortly after resigning as Deputy PM)
  • Major in 1998 (adv. Blair)

Hereditary peerage

  • Balfour in 1922 (adv. Lloyd George)
  • Asquith in 1925 (adv. Baldwin)
  • Baldwin in 1937 (adv. Chamberlain)
  • Lloyd George in 1945 (adv. Churchill)
  • Attlee in 1955 (adv. Churchill)
  • Eden in 1961 (adv. Macmillan)
  • Macmillan in (adv. Thatcher)

Life peerage

  • Douglas-Home in 1974 (adv. Wilson)
  • Wilson in 1983 (adv. Thatcher) (dissolution honours)
  • Callaghan in 1987 (adv. Thatcher) (dissolution honours)
  • Thatcher in 1992 (adv. Major) (dissolution honours)
  • Cameron in 2023 (adv. Sunak)

It may also be worth considering honours given to the spouses of prime ministers, whether for achievements in their own right or by right of marriage.

  • Margaret Lloyd George: GBE in 1918 (adv. her husband)
  • Lucy Baldwin: GBE and DStJ in 1937 (former adv. Chamberlain)
  • Clementine Churchill: GBE in 1946 (adv. Attlee), life peer in 1965 (adv. Wilson)
  • Dorothy Macmillan: GBE in 1964 (adv. Douglas-Home)
  • Denis Thatcher: TD in 1982, baronet in 1990 (adv. Major), CStJ in 1991.
  • Norma Major: DBE in 1999 (adv. Blair)
  • Cherie Booth/Blair: CBE in 2013 (adv. Cameron)
  • Philip May: Knight bachelor in 2020 (adv. Johnson)

Unless I’ve missed any, no current or former prime minister (or their spouse) has, from 1901 onward, been appointed to the Order of the Bath, the Order of St Michael and St George, the Order of the Thistle or the Royal Victorian Order.

UPDATE (August 2024)

Theresa May has received a life peerage, for which she was nominated by Rishi Sunak in the dissolution honours last month.

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Chipping off the old block

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One week after the announcement of his appointment, David Cameron took his seat in the House of Lords today. Although there is still no update on the London Gazette (their website tends to be quite slow in these matters), he was shown Parliament.UK as a member of the house from Friday and today the reading clerk confirmed he had been created Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton, of Chipping Norton in the County of Oxfordshire on 17th November.

Cameron is the fifth former prime minister to be ennobled in pursuance of the Life Peerages Act 1958 – the others being the Lord Home of the Hirsel (1974), the Lord Wilson of Rievaulx (1983), the Lord Callaghan of Cardiff (1987) and the Baroness Thatcher (1992).

Of those, only Thatcher had her introduction ceremony recorded for television. Hers was the older style featuring bicorne hats, bowing, and the reading of the writ of summons after the letters patent, all of which were omitted from 1997 onwards. Cameron’s is the post-2020 version which retains some changes to the choreography meant to comply with COVID-era social distancing requirements. His supporters, the Lord True and the Baroness Williams of Trafford, are both incumbent ministers (Leader of the House and Chief Whip respectively) and both were appointed to the upper house during Cameron’s premiership. Thatcher, in her maiden speech, remarked that some 214 then-members of the house were her own appointments. I don’t know quite what the present figure is for Cameron (though I do remember the late Lady Boothroyd complaining in 2015 about it being too high).

Cameron’s choice of territorial designation is slightly surprising – most would likely have expected him to choose Witney, his old constituency, rather than Chipping Norton, a fairly small town within it. Simply being “The Lord Cameron” without further specification would not have been allowed as there are already several other life peers and a Scottish clan by that surname. The prior example of a two-word location which comes most prominently to mind (at least as far as senior ministers are concerned) is the Lord Butler of Saffron Walden – though that had been Rab’s constituency name as well.

Curiously, it is not clear yet if Cameron has been properly appointed to the office of Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Affairs as the latest Privy Council minutes do not mention him.

UPDATE (23rd November)

Cameron’s peerage was Gazetted on Tuesday, and his ministerial appointment was formalised on Wednesday. He also made his maiden speech on Tuesday.

I Might Have Known

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Three years ago I had a stab at designing a coat of arms for the Reverend Wilbert Vere Awdry, believing that he never had one officially granted or descended to him. Now, however, I discover that he most likely did.

When searching through the Internet Archive I found a digital copy of The Thomas The Tank Engine Man, a biography of Awdry by Brian Sibley (who also edited The Fall of Númenor and wrote several companion books about Tolkien’s legendarium and its cinematic adaptations).

The early pages recount some of the vicar’s family history, including his uncle William and grandfather Sir John. Sir John Wither Awdry spent three years as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Judicature at Bombay and William Awdry spent twelve as Bishop of South Tokyo. I quickly found that these two men already had their own Wikipedia biographies, both of which mentioned their kinship to Wilbert. If only there had been links in the other direction I might have discovered this information much earlier.

William, August 1900

Unfortunately Debrett’s Peerage would be of no use here as it tends to list only the corporate and not the personal arms of the Lords Spiritual, and even then only those diocesan bishops within the United Kingdom – Awdry meeting neither condition. Happily, Sir John did have an entry in Burke’s Landed Gentry 1862, which lists his dynastic arms of unspecified antiquity as Argent three cinquefoils Or on a bend Azure cotised of the same with crest Out of a ducal coronet a lion’s head Azure and motto Nil Sine Deo.

William and Wilbert being legitimate agnatic descendants of Sir John, it naturally follows that whatever armorial ensigns he possessed, they possessed also. It is curious, therefore, to have found so little record of him or his son Christopher actually using them. This is amplified by the fact that the fact that he and his brother George clearly had an active interest in and working knowledge of heraldic blazon, which Sibley’s book even notes:

George…was exploring matters of heraldry and coats of arms ‘A real beauty occured to me for Tidmouth,’ he wrote to his brother, ‘It ought to be rather elaborate, as it is relatively new, and the simple ones are doubtless allotted already.’ The proposed arms for Tidmouth were to feature a smith’s hammer and tongs, a lymphad (a heraldic ship), three herrings and a wheel. ‘This,’ George explained, ‘covers all Tidmouth’s titles to importance: shipping, transport, fishing, engineering…’

I did, of course, illustrate Tidmouth’s arms two years ago as well.

Sir David’s Day

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Just over two years have passed since the murder of Sir David Amess, MP for the town (now city) of Southend-on-Sea. It was announced at an intermediate point that he would have his shield of arms fixed to the wall of the Commons chamber, in the manner of other murdered MPs – the most recent example being Jo Cox.

Now, at long last, the shield has been revealed.

Sir David was presumably non-armigerous during his lifetime, with this being a posthumous grant arranged through his widow Julia. So far no news source that I can find (and certainly not the College of Arms) has published the blazon, which I would guess is something like Azure on a chief conjoined to a pale between two talbots rampant Or five roses Gules barbed and seeded Proper. According to press releases the roses represent his five children as well as his gardening hobbies while the talbots represent his animal welfare campaigns and his time at Bournemouth University.

Most intriguing is the motto of His Life Remains, which Julia chose because “wherever I go, I am reminded of him in some way: someone he has helped, a charity he has supported and people whose lives he has touched”. It is unusual for a heraldic motto (unless referring to God, of course) to use third-person language and this decision wouldn’t really make sense except in the concept of a memorial for the deceased.

On an aesthetic level I would rate this achievement higher than Cox’s, due to the superior tincture contrast, although the arrangement of elements is a little unsatisfactory and requires a slightly more rectangular shield shape.

The details of his crest remain unknown.

Everyone on the Same Page

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Minutes of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council usually make for quite dry reading. Despite the speculations of conspiracy theorists, and apart from grand occasions such as the accession of a new king, plenary sessions are mainly filled by the appointments of new officeholders (especially in recent years, as ministerial churn as grown), amendments to charters of public bodies, closures of overcrowded graveyards, and the designs of commemorative coin series.

The formatting is similarly dull, being little but a list of links to PDFs, in which each order in council has its own A4 page with the main text in what I presume is Times New Roman with St Edward’s Crown (surrounded by the national floral badges) in the header. Beginning each document is a contents list typed in a sans serif font (most likely Arial).

Last month, though, a small change was seen – the individual orders in council now have page numbers in their footers (in the sans serif font, and clearly not actually part of the order) while the contents pages now have hyperlinks in their right margins. A new front page has also been added, with the Privy Council Office prominently featured. The PCO’s logo is slightly different to that used by most other government departments – it features the royal shield encircled by the Garter and ensigned by the crown, but without supporters or motto. An interesting thing to note here is that although this stylistic modernisation debuted more than a year into the New Carolean era, the depiction used on the front page and in the orders themselves is still St Edward’s Crown and not the Tudor Crown as the current monarch apparently prefers.

EXTERNAL LINK

Some News At Last!

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Long-time readers will be familiar with my frustrations in discovering the heraldic achievements of former ministers and recent Garter companions Lady Amos and Sir Tony Blair. Now, at last, some progress is being made.

My guess at Amos’s lozenge.

Almost a month ago the Right Reverend Graham Usher, Bishop of Norwich, Tweeted a photograph of the inside of St George’s Chapel. Among the familiar Garter banners I noticed one I had not seen before – per saltire Gules and Or, two of the sections charged with counterchanged circular devices. Presumably the other two sections had them as well, but Sir Thomas Dunne’s banner obscured them. I wasn’t entirely sure what the symbols were – Jukudlick, another Wikipedian, reckoned they were gyroscopes. Without any specific, reliable matching of the arms to the person I was not prepared to add the graphic to her page.

Today’s update comes from the website of Ian G. Brennan, the man who actually constructs the wooden models of knights’ crests to go above their stalls. He includes a photographic gallery of all the crests he has made… and now Blair’s is among them. I had not been paying much attention to his website as it did not look to be frequently updated – indeed the overall design looks to be stuck around the middle of Blair’s premiership. Judging by what I saw when checking the Wayback Machine, this update happened within the last ten days.

No blazon is given, but my best guess for Blair’s crest is a mute swan’s head erased Proper holding in the beak a rose Gules seeded Or barbed slipped and leaved Vert.

The torse is depicted as Azure, Or and Gules, which gives some hints as to the principal tinctures of the shield. The red rose is almost certainly a reference to his thirteen-year leadership of the Labour Party.

 

The website also has a photograph of Amos’s crest. Whether this actually is a crest or just a badge is yet to be seen – I note that the photograph is framed so as not to reveal the presence or absence of a torse. Here the round object looks more clearly like a gyroscope, while the beast holding it is, I would say, a panther sejant guardant Proper. As always with heraldry, you can’t be sure until you’ve read the blazon.

This year’s Garter ceremony was held on Monday. Blair and Amos attended for the second time, as did first-timers Lady Ashton of Upholland and Lord Patten of Barnes. Ashton is already King of Arms for the Order of St Michael and St George (even attending the coronation in that capacity), yet her own bearings are not recorded in any issue of Debrett’s I’ve seen. Patten has no record either. Based on this, I don’t expect any revelation until 2025.

Arms, Flags, Paint Pots & Queens

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Having written a few times now about heraldry as featured in The Railway Series, as well as significant events in that franchise, I felt that now would be a good time to do a spotlight on the most particularly heraldry-heavy story.

Today is the seventieth anniversary of the UK publication of Gordon the Big Engine, the eighth book in the series, came just fifteen days after Elizabeth II’s coronation. I will, of course be focusing on the fourth chapter in the book (and its 1995 television adaptation), in which the monarch herself visits the big station.

The written story has seven illustrations by Clarence Reginald Dalby, of which only the last three are relevant here. The television episode obviously has a large number of potential screenshots. The images used below are linked from the bountiful gallery on ttte.fandom.com and are labelled by their timestamp within the episode (not counting opening credits) in case of future link rot.

5th illustration

6th illustration

7th illustration

The text of the story says:

Edward steamed in, looking smart with flags and bright paint.
…the Queen’s train glided into the station. Gordon was spotless, and his brass shone. Like Edward, he was decorated with flags, but on his buffer beam he proudly carried the Royal Arms.

In the illustrations themselves we can see Union Flags galore, as well as a string of pennons in the national colours.There is also a tricolor drape across the frame of the station which runs the risk of inadvertently looking French or Dutch. Gordon’s carving of the royal arms is obviously the centrepiece here: It looks to have a lion Or as the supporter on both sides with the quarterings being first and fourth Or, second Azure third Gules. The actual charges on them cannot be deciphered but the crown looks like a reasonable approximation of either the Tudor crown or St Edward’s (the former likely still being in wide usage at this early stage of Elizabeth’s reign).

The television adaptation depicts things a little differently – Britt Allcroft at this stage was keen to present Sodor as a mystical fantasy land and dissociate it from the United Kingdom (although clearly not from the monarch), so the Union Flags are entirely absent and the bunting is generically technicoloured. We do, however, see multiple carvings of the royal arms – one leaning on either side of Gordon’s smokebox and at least four more attached to the station itself – originally on the glass of the canopy but later moving to the pillars and a nearby lamppost.

2m02s

2m43s

3m24s

4m20s

Also flying from the canopy are three flags of more definite designs, the first Argent a cross Gules, the second Azure a saltire Or and the third Murrey a saltire Argent. The first is obviously the flag of England but I don’t know the origin of the other two. We don’t get a close-up shot of the royal arms, but they are clearly supported by a golden lion and a white unicorn in the right arrangement. The shield itself looks to be blue in both the lower quarters but the upper quarters for England and Scotland are potentially correct. A red banner with indecipherable golden embroidering also flies outside the station as Gordon approaches.

This, incidentally, was not the first adaptation of the source material, for the story was republished as part of a series of Changing Picture Books called Busy Engines in 1994. The illustrations here (by Arkadia Illustration Ltd.) show many Union Flags as in the original book but no royal arms. Gordon’s footplate instead carries a large facsimile of St Edward’s Crown (perhaps foreshadowing the Duchess of Loughborough).

The Queen’s own appearance also changes – in the 1953 book she is shown only as an arm emerging from her carriage, in the 1994 book wearing a golden circlet trimmed with ermine and a thick blue sash from her right shoulder (very formal for a day trip on a steam train) and in the 1995 episode in a light blue dress with matching hat. It has been suggested but never confirmed that the man in the brown jacket is meant to be her husband and the short woman in the green dress her mother, which might be the clue as to why the story title implies that more than one queen visited.

Armory and Architecture

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This evening I attended a virtual lecture at Arts University Bournemouth. The presenter was David Lund and the subject was the history of architectural model-making, particularly that of John Brown Thorp.

Modelling is an invisible profession to most people as the model-makers are largely executing the ideas of architects, who thus take all the credit for the design. British model-making kicked off in the late sixteenth century with the arrival of trends from Italy. The earliest record is of a 1567 model of Longleat House, made for Sir John Finn. Sir Christopher Wren would go on to commission architectural miniatures on a regular basis.

Originally timber was favoured for model-building, but card proved to be more adaptable. Thorp is considered the grandfather of architectural model-making. He had his headquarters near to the Inns of Court, and his extremely-detailed scale models were used in court cases. By 1940 his firm was employing forty other modellers. The emergence of modelling as a dedicated profession allowed an increase in the size and standards of their creations.

Modelling boomed in the 1950s and ’60s, with the material fashions of the models changing in line with those of the buildings themselves – card representing brick was replaced by perspex representing glass and steel. The economic slump of the 1970s caused a change in clientele, with modellers working for private developers instead of state architects. Nowadays it is common for models to be designed on computers and then 3D-printed, incorporating lighting and even animation.

In the Q&A session, Lund was asked about the phenomenon of public disappointment when a finished construction fails to live up to what the model promised. Lund conceded that models and artistic renderings often gave a sanitised, optimistic prediction of the built environment, replete with happy people and clean surfaces, whereas the reality (especially in modernist constructions) proved quite different. Developers and the public often unfairly blame the artists and modellers for this, even though they are only following what the developers tell them to do.

On an entirely unrelated note, late last night I discovered that Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Speaker of the House of Commons since 2019, has finally been granted a coat of arms. I was relieved to come across this news at all, yet also a little perplexed to realise that the news articles were from almost a month ago. I don’t know how I missed this, given that I have been obsessively looking out for this ever since his election. The not-so-grand reveal came at the unveiling of a new set of stained-glass windows in the Palace of Westminster, the other panels of which were decorated with the arms of British Overseas Territories.

None of the news articles I have uncovered so far gave the blazon for the new achievement, so my illustration for Wikimedia Commons is based on visual inspection of the artwork in the photograph. It indeed includes the red rose of Lancaster, “busy bee” and rugby references as Sir Lindsay hinted two years ago. The use of the parliamentary mace Or on a fess conjoined to a bordure Vert is almost certainly copied from the arms of Sir Harry Hylton-Foster, who became speaker sixty years before Hoyle did – though one has to hope that Hoyle does not end his tenure quite so abruptly. The window shows mantling Gules and Argent (rather than Vert to match the shield), so I have copied that. It is not clear exactly when the grant was made, nor whether the grant was to Sir Lindsay himself or to his noble father (the mace makes the latter seem unlikely).

The search for other new grants continues. Last month I got a pretty strong hint about the arms of Lady Amos, but those of Sir Tony Blair remain as elusive as ever.

The Crown old and new

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Early in the new reign, the College of Arms announced a new royal cypher for Charles III. A noted difference between this one and his mother’s (other than the name, of course) was the depiction of the crown.

“St Edward’s” crown, favoured by Charles II to Victoria

Up to and including Victoria’s reign, depictions of the crown in heraldic drawings could be inconsistent. Edward VII ordered a standardised depiction with simple arches, which has come to be known as “the Tudor crown” due to its resemblance to one supposedly commissioned by Henry VII or VIII (and seen in royal portraits up to the Civil War). Elizabeth II later decided to change this to a version with depressed arches, better resembling St Edward’s crown which monarchs actually wear at coronations, and which seemed to be favoured in heraldic drawings before Victoria’s time. The timing of these decisions created a general misconception that the Tudor crown is always used when the monarch is male and St Edward’s when the monarch is female. Charles’s decision is likely to reinforce that belief.

The “Tudor” crown, as used by Edward VII-George VI

On the day of the coronation, the Canadian Heraldic Authority unveilved their own new version of the crown, intended to be more distinctly Canadian. The overall shape of the crown is still based on the Tudor version, but the jewels have been replaced by a wavy blue line, the uppermost cross by a snowflake (as already used in the Order of Canada) and the crosses around the rim by – of course – golden maple leaves. The removal of explicit Christian symbols may be due to the lack of an established church in Canada, though the omission of fleurs-de-lis is a little perplexing, given the constitutional importance of the country’s French heritage.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/Crown_of_Canada_2023.svg/248px-Crown_of_Canada_2023.svg.png

The Canadian crown, as used by Charles III

It is not clear on exactly what timescale the new crown is to supersede the old. Four days after the coronation the government of Canada released a revised Canadian passport design. Though many radical changes have been made, the 1952 depiction of the crown retains pride of place. It is also not certain whether this will apply to the parliamentary maces. Currently the mace of the House of Commons is modeled on the Tudor crown while that of the Senate is modeled on St Edward’s. This is reflected in the heraldic badge of the parliament, showing both maces in saltire behind the shield. Funnily enough, British passports, though updating the introductory text to reference His Britannic Majesty instead of Hers, also still seem to have the prior crown on their covers.

The shield itself (fleurs and all) remains unchanged. It was announced on the same day that the arms of Canada may be flown as a banner to represent Charles and all future sovereigns. Previously Elizabeth II’s flag had the royal arms of Canada with her personal EIIR cypher imposed on a hurt in the middle. The removal of the cypher brings Canada closer in line with British heraldic practice whereby the reigning monarch bears the arms of dominion undifferenced, as well as avoiding the hassle of redesigning the flag for each subsequent reign. It remains to be seen whether the heraldic banners of other members of the royal family will also omit their cyphers and keep just the cadency labels.

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Some Developments, Old and New

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My hobby as an amateur armorial artist has been going in earnest for six years now and is fast approaching 1,400 illustrations. Every now and again I go back to revisit one of my earlier works to see if it can be improved.

Today’s retrospective was Lord Walker of Aldringham, former Chief of the Defence Staff, whose arms I first did in January 2019. I found an old thread about it on r/heraldry and, predictably, they weren’t very impressed.

I set out to remake the shield from scratch, smoothing out the fracture of the orle, refining the colours and, crucially, making the acorns a little more recognisable. The main difficulty I had was fitting the four acorns above and below the chevrons, for this arrangement works more naturally with three. When reading the blazon on Walker’s page I saw that there was no source given for it, and set out to find one. Reading Debrett’s Peerage 2019 (page 4691) I discovered that there were indeed three acorns not four, and corrected the image accordingly. I must wonder how that error originated (since it was written as a word not a numeral, so a simple typo would be difficult) and how far it has proliferated.

With nine days to go until King Charles’s coronation, his cypher has started to be seen on the liveries of royal soldiers. The Yeoman Warders (or “Beefeaters”) at the Tower of London recently debuted their new blue undress uniforms, and the state trumpeters have updated theirs as well.

UPDATE (30th April)

I see that on the same day I uploaded my re-illustration the Prime Minister’s Flickr account published a photograph taken inside Westminster Abbey, with Walker’s banner hanging in the background. Sure enough, three acorns only.