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

New Government Arms

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The latest development in a long-running story, yesterday the Cabinet Office announced the rollout of a new rendering of the British royal arms, based on an illustration by Timothy Noad, for use by HM Government, including in all departmental logos on the website. It will presumably also appear in the letterheads of governmental paper publications, but of course the appearance of those example will be less instantaneous.

The most obvious, and important, change is of course the change from St Edward’s Crown to the Tudor Crown, about which I have written before. The crown is also now depicted much larger relative to the other elements. The lion and unicorn supporters have also been redrawn in a much more chunky, angular style than in the old version.

The escutcheon is restored to a more traditional heater shield shape, poking out in front of the Garter circlet, whereas the old depiction had it as a fully-enclosed cartouche. The circlet itself has been enlarged and the motto typed in a serif font as well as having the colours inverted – it now matches the shield, supporters and crown by having the field depicted in negative while the charges and outlines are positive. The fleur-de-list at the end of the strap is gone.The motto scroll is now much flatter, but anomalously retains the old font and colour scheme.

Comparing the two overall, I would say that the new version looks better as an example of heraldic art due to the shield itself no longer being denied its due prominence, but the old version may work better as a corporate logo due to its stronger outline, especially when shrunk for low resolutions.

In other heraldic news, The Heraldry Society recently released a digital upload of 244 pages from Volume 6 of The Coat of Arms, and I have discovered the Fellowship of the White Shield, whose blog currently has nine articles on the subject. I will not be short of reading material in the foreseeable future.

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.

A Comment-Worthy Development

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Ahead of Their Majesties’ visit to Samoa, the Royal Family’s official YouTube channel released a short video from a reception of Samoan delegates at Buckingham Palace. It’s a short video and oddly-trimmed at both ends, as is often the case for this channel, but that’s not the thing that struck me. What struck me is that, for the first time in at least a decade (at least as far as I remember), the video has the comment section enabled.

Looking back at a random selection of other videos on the channel, this seems to be a universal change. Given the sort of comments that normally come up in replies to royal Tweets, this decision – if indeed it was consciously made – seems a rather courageous one to say the least.

Another thing I noticed was the change of channel logo – until recently the logo was a photograph from behind their Majesties’ robed backs, looking out from the Buckingham Palace balcony after the coronation. This is still the logo for the Twitter account. Now it has been replaced by a white outline of the royal arms on a blue background. It looks to be the same drawing as used on both the top bar and the background of the royal family website (distinct from the blue-tinted Sodacan illustration appearing in the footer), but with a tincture change. The image is in raster rather than vector form with rather low resolution which fuzzes the fine line details, and the blue square has white outlines on the top and right edges which are still partly visible when cropped into a circle. The overall look is not especially polished, one has to say.

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.

Timothy Noad at the World Calligraphy Museum

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Heraldry is not a topic much-covered on YouTube, so I cherish what scraps I can find. Recently I found this video from seven years ago of Timothy Noad, illuminator of many heraldic patents, giving a short lecture on his career and craft to the World Calligraphy Museum.

The presentation is actually only half as long as it seems, for as Noad has finished reading out each paragraph in English he has to stop while it is translated into Russian. This results in the whole performance having a stilted cadence redolent of schoolchildren performing class assemblies.

Still, it is nice to actually see and hear from the man who for so long has existed only as a name. I suspect that events in the last two years will make joint ventures like this rather difficult to replicate in the foreseeable future.

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.

Photographs of the State Opening

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One of the recurrent themes of this blog is the inconsistency of licensing in British governmental and parliamentary photographs. Without rehearsing the entire story again, I will note that yesterday I made a wonderful discovery:

Since the day of the event itself I had thought that the only photograph of the 2024 State Opening of Parliament to be released under a free licence was this one of His Majesty in procession through the royal gallery. It is fairly tightly framed, with only the middle ground in focus so that Charles and the page boys to his flanks appear a little too sharp while the Duke of Norfolk in front and the Marchioness of Lansdowne behind are entirely blurred.

The House of Lords Flickr account had a generous album of high quality shots, but these were released under a Non-Commercial and No Derivatives licence, rendering them useless for Wikimedia Commons*. When this happened last year I was able to get around it by using those which had been re-issued under a looser licence by the Oireachtas, although some other Wikipedians challenged the legitimacy of these. No such republication existed this time around.

Happily, yesterday when strolling through the relevant category on Wikimedia Commons I came across a second photograph of the event, taken from inside the upper chamber and showing the speech being read. The source was given as parliament.assetbank-server.com, and the link revealed a page from what seemed to be an official Parliament-owned website with twenty-eight of the forty-five photographs in the Flickr album, but this time very explicitly licensed under Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0), which meant they could be used on Wikimedia Commons. Of course, I took the opportunity offered by the handy “DOWNLOAD ALL AS ZIP” button to transfer the lot of them. I had to give new names to all of them as the file originals were mostly gibberish and I noticed that the metadata were inconsistent as well (some had timestamps and others didn’t, some were taken by Roger Harris and others by Annabel Moeller). Some more editing may well be required in future to rectify this.

Though I am reluctant to look this gift horse in the mouth, I am a little perplexed by the existence of this website, which bears the UK Parliament logo but is not at the parliament.uk domain, and whose individual pages can be seen freely once you have the direct link but which cannot be navigated without a login. It could be the case that the majority – or indeed entirety – of the recent House of Lords photograph collection is actually released under a usable licence and these pages would prove it, if only we ever manage to find them.

*The irritating thing about photographing licensing in a parliamentary context is that one must continually differentiate between Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons and the House of Commons. The presence of Their Majesties in these images means that “royalty-free” isn’t very practical either.

Late-Summer Heraldic News

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In the past fortnight there have been a handful of significant developments in the world of British heraldry.

Firstly, on 15th August the College of Arms published the 76th edition of its newsletter. Much of the text deals with topics already explained (such as the coronation roll and the year’s garter appointments) but there were some new details, such as the grant of arms to the University for the Creative Arts, which will be another addition to my list on Wikipedia.

Secondly, there are two long-form videos on YouTube of armorial interest: On August 20th a video by the White House Historical Association about the making of the Presidential Seal and on August 23rd by American Ancestors interviewing the York Herald Peter O’Donoghue. These videos speak for themselves so I will not elaborate them.

Thirdly, and of most interest, is a Tweet from 24th August by Alastair Bruce. It includes three photographs from inside the High Kirk of Edinburgh, showing the stallplate and banner of Queen Camilla. There is not much of surprise about the composition of the arms – they show the arms of King Charles impaling the arms of Bruce Shand – but it is reassuring to have confirmation that both shield and banner exist in formal usage, given the persistent uncertainties of Her Majesty’s status in England.

The most intriguing of the three photographs is the one which shows Camilla’s stallplate accompanied by five other royal ones: In the left column are Prince William, Earl of Strathearn (middle) and Olav V, King of Norway (bottom). In the right column are Queen Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (top) the Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (middle) and the Prince Albert, Duke of York (bottom). The fact that these six achievements are put together like this is itself a little confusing since some of those members of the order had overlapping tenures so could not have occupied the same stall. Also noteworthy is the way in which the artistic styles have changed over the years:

  • The Prince Albert, (later King George VI) was appointed to the order by his father in 1923 and presumably this is what it says on the scroll underneath (although it’s not legible in the photograph). He uses the royal arms differenced by a label of three points argent the centre bearing an anchor Azure. He has the coronet of a child of the sovereign sitting on top of a forward-facing golden helmet, and the coronet itself is topped by the lion crest, gorged at the neck by another label of three points argent – although that one doesn’t have the anchor in the middle. While that could be dismissed as an omission by the painter (perhaps too small to draw properly) it is unmissable that this stallplate clearly uses the English version of the royal arms and crest as well as referring to the prince by his England-based title (Duke of York) instead of his Scottish-based one (Earl of Inverness).
  • Queen Elizabeth was appointed by her husband in 1937. Her stallplate shows his arms impaling those of Claude Bowes-Lyon. Again the English arrangement of the royal arms is used, especially confusing as Elizabeth was herself of Scottish ancestry. The shield is topped by the royal crown. I can’t work out if it is the English or Scottish version of the crown shown, given the vagaries of the art style.
  • The Prince Philip was appointed by his wife in 1952. His stallplate shows his arms as granted in 1949. He used the same coronet as his sons and uncles-in-law, but here it is depicted beneath the helm rather than atop it as in the other examples. Philip apparently used the same arms in every heraldic jurisdiction, as well as the same title. His personal motto “God Is My Help” appears on a scroll above the crest, as is the Scottish tradition.
  • Prince William was appointed by his grandmother in 2012. Earl of Strathearn was his secondary peerage, his primary being Duke of Cambridge. His arms are in the Scottish arrangement. He uses the coronet of a son of the heir apparent on top of a front-facing grey helmet with gold bars, itself topped by the Scottish royal crest. Both crest and shield are differenced by his label of three points Argent, the centre bearing an escallop Gules. The Scottish motto “In Defens” flies over the crest. The tinctures used for this stallplate look a little off, with the Or in particular being shown as a much darker shade of yellow than that used for all the others.
  • Queen Camilla was appointed by her husband in 2023. Her shield uses the Scottish arrangement of the arms. The royal crown is drawn rather differently to that used by her grandmother-in-law, but it’s still just as unclear which one it is supposed to be.
  • Olav V, the only foreign member here, was appointed by his first cousin one removed in 1962. Crests are not a traditional feature of Norwegian heraldry, but the royal crown of Norway is placed atop a forward-facing grey helm with gold bars. The mantling is Gules doubled Or whereas the British princes here use Or doubled Ermine. Domestic depictions of the Norwegian arms tend to omit helm and mantling altogether or use a pavillion Purpure doubled ermine.

Heritage Day at Sunk Island

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Every summer the diminutive parish of Sunk Island puts on a heritage event, displaying billboards about the social and environmental history of the place, as well as selling a few mementos. I was invited to attend today’s to help with carrying some of the materials in and out.

The event is hosted at Holy Trinity Church, which ceased to operate as a place of worship in 1983 but remains open as a community centre (especially since the demolition of the village hall nearby). The history of the church itself (including the contest between rival Christian denominations for recruitment of parishioners) was a major theme of the display. The other big theme was the dredging up of the mud banks, followed by the cutting of new drains and the building of the sluice gates.

Some of the displays looked like they had been made many years ago and brought out unedited each time. There is a familiar style common to these kinds of displays by churches, village halls and primary schools in small settlements in rural Britain around the turn of the millennium. In particular I noticed a poster about the Crown Estate, which still referred to it paying for the civil list (as opposed to the sovereign grant).

What particularly piqued my interest was a patchwork quilt entitled “Treasures of Holderness”, each patch made by a member of a local sewing group. That by Sue Daniels showed the shield of arms of Holderness Borough Council. The full achievement was also shown on a wooden plaque affixed to the wall of the entrance hall. The borough itself, along with its governing council,was dissolved in 1996 and merged into the East Riding of Yorkshire unitary authority. Holderness no longer has a heraldic personhood distinct from the rest of the county but the old arms carry on informally by force of cultural inertia. None of the individual parishes seem to have arms individually granted.

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