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.

The King’s Accession: Fast and Slow

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The royal journalist Robert Hardman recently released his latest publication Charles III. New King. New Court. The Inside Story, which covers the end of the previous reign and the beginning of this one. Confusingly the same book seems to have been published under at least three titles: I’m also seeing it called Charles III: The Making of a Modern Monarch and The Making of a King: Charles III and the Modern Monarchy.

Reading the whole thing will obviously take some time, but I have managed to get through the first few pages, including those covering the decease of Elizabeth II. I was particularly fascinated by this passage:

…for visibility, Prince Charles was raised on his mother’s mantra that ‘I have to be seen to be believed’. Immediately after her death, it became clear that he would abide by this. Duties and conventions which might have been spread over many months at the start of the previous reign kicked in almost immediately. His first broadcast as monarch was recorded within twenty-four hours (Elizabeth II’s first broadcast, which was by radio, came ten and a half months into her reign). There would be visits to all the home nations within days. Court mourning, which continued for two and a half months after the state funeral of George VI, would end precisely one week after that of Elizabeth II. In less than three weeks, the King’s cypher, ‘CIIIR’ (Charles III Rex), was ready and released for immediate use on post boxes, military uniforms and official documents. It had taken more than five months before the design for ‘EIIR’ was approved in 1952. Investitures were up and running again within the month.

Of course, this is still slower than I would have liked, especially in heraldic, numismatic and vexillological matters: Sixteen months into the present reign, there is still uncertainty about the arms of The Queen and the Prince & Princess of Wales (especially in Scotland), as well as His Majesty’s personal banners in most other Commonwealth Realms. Though in almost all cases it is trivial to predict what they ought to look like, there are few in which I am certain that such designs have actually been granted. In addition, I am still yet to personally encounter any coinage or banknote bearing the current monarch’s face.

The slowness in updating online profiles is particularly baffling, given that it requires no physical material to be changed. This month there has been a hint of movement by His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, whose Twitter icon now shows the Tudor crown, although the logo on the website itself still uses the St Edward version. The cover images for recent policy posts show both versions in use, suggesting that the filtering through of the new design is still ongoing.

UPDATE (19th February)

The crown logo is now updated across government websites.

A Patten Emerges

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On St George’s Day last year His Majesty appointed two new companions of the Order of the Garter – Lady Ashton of Upholland and Lord Patten of Barnes. Obviously that would mean their banners of arms would at some point be erected at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle. At the time it was not public knowledge what their lordships’ arms actually were, if indeed they had any, and given how long it was taking to find out about Blair and Amos I was not optimistic of learning any time soon.

Today they were revealed by Major Alastair Bruce of Crionaich via what used to be called a Tweet. He shows photographs of two banners of arms along with an excerpt from an online article, which I will quote below:

Baroness Ashton served in the Ministry of Justice and later as the EU’s first High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security policy. She contributed towards negotiating a peace settlement between Serbia and Kosovo. Red roses reflect the fact that Upholland, which forms part of Baroness Ashton’s title, is in Lancashire.

On Lord Patten’s banner the pearls allude to the crest of Hong Kong where he was Governor from 1992 to 1997. The blue field and crowns replicate the arms of Oxford University where Lord Patten has been Chancellor since 2003.

It is not clear precisely where Bruce found this information, as the message includes the web address of St George’s Chapel but does not specify an exact page. I have looked through the site to find a recent update about Patten and Ashton but found nothing. I hope this will be resolved soon.

As for the heraldic designs themselves: Patten’s arms are perfectly dignified if a little unoriginal. Having the shield resemble that of his university could make for a confusing sight should he try to impale them. Ashton’s banner is an overloaded mess redolent of the worst excesses of the early nineteenth century.

That the reveal of these arms took only nine months instead of eighteen is a positive sign. I hope that future grants of arms will become public even faster.

UPDATE (15th January)

Baz Manning informs me that the images and quoted text are from The Dragon, the community newsletter of St George’s Chapel.

Found in the Booth

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For the past few years I have kept a keen eye on the blog Heraldry Online by Stephen Plowman. Most of the heraldry community learn of grants of arms by updates on relevant authorities websites, or by the accounts given in volumes of Debrett’s. Plowman, however, posts a regular stream of photographs of the actual letters patent by which the arms were granted, spotting the historic documents as they come up for auction (typically after the actual line of armorial inheritance has gone extinct). Today he has posted one particularly important to me – the late Baroness Boothroyd.

I have written many times before about my history with her arms, but it is nice to see the definitive article at last. The text of the blazon is the same as in Debrett’s, but we now know the date of granting (8th October 1993) and the herald responsible (Conrad Swan).

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.

Back in the Library

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The arms of Lord Loomba, drawn by Cakelot1

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.