The Deputy & The Duchess

Posted on by
1

The Duchess’s Heraldic Achievement

Documentaries about the stormy second premiership of Harold Wilson (1974-6) often mention his determination to take the nation by surprise after months of all his government’s secrets being leaked to a vicious press. In the end he pulled off the particularly-impressive trick of resigning on the same day that the Princess Margaret finalised her divorce from the Earl of Snowdon, and therefore knocked the latter story off the front pages. No doubt this spared the royal family a lot of grief.

Today a similar coincidence has been achieved in reverse – Angela Rayner resigned as Deputy Prime Minister, and Buckingham Palace announced the death of the Duchess of Kent. There is something a little uncanny in these events happening so close to the anniversary of Liz Truss’s accession to the premiership and Charles III’s accession to the throne. The public mourning over the deceased Queen Elizabeth obviously didn’t save the Truss government, but did at least postpone its inevitable disintegration. Neither of today’s events are quite on the scale of those but, even so, the cabinet will likely be glad of the news – and Parliament – having a different story to occupy their time.

I will deal with Rayner first. Obviously her property tax scandal is a further reputational blow for a government whose public approval ratings were already abysmal. Her departure could cause some practical issues, too. Rayner simultaneously resigned from three offices: Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and Secretary of State for Housing, Communities & Local Government. The latter is the one of greatest constitutional substance, for each Secretary of State is a corporation sole defined in statute with responsibility for a government department, in this case the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government. The MHCLG cannot operate effectively without its secretary of state so a successor to Rayner will need to be appointed within days and confirmed at a meeting of the Privy Council shortly afterward. The middle is of course not a government office but a party one. Deputy Leaders are elected by a postal ballot of the rank-and-file partisans in an operation that typically takes months. This will be the first time in decades that the Deputy has been replaced without the actual Leader also changing (unless Sir Keir Starmer somehow also ends up resigning imminently) and, given the unpopularity of the current government among the party’s base, it could be a major opportunity for dissident factions to attempt a strike against front bench. The internecine fighting is bound to highlight controversies and resentments on which the opposition parties can pounce. The former will be the more interesting to watch: As I have mentioned before, the Deputy Prime Minister is constitutionally little more than a courtesy title rather than a substantive office and many premiers can do without appointing one. There is no obligation for the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party to be deputy leader (whether en titre or de facto) of a Labour government – notably Harriet Harman wasn’t. Even so, the Deputy probably need to have some kind of senior government post, for as a backbencher they would be too free to criticise and challenge the incumbent. If the eventual winner of the election is not already a cabinet minister then it may necessitate another minor reshuffle. In the meantime, though the Prime Minister will need a designated survivor, he would probably be better off not appointing a new DPM, nor a First Secretary of State, as whoever landed that job would then have then have to endure the indignity of relinquishing it a few months later and, since everyone would predict this in advance, would probably struggle to accomplish much of worth during that time.

Moving on to the Duchess: Born in 1933, she was the oldest among the royal family, a status which now passes to her 89-year-old widower Edward. Her death does not create a vacancy in the Firm, as she very quietly retired from public duties a few years ago and was absent for nearly all of the big ceremonial gatherings since then.1 At the time of writing the exact date of the Duchess’s funeral has not been announced, but based on usual time lapses it should be concluded before the halfway point of this month and thus narrowly avoid clashing with either Donald Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom or the Duke of Edinburgh’s attendance at Papua New Guinea’s semicentennial independence celebrations. Katharine was the first British royal since the Glorious Revolution to convert to Roman Catholicism, and it has been stated that her funeral will follow Catholic liturgy. That will be an innovation for the House of Windsor too, as the only thing approaching a recent precedent is the reinterment of Richard III in 2013, and even that was technically an ecumenical affair. The Duke of Kent has been steadily winding down his commitments in recent years but is still considered a senior working royal. It is yet to be seen if the death of his wife will lead to any changes in his arrangements. The Ferens Building at the University of Hull (not to be confused with Ferens Hall) has her name on its keystone and the Prime Minister’s statement this afternoon mentioned that she was “giving her time and working anonymously as a music teacher at a school in Hull”. It will be interesting to see if any of her pupils are involved in the funeral, or indeed if there will be any local ceremonies to celebrate her association.

1The latest reference I can find in the Court Circular to her attending in person, rather than being represented by someone else, is 8th June 2019. I note that the “Where is Kate?” crisis of eighteen months ago failed to notice or care that the other Katharine had been “missing” for a much longer time.

UPDATE (8pm)

In the time between drafting this article and uploading it, Sir Keir has ignored my advice and carried out a full reshuffle, appointing David Lammy as DPM and Lord Chancellor (interestingly making the same career move as Dominic Raab four years ago) and replacing Rayner at MHCLG with Steve Reed, among many other changes. No timetable or candidates have yet been confirmed for the Deputy Leadership.

Review: Captain James Cook by Richard Hough

Posted on by
Reply

The paperback edition of this book was first published in 1995 and sold for £6.99. I picked up my copy in 2024 for £1. It follows the conventional format for a biography, beginning with the circumstances of the subject’s birth and running all the way to the aftermath of his death. That Cook has a tragic death relatively young is probably to Hough’s advantage as it prevents the book becoming overlong.

Cook is among Britain’s most celebrated sailors and explorers. This biography covers the whole of his maritime career, particularly his three Pacific voyages. Cook makes multiple visits to New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii and the Society Islands. He gets close to both the North and South Poles. A lot of the book is dedicated to Cook’s interactions with the Maoris and the many Polynesian tribes. There is a recurrent schizophrenia in the stories of these encounters – one minute the islanders will be treating Cook and his crew like gods, the next they will be plundering his vessels for anything not nailed down (and often even stealing the nails themselves). This reaches its apotheosis at Kealakekua Bay in 1779: On his first visit in January Cook is hailed as Orono, God of the Season of Abundance, and is showered with lavish praise, but when he returns in February the mood is of cold hostility and it is not long before a war breaks out which leads to his own gruesome death. Cook’s own personality charts a more linear decline from a civil, optimistic attitude on his original voyage to a cruel, irrational and vindictive one by the end. Partly this is the result of the great many infuriating setbacks suffered on that trip but there is also an analysis by a twentieth-century surgeon reckoning that Cook picked up an intestinal infection which impaired his brain function.

This book highlights how much of the world prior to Cook was still uncharted: As well as looking for new navigational passages (such as around the Arctic), Cook is also sent on a mission to prove or disprove the existence of Terra Australis Incognita, a much-fabled supercontinent in the Southern hemisphere that would have linked Australia together with Antarctica. There are also references to other scientific advances at the time, such as Cook’s own dietary and sanitary innovations to combat scurvy or the excursion to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus.

The accounts of events aboard His Majesty’s Ships Adventure, Discovery and Resolution are pieced together from those diaries and letters that survived to be archived. These include Cook’s own logs, but also those of his contemporaries Joseph Banks, William Bligh, Charles Clerke, John Gore and a host of others. As is usual with these kinds of works, we get first-hand accounts of the action and occasionally the dialogue, but the thoughts and feelings of these men can only be speculation, save the rare occasions when they speak them outright. At this period real-time communication was impossible over long distances and letters could travel no faster than the mariners themselves, so the Admiralty back in Britain would not have any meaningful understanding of what happened on these voyages until the ships completed their return journey (if they ever did at all) and gave accounts retrospectively. This also meant that sailors would be cut off from events at home for months or even years at a time. In the final chapter Hough says that James & Elizabeth Cook, having married in 1762, only spent an aggregate of four years together before his death in 1779. Most of his children rarely if ever got to see their father either. After Cook’s death, Clerke became Captain and he penned the letter back to London explaining as much. It did not arrive until 1780, by which point Clerke himself had died too and it was Gore who held command by the time the survivors got home.

I bought this book principally for my father and we read it together in short bursts over the course of a year. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in sailing, but the story is probably easier to follow and remember when taken at a faster pace.

Everything in my Power

Posted on by
Reply

As we have recently celebrated the eightieth anniversary of VE and VJ Day, I have naturally been reading a lot of articles and watching a lot of documentaries about the end of World War II in both Germany and Japan. The mechanics and political technicalities of the German surrender are particularly fascinating to me, as the event represented not only the cessation of fighting but also the succession of states – with the Third Reich dissolving in favour of the Allied occupation zones. It is a reminder that, even in times of total war and with the prospect of total annihilation, there are still laws and protocols which must be followed, most notably the famous Geneva Conventions.

Key to the successful operation of these laws is the presence of at least a small number of neutral countries which maintain diplomatic relations – however strained – with both factions. This can lead to some interesting shenanigans: When my late grandmother got me A. J. P. Taylor’s1 The First World War for Christmas 2013 I was amused to read that before the United States took a side there were British and German ambassadors in Washington D.C. competing for Woodrow Wilson’s favour in loans and arms contracts. The novel Winston’s War by Michael Dobbs (which I read in the summer of 2018) has a subplot in which Churchill discovers that Britain is short of rifles and hatches a cunning plan to buy second-hand German ones instead, because the Reich had such a surplus that they were still exporting them commercially to neutral countries on the continent. Though they weren’t explicitly mentioned very often, neutral states and organisations also played an important role in The Barbed-Wire University by Midge Gillies (which I finished last April), since the parcels, letters and so forth that the Allied prisoners received from home were hardly the sort of things which their Axis captors would (or indeed could) have delivered themselves. Neutral countries are also necessary for most forms of reliable news reporting (whether or not related to the war) to get from one side to the other – though how this works in the internet age is probably worth another article.

The specific aspect of wartime diplomacy which interests me for the purposes of this article, and which I only discovered in my recent Wiki-reading, is the concept of “Protecting Powers”. Put simply, this means that when two countries have broken off diplomatic relations (and especially if they have declared war) then their ambassadors and/or other official representatives on each other’s soil will be withdrawn. A neutral third country will then be appointed to act as a go-between while the warring countries cannot communicate directly. This third country will have an “interests section” as a department of its own embassy, and will be the official channel for humanitarian aid, personnel exchanges and, eventually, peace negotiations. In some cases the PP’s embassy will take over the former embassy buildings2 of the country that it protects, and may even re-employ the same lower-level staff, so that the “interests section” is a polite fiction to allow the former embassy to continue in all but name.

There are limits to what a PP can realistically do, as both parties in the conflict must agree to their appointment – a PP which allows its interests section to push too far may see its neutrality questioned by the host country, and then its own diplomatic ties threatened. Switzerland, unsurprisingly, is a popular choice for this role, as is Sweden. The Wikipedia page on Protecting Powers has a catalogue of historic and current examples, noting that by the end of World War II Sweden held 114 mandates involving 28 countries. At the time of writing, the Swedish embassy in North Korea hosts interests sections for ten other states. There was a period in the last decade when Britain broke off relations with Iran, so the Swedish embassy in Tehran hosted a British interests section, while Oman’s in London hosted the Iranian.

Of the serious armed conflicts taking place in the world right now, the most important – at least from a European perspective – is that between Russia and Ukraine. Although relations had already become icy with Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, it was his launch of a full-scale invasion in February 2022 that saw them broken off entirely. This war has now been going on for 42 months, i.e. more than half as long as Britain was fighting in World War II. Having gotten into this topic, I was naturally curious as to whom the two countries had chosen as their PPs. None of the Wikipedia articles which should have mentioned it actually did so, however, so I asked the question in various talk pages. At time of uploading, only one other contributor has managed to find any information relating to this query: Based on some articles found on a Russian news site, it looks as if there still aren’t any! In a conference in Canada in 2024 (already way too late, really) there were offers by the Vatican, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Lithuania and Qatar to perform the role, but nothing was agreed, though Qatar at least has been involved in some POW exchanges. Putin has said Switzerland lost its neutral status by joining in sanctions on the Russian economy, and the International Committee of the Red Cross (which can also act as PP if no sovereign state is available) has struggled to get access. I might have thought that Turkey would be a candidate, since they had hosted some (unsuccessful, of course) peace talks, but they are not mentioned at all.

This perhaps goes to show that comparisons with the 1940s may be, if anything, a bit understated: To put it bluntly, the current Russian government is at least in some respects failing to comply with protocols which even he of the small moustache managed to honour!

Article from SwissInfo: Russia rejects protecting power mandate agreed by Switzerland and Ukraine (11 August 2022)

Articles from RosBiznesConsulting:

Article from Media Center Ukraine: Bohdan Chumak: The involvement of a protecting power could become an effective tool in securing the return of prisoners of war (8 January 2025)

Article from Al Jazeera: Russia and Ukraine discuss more prisoner exchanges at Istanbul talks (23 July 2025)

1 A. J. P. Taylor is not related to me.

2 Technically the building is called the “chancery” whereas the “embassy” is the organisation hosted there.

New Channels Discovered

Posted on by
Reply

 

I mentioned some years ago the phenomenon of YouTube channels carrying old episodes of TV series that probably wouldn’t be broadcast anymore.

Clarkson-era Top Gear is probably not such a series, but recently I discovered that thirteen months ago the channel Top Gear Classic was launched, carrying compressed clips of the various challenges the three presenters undertook from 2002 to 2015. The name is a little confusing as I would have thought that “Classic” in this context should refer to the 1977-2001 broadcasts. Many of the clips on this new channel are the same that were already uploaded to the main Top Gear channel, and indeed the BBC Studios channel, many years ago. The most obvious difference now is the much higher video quality. Given how many amateur fan channels have sprung up with compilations from this time, and subsequently The Grand Tour, it would have been a great loss for the BBC not to get in on the act themselves I suppose.

Another new find is the channel Rails, Roads & Runways, launched in January this year by ITV Studios and containing, as you may expect, episodes of rather old documentary series about trains, cars and aeroplanes.

Review: The Victoria Letters by Helen Rappaport

Posted on by
Reply

After spending nearly two months struggling through Dan Franck’s The Bohemians, I needed something of an intellectual palette cleanser, preferably back in a subject area where I already had some prior grounding. I settled on this large hardback picture book that was released as a companion to the 2016 ITV series.

As the title implies, this is composed mainly of the private letters and journals that Victoria herself wrote from her early childhood until around the time she first gave birth (which is when the first season of the TV show ends). Victoria is unusual among British monarchs in the fact that so many of her personal written thoughts have been maintained and made public – some even during her own lifetime.

The book runs to three hundred pages, but the text density is rather low so I got through the entire book in just four days. The final twenty-eight pages are about the making of the TV series, with everything up to that point being about the real life of Victoria with the fictional series rarely acknowledged.

The book overall is both visually lavish and textually engaging, though I found a few errors along the way:

  • The photograph of a palace interior on pages 44-5 exposes part of the metal ceiling of the hangar in which the set was built.
  • The photographs on pages 144 and 228 show overhead power lines in the background.
  • Page 131 describes Victoria’s uncle Ernest Augustus as “heir apparent” instead of “heir presumptive”.
  • Page 294 says of Prince Albert that “as Victoria’s husband he automatically became a member of the Order of the Garter” which was not true; he was appointed to the order almost two months before the wedding.
  • Page 294 also includes a quote from costume designer Rosalind Ebbutt claiming “The garter traditionally went round the knee, but Queen Victoria was the first woman to be elevated to the Order of the Garter and she couldn’t wear it on her leg because it wouldn’t be visible. So she had a special one made that buckled around her arm, over her sleeve.” which is a bit misleading: Victoria was never “elevated to” the order, rather she became its sovereign automatically when acceding to the throne. The custom of wearing the garter on the arm instead of the leg was also exhibited by Anne, Britain’s previous queen regnant*. There were, of course, Ladies of the Garter before her.
  • The cast list on page 300 includes Nicholas Agnew as Prince George twice.

A further note is really more a problem with the series itself than the tie-in book: Victoria & Albert’s wedding is noted to have taken place in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace, but the set shown in the episode looks nothing like that and bears far more resemblance to St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle instead.

Heraldic banners show up in multiple photographs in the book, I have already written an article about one particular instance, but perhaps an armorial viewing of the series in general is in order at some point. I notice also that when personal letters are reproduced they are topped by an illustration of the royal arms which came into use during Victoria’s reign, indicated by the lack of the Hanoverian inescutcheon, even when the letter is meant to predate her accession. Of course, little Drina was never actually granted differenced arms prior to that so I don’t know what image would have been appropriate here!

It is a shame that no similar books were written for seasons 2 and 3, and indeed that the TV series as a whole seems to have been quietly dropped after 2019, for I would have enjoyed seeing the whole of the Victorian age covered this way.

*See “The Orders of Knighthood and the Formation of the British Honours System, 1660-1760” by Antti Matikkala, pp 324-6.

 

August Armorial Announcements

Posted on by
Reply

The Queen’s heraldic banner continues to be a bugbear: Late last month, Sky Sports Racing Tweeted a short video of Her Majesty arriving (by helicopter) at Ascot. The commentator pointed out that upon Her Majesty’s appearance the royal standard was flown, but I noticed that it was again the generic ermine-bordered version and not that impaled with the arms of Bruce Shand, which has been seen in official usage recently. Perhaps the venue simply didn’t have a copy of that one yet?

The slow rollout of the Tudor Crown continues — on 1st August the Australian Department of Defence announced that all three service branches had updated their logos to use the new crown, as well as making other small adjustments to the rest of the graphics.

On the same day, the British Army announced a new cap badge for The King’s Gurkha Artillery Regiment, which likewise has the Tudor Crown on in. Since this regiment did not exist until this year, there was no St Edward’s version to remove in this case.

The King himself appeared at RAF Lossiemouth on 6th August to present a new standard to 42 (Torpedo Bomber) Squadron. I would assume that the Tudor Crown appeared on it, but none of the photographs or footage of the event gave a clear view of the standard itself — which is ironic given that was the whole point of the event!

Progress in the judiciary is less clear. I should remind readers that I am only speaking here about the judiciary of England and Wales, since that in Scotland uses the other version of the royal arms with the Crown of Scotland while that in Northern Ireland is reluctant to use explicit national symbols at all. The United Kingdom Supreme Court, and the Privy Council, have already been discussed.

From the PDFs of recent judgments, it appears that both civil and criminal divisions of the Court of Appeal are still using the old and rather ugly Royal Courts of Justice logo, with the almost-triangular royal shield topped by St Edward’s Crown, as are all three divisions of the High Court. Other courts are less consistent.

I have seen the Crown Court using several different ideas:

It looks as if every different court location has its own document template.

Discovering the Small Web Movement

Posted on by
Reply

What happens when the mines run out?
The Captain announces a new golden age of prosperity. They just fill up again.
What, just like that?
Yeah. Well, you don’t think that’s wrong, do you?
Wrong? It’s an economic miracle. Of course it’s wrong.
Oh. Oh then, of course, the lights change.
What lights?
You know, the lights. The ones on the sky at night. Little points of light.
Do you mean the stars?

Conversation between the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Kimus (David Warwick) in The Pirate Planet (part 2) by Douglas Adams, broadcast 7th October 1978.

Anyone perusing my blog’s back-catalogue recently may recall my post about The Queen’s Reading Room, a post which I named “Reading the Room” in a very weak pun on the topic name. That post now has an update at the bottom clarifying that since I wrote it another podcast has started up which actually is called “Reading the Room”. Of course, it’s such an obvious title that, in this age of mass podcast proliferation, it was bound to be used eventually (and indeed the Substack blog carrying it needs to have “pod” at the end of its subdomain because plain “readingtheroom” was already taken), but this one seems to be rising to prominence among intellectual circles. It almost certainly gets a leg-up due to the fact that both the hosts – Felice Basbøll and Ella Dorn – are columnists for a handful of newspapers and magazines, as likely are a lot of their listeners, so its popularity is not entirely grassroots. Apart from the very broad stroke that they both talk about books, this podcast is entirely unlike the Clarence House production: There are no interviews with the authors, tours of vintage libraries or commissions of research into national literacy statistics. This podcast consists of the two hosts talking among themselves for over an hour at a time about one or more books they’ve read, their choices and the outflowing discussions focusing heavily on philosophy and contemporary socio-political matters. This is not an approach that it would be practical (or constitutionally wise) for Her Majesty to take.

Alright, that’s enough unpaid advertising. The podcast is not the real reason I’m writing this article now. In addition to their newspaper editorials, Basbøll and Dorn both also have individual Substack blogs. Most of what they write there isn’t relevant to this article either, but there was one that particularly struck me as important – Dorn’s post from 27th February this year entitled “How to Take Down Big Tech”. The main thrust was that, for the preservation of online freedom and, more broadly, of enlightened society, it would be better if we avoided large social networks as a general principle in favour of smaller forums and individual websites. She referred to this as “The Small Web Movement”. I have supported the same goals for practically the whole of my online life and have often encountered posts, articles, comments and videos from other people concurring, but only here did I discover that it was an established ideology with a tangible identity.

My history with the World Wide Web is a fought one. For most of the noughties, my family – and most households in the area – had about the connection quality you would expect from rural broadband at that time. Then again, the web itself was still quite primitive. In 2009 out ISP jacked up the price prohibitively high. For the next few years we had no home broadband at all, and internet access was only achievable through a prepaid WiFi plug-in device, which had limited utility. I think it was in 2012 that, having established HubbNet, we finally got a decent connection again. No sooner had I rejoined the online world then I became aware that it was under threat. In the good old days it appeared that, subject only to the physical limitations of their hardware, anyone could have their own website, use any number of online services and upload any number of photographs or videos. It seemed to be, quite literally, a free-for-all. The story of the past decade or so has been the realisation that this utopia was unsustainable. For a long time all of these big sites were running at a loss, heavily subsidised by very wealthy investors who supported the development of these technologies in the hope that they would somehow become massively profitable in the near future. A lot of them still haven’t. As the money dried up and investors started insisting on a tangible return, and even moreso post-pandemic as the long era of ultra-low interest rates finally ended, companies had to make drastic changes to their products to increase revenue and slash costs. Restrictions were placed on space, ads became more aggressive and harder to skip. Pages disappeared behind paywalls and old pictures/videos/files were deleted. The crusade against free riders often became in practice a war on usability. The polite term, though not the common one, for this phenomenon is “Platform Decay”. If the freedom of the web wasn’t under threat from the companies themselves, it was threatened by politicians. Leaders and legislators across many countries, parties and decades have repeatedly sought to take control of the medium that most of them don’t understand in the slightest. This is alternately done in the name of copyright, security and safety. In the New Tens we were threatened with the spectres of SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, ACTA and Article 13. thankfully the most dangerous aspects of these were killed before they could reach the statute book. In the present decade we haven’t been so lucky: I am writing this in the wake of the coming-into-force of the Online Safety Act, a multipartisan disaster passed in 2023 against the objections of everyone with half a brain. Similar laws exist in some parts of the United States and are expected to proliferate across the European Union. However virtuous may have seemed the intentions these laws claimed, they all had the potential to destroy the internet as it has been known for the past thirty years. The deliberations over these laws tend to play out as battles between sovereign states and the major tech businesses, with the common end user having plenty of reason to distrust both. With states concentrating on the most prominent large platforms, and the platform owners themselves often pre-emptively shutting messages which could offend either the government or their advertisers, the need for a decentralised network of small independent backup sites becomes pressing.

The main benefit of having an entire website of your own is that it gives you a greater degree of personal control, especially with regard to visual customisation. Twitter and similar sites give you a profile picture, a couple of sentences’ written biography and maybe a header image if you’re lucky. Long ago YouTube channels allowed you to change the button colours and set a background image, but those abilities were removed around the time they were bought out by Google. Variables, on social media profiles, tend to be restricted within a fairly narrow range. Website builders, by contrast, often allow dozens, maybe hundreds of templates, after which the client has further options for menus, logos, assorted other widgets, fonts and colour schemes. If you’re coding your own website from scratch you can have it look and work basically any way you want. For a physical analogy, imagine a street where each resident can have his own house with its own unique design and decoration, versus a barrack hall where each inmate can, at best, have a different selection of photographs on the backboard behind his pillow. The flipside of this, of course, is that increased proximity allows conversations to happen faster. Short, snappy replies can be given almost in real time, whereas with separate websites they would naturally tend to be longer and more spaced out. Most in and indeed out of the Small Web Movement would consider that a positive, perhaps even the positive, but there are others for whom this spontaneity and intimacy are extremely valuable. There are ways to approximate this, if need be – most website builders include the options for comment sections on posts and pages, as well as a “re-blog” feature. If inter-platform compatibility is an issue, you could always just include a hyperlink to the other person’s post in your own. If that’s too cumbersome… maybe email each other? In my personal experience, I’ve more often witnessed this problem occur the other way around, as Tweeters desperately crush a substantial paragraph of text into a long string of single-sentence posts, or even screenshot the block of text on another medium then upload that as an image. The latter solution has the advantage of speed but it must be monstrously inefficient in terms of accessibility, searchability and digital memory space.

The Movement’s favoured solution is the return to the dedicated online forum. Forums have been around since the earliest days of the World Wide Web, but their power and prominence has waned in latter years with the rise of the social media giants. Reddit, in particular, is designed as a sort of universal mega-forum which subsumes all the others. Forums are a halfway point between personal websites and major social networks, giving people with shared interests a common space without having to invite the whole world in, allowing customisation of design at group level but not individual. Examples of forums which still command some cultural weight are The Student Room, Digital Spy and the notorious Mumsnet. One might throw in the Army Rumour Service as well. There are also lots of smaller forums dedicated to specific hobbies, needs or franchises. Often a long-running film, book, or television series will have a quasi-official fan forum, e.g. Star Trek has Trek BBS, Doctor Who has Outpost Gallifrey and I think I’ve already mentioned Sodor Island Forums. In case I’ve not mentioned already, there are, of course, heraldry forums too.

Fairly it could be said that all of this still falls short of the intention of the Small Web Movement because they still involve using someone else’s platform. The real goal is to have each blogger hosting their own website independently. While I accept the principle of decentralisation, I think expecting everyone to keep individual servers running may be a little beyond feasibility given constraints on money, space, electricity supply and technical knowledge. Indeed, since it has been over a decade since I completed my Information Technology GCSE or had much direct involvement in HubbNet, some of the material I’ve come across from the Movement about Gopher and Gemini is stretching the limits of my own understanding a little, though I hope to get there reasonably soon. Perhaps a compromise could come about in the form of small local data centres, with hosting space rented out in a manner akin to garden allotments. More realistically, since the intention is to transition the masses away from social media accounts, builders such as this would be a relatively easy first step, from which those most determined (and whose sites are successful enough to justify it) can later move the whole way.

I remain undecided on the necessity of registering your own domain rather than using a subdomain of the website builder. I have written before about my disappointment in having to go for “HomeworkDirect.UK” because the Uncle Ben’s rice brand snapped up “HomeworkDirect.Com” just before I could claim it. I always intended this blog to be at “RobinStanleyTaylor.Net”, but did not actually get around to registering the domain until 2017, with “RobinStanleyTaylor.Wordpress.Com” sufficing for the first two years. I cannot run a proper counterfactual to see how the blog would have fared without the change, but I know I was getting at least some regular engagement on the small number of posts I’d made up until that point. I suppose the main value of a domain is on an aesthetic level – it confers an air of formality and professionalism, whereas a “.someonelse.com” looks casual and amateur. A personalised domain also tends to be shorter (what with one of the levels being removed) which makes branding easier. On a practical level, and in keeping with the general thrust of this article, having your own domain allows you to totally replace the website you use without having to give up the URL you’ve already posted everywhere. I took advantage of this in 2022 when I moved Homework Direct to WordPress because Wix put its prices up. On the other hand, renting a domain is itself an expense as well as requiring identification whereas subdomain sites can still be free and anonymous. Of the sites I frequent (on which topic more later), I notice that The Norton View is still on a WordPress subdomain after operating more than fifteen years, as did Murrey and Blue under its original ownership. Of the many Substack blogs I’ve recently encountered, the vast majority have kept it at “.substack.com”, whereas it would be difficult to imagine them all doing the same on WordPress. Perhaps one is considered more prestigious than the other in some way.

As a case study into the importance of having a website and not just a channel, I point to the example of Chuck Sonnenburg, professionally known as SF-Debris. Chuck is a film and television critic of more than seventeen years’ standing, making him one of the seniormost figures in what is now a very large “reviewtainment” industry. He got his start talking about Star Trek: Voyager, then gradually branched out to the rest of the Star Trek franchise, then to other science fiction and fantasy franchises (e.g. Doctor Who and Red Dwarf) as well as whatever miscellaneous films and series his fans suggest for him. He claims to have surpassed the ten thousand video mark some years ago. His journey has rarely been easy. His review videos take the form typical of the genre – ten to fifteen minutes of footage from the episode he’s reviewing, occasionally playing the sound but mostly as a silent montage over which he reads his commentary. Purveyors of this type of content maintain that it falls under Fair Use, but that doesn’t stop IP owners – or indeed the automated systems of the video-hosting services) from blocking videos on the grounds of copyright infringement. Chuck has been around long enough to witness several such piracy purges. For his first few years he used YouTube as his primary platform – only natural as it was and is by far the largest – with a backup channel on Blip.TV. The backup channel was mainly used for long-form videos, as YouTube back then had quite restrictive limits on running time. In 2011, having had a few too many threats from YouTube, Chuck decided to take down hundreds of his own videos before the platform inevitable purged them, then set about making Blip his main platform instead. Rather than simply reupload his old videos in their original form, Chuck decided that a lot of them needed rerecording. He did this alongside still making new reviews, so it took years before all his missing episodes were available again. Almost immediately this effort was rendered worthless because BlipTV completely shut down as a platform. Chuck therefore had to reupload everything again with yet another host. He has joked about this himself, claiming not to remember how many platforms have dropped him over the years. At the time of writing he seems to be using DailyMotion for his “full motion” videos while, ironically, going back to YouTube for lesser versions where he essentially talks over a slideshow of still images instead of moving clips. This alternative format is less engaging to watch but safer from a copyright perspective, as well as almost certainly being easier to edit. Here the point of this [my, not Dorn’s] article comes into play – originally Chuck’s videos were displayed on his YouTube channel and that was likely to be the place where people watched and commented on them. Alongside this, however, he also had a standalone website at sfdebris.com which essentially ran like a blog with each post being titled after the episode or film he was reviewing and consisting of an embed of the corresponding video followed by a short (and snarky) written description. Originally this could have struck some as pointless, but the repeated purges vindicated his approach, for links to his website remain usable long after links to his video channels are killed. When the videos are taken down, the sites pages are left with error messages or even just empty spaces where the embeds used to be, but the page titles, the descriptions and the navigation menus are intact so that the site exists as something of an empty shell. As Chuck proceeds with reuploading on a new video host, the shell is gradually filled in again with the new videos being embedded exactly where the old ones had been. When the reupload process is eventually completed, visitors will find the site looking and working much as it did before. If they notice any difference at all, it will only be that the play button on the video is a different colour – just like the citizens of Zanak noticing the new lights in the sky when the mines are refilled. Nowadays Chuck has the DailyMotion videos unlisted to they cannot be viewed from the hosting site itself, only as embedded on his blog, so that none come to think of the former as his home. Chuck also has a dedicated forum set up to take on the role normally played by the comment section. Again, this helps to maintain long-term continuity, because comments left on the videos themselves would be lost to digital history upon blocks or takedowns. It also has the advantage that the conversations themselves are easier to write and read.

If you’re as much a pessimist as I am you’ve probably already anticipated that if a critical mass of content creators adopted this strategy then the platform owners would cotton on and start forbidding embeds, or at least restricting them in some (probably financial) way to force viewers to use the host sites directly. In this scenario I would hope that creators already using said strategy would be able to vote with their feet by switching to hosts more obliging (unless of course they were to all do it at once). In the interim a simple direct link on the blog page would probably suffice for the same purpose, even if it was less elegant in looks.

Dorn’s article expressed a wish to see people exchanging URLs for websites instead of handles for profiles, so at this point I ought to share some of my own recommendations. Per her advice, I have created a link directory on this website, which can be accessed under the “About” heading in the main menu.

FURTHER READING

Pondering Thatcher’s Letterheads

Posted on by
Reply

About a decade ago when I first got interested in heraldry, I came across this article in The Independent by Ben Summers and Michael Streeter, dating all the way back to 24th March 1997, early in that year’s general election campaign*. It concerned the use of the British royal arms by the Baroness Thatcher on her official letters.

The wording of the article is a little confusing, and made harder by the absence of any images (unsurprising given the age): It alleges that Lady Thatcher abandoned the use of her own coat of arms for her letters and started using instead the royal arms, in the lesser format favoured by various government departments.

Thatcher’s own heraldic achievement

The journalists interviewed both Black Rod (Sir Edward Jones) who awkwardly declined to comment and Somerset Herald (Thomas Woodcock, later Garter King of Arms) who dismissed a suggestion (made by whom it’s not clear) that Companions of the Garter are specially entitled to use the royal arms in this way.

Government arms as used at the time

The article contrasts Thatcher to Britain’s two other living former premiers at the time – “Sir Edward Heath uses a simple House of Commons portcullis and a plain typeface, while Lord Callaghan simply types his name beside the House of Lords logo.” – and the main thrust is the piece is to play up the public perception of the Iron Lady as not being able to leave government behind and as believing herself as great as the reigning monarch.

Trouble is, I think this is a bit of a reach, given this sentence: “The normal House of Lords logo used by peers places the Arms inside an ellipse, together with the words “House of Lords”, making clear the state body to which the use of the Arms relates.”

With one hand Streeter & Summers allege delusions of grandeur based on Thatcher’s supposed use of the governmental coat of arms instead of the House of Lords logo, but with the other they tacitly admit that the two devices are near-identical anyway! While the page itself does not have any photographs, I have been able to find a handful of examples online as letters by public statesmen often become collectable items sold at auction. The impression I get is that, while letterheads for members of the House of Commons have favoured the crowned portcullis badge** since many decades before Thatcher’s premiership, those for members of the House of Lords at that time used the royal arms in an oval with “House of Lords” typed underneath. Letterheads for government ministers at that time followed the same pattern – the royal arms in an oval with the department name beneath – although there were some rare examples of ministries already using the more modern corporate-style logos that would become characteristic of the New Labour years.

If the authors meant that Thatcher was using the royal arms in her private correspondence – i.e. not related to her parliamentary duties – then they might have had a point, but that is not made clear. I would also note that in all the photographs I’ve found so far, none show peers using their private coats of arms in the headers – a shame, really, as that is one of the main reasons to acquire a coat of arms in the first place.

This could be an example of what the article alleges – albeit it’s from seven years too late.

I’ve tried searching for any documentation of the actual rules around the use of parliamentary letterheads. I found this page for the House of Commons but nothing so far for the Lords.

Here I have collated a series of examples of letters written by Lady Thatcher and other British prime ministers in their legislative (rather than executive) capacities.

Margaret Thatcher

  • 1966-04-01: Letter to Mr & Mrs Bland, with no personal letterhead but logo in top left corner, featuring even lesser royal arms in a portrait oval with “HOUSE OF COMMONS” arched above it.
  • 1971-10-27: Letter to illegible recipient with green portcullis in top centre and “THE RT. HON. MARGARET THATCHER M.P.” above it.
  • 1976-10-28: Letter to Misses Brett and Watson, with blue portcullis in top left corner and “The Rt. Hon. Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, M.P.” along the top.
  • 1991-12-09: Rear page of a letter to Ed Koch (former Mayor of New York City), with portcullis in blue in top left corner and “THE RT. HON. MARGARET THATCHER, O.M., F.R.S, M.P.” along the top, notable because she is no longer called “Mrs” but not styled “Lady” either despite Denis’s baronetcy.
  • 1991-12-12: Letter to E. T. Freeborough with same layout.
  • 1995-03-01: Letter to Rick Pallack with lesser royal arms (sans oval) in top left corner and “MARGARET, THE LADY THATCHER, O.M., P.C., F.R.S.” along the head.
  • 2003-??-??: Message thanking an unidentified well-wisher for his condolences after the death of Sir Denis, featuring the House of Lords logo as described with “Margaret Thatcher” underneath it and “THE RT. HON. THE BARONESS THATCHER, L.G., O.M., F.R.S.” in the footer. “P.C.” is omitted for some reason.

James Callaghan

  • 1990-09-16: Letter to Andy Wood with House of Lords logo in red and “THE RT. HON. LORD CALLAGHAN OF CARDIFF KG” above it in black. “PC” omitted here too.

Harold Wilson

  • 1973-10-30: Letter to Geoffrey Davis, with House of Commons portcullis in top centre and “From: The Rt. Hon. Harold Wilson, OBE, FRS, MP.” above, all in green.
  • 1994-05-??: Letter to Lynda Winston, with House of Lords logo in top centre and “The Rt. Hon. The Lord Wilson of Rievaulx KG, OBE, FRS.”

Alec Douglas-Home

  • 1970-07-29: Letter to Klaus Kuhneumund, with oval House of Commons logo and “From: The Rt. Hon. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, K.T., M.P.” above, all in subtly inconsistent shades of blue.
  • 19??-04-17: Letter to the Marquess of Lansdowne, with House of Lords logo in top centre and “From: LORD HOME OF THE HIRSEL K.T.” above it. “P.C., J.P., D.L.” left out.

Harold Macmillan

  • 1978-02-22: Letter to Harold Smith, with “From the Rt. Hon. Harold Macmillan” along the top, with “OM FRS” omitted.. There is no parliamentary logo at all as he was not a member of either house at this time.

Edward Heath

  • 1984-05-10: Letter to Felipe González, with portcullis in top left corner and “The Rt. Hon. Edward Heath, M.B.E., M.P.” along the top, all in blue.
  • 1991-02-13: Letter from Heath’s private secretary Robert Vaudry to Sean Bryson with portcullis in top centre and “From: The Private Office of The Rt Hon Edward Heath MBE MP” above it, all in black.
  • 2000-09-18: Letter to the Lady Harmar-Nicholls, with portcullis in top left corner and “The Rt. Hon. Sir Edward Heath, K.G., M.B.E., M.P.” along the top, all in blue.

More recent examples of backbench peers using the royal arms

On a semi-related note, I am still searching for evidence of armorial bearings held by Wilbert Awdry (who, incidentally, died just three days before that Thatcher article was published). Recently I have found some digital uploads of his letterheads, which feature a monochrome photograph of a steam locomotive, identified by the caption as Locomotive No.1 of the Sydney Railway Company. If he wouldn’t use a coat of arms there, where would he?

*The fifty-first Parliament of the United Kingdom was prorogued on Friday 21st March but would not be dissolved until Tuesday 8th April, with polling day on Thursday 1st May.

UPDATE (21st July)

Barely a day after I posted this, technology lawyer and academic Kendra Albert and software engineer Morry Kolman launched Heavyweight, an online letterhead composition tool which allows one to mimic the style of a legal firm. These letterheads are purely textual, so sadly no coats of arms to review.

On Admirals and Arundells

Posted on by
1

The Queen turned seventy-eight today. That’s not traditionally considered one of the big birthdays and so commemorations have been fairly muted. The most significant announcement was her appointment as Vice-Admiral of the United Kingdom.

The Vice-Admiral is the deputy to the Lord High Admiral, and it may be prudent to recap the outline of that office first: The Lord High Admiral is the ultimate head (originally operational, but later just ceremonial) of the Royal Navy. Appointments have been made since the late fourteenth century in the Kingdoms of England and Scotland, then later Great Britain. Occasionally in Stuart times, and almost permanently from Anne’s reign onwards, the singular office was not filled and instead the post was instead put “In Commission” – i.e. delegated to the Board of Admiralty with the First Lord of the Admiralty (a cabinet minister) as its chair. The creation of the modern Ministry of Defence in 1964 saw the Board with its First Lord dissolved and the title of Lord High Admiral resumed in the person of Queen Elizabeth II. In 2011, on his ninetieth birthday, she conferred the office upon her husband Philip. The status of the office following his death in 2021 is a little ambiguous but the general assumption is that it defaulted back to the sovereign and now resides in King Charles III. I had wondered if Vice-Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence would be appointed on his seventieth birthday this March, but this did not occur. The King perhaps intends to retain the top office for himself and have his wife as runner-up.

The Queen is both the first female and the first royal holder of the office of Vice-Admiral, whose previous recipients have all been career navy men (and indeed tended to hold the actual rank Full Admiral). Her Majesty’s most recent predecessor was the Lord Boyce, who was appointed in 2021 and died in 2022.

Below the Vice-Admiral is another deputy, the Rear-Admiral. This office is currently held by Sir Gordon General, a General in the Royal Marines who was formerly Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff and also served as Lord High Constable at the 2023 coronation.

The Lord High Admiral has a flag of office – a fouled golden anchor on a crimson field. The Queen was presented with a “burgee” (pennant) with a red anchor on a white background when she visited HMNB Devonport. I just about saw Camilla’s impaled banner of arms as well.

On another note, today is also the twentieth anniversary of the death of Sir Edward Heath, Prime Minister 1970-1974. His military career was on land, though he was a noted yachtsman in later life. He stayed in the House of Commons for twenty-seven years after his premiership had ended, which is considerably longer than all his successors combined. He is the most recent Father of the House to have served more than one term, as well as the most recent to have formerly been Prime Minister.* He is also the most recent example of the Order of the Garter being conferred upon an incumbent member of the House of Commons**.

Wikimedia Commons has long had a vector graphic (by Sodacan, of course) of Sir Edward’s shield of arms, but it was only recently that I discovered, through the website of the Heraldry Society, a photograph of the heralds’ illustration of the full achievement. Heath had no offspring, so the arms as a hereditament became extinct.

This anniversary means that Arundells, his house in Salisbury, will now have been his museum for longer than he actually lived there. He bequeathed the building to his namesake charitable foundation who then opened it to the public. There was a fear in 2010 that the house would need to be sold due to high running costs, which then developed into a legal battle, but as of 2025 the estate seems to be running as normal again.

It should be noted that the spelling is Arundells with two Ls, not Arundels with one. Incidentally, it was an Earl of Arundel who is listed as England’s earliest Lord High Admiral, so everything links up I suppose!

*I’m phrasing it that way because Heath is not the most recent Prime Minister to be Father of the House – that was Callaghan.

**I hesitate to say “sitting member” because St George’s Day in 1992 fell in the interlude after the general election (9th April) but before the new Parliament actually assembled (27th April).

Another Condolence Note

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday the Prime Minister and the Mayor of London attended the memorial at Hyde Park commemorating the London bombings of 7th July 2005.

As with the Auschwitz memorial earlier this year, Sir Keir left a wreath of flowers with a card attached. The card uses the old version of the government arms. I’m guessing the pile of these cards printed during the previous reign has still not been exhausted.

A mere four days earlier, the Prime Minister, Secretary of State for Health & Social Care and Chancellor of the Exchequer had visited the Sir Ludwig Guttmann Health Centre, where they spoke from a lectern clearly adorned with the new, Tudor crown, illustration.

I’m afraid I don’t have anything profound to say about the bombing attacks themselves. I had yet to ever visit London in person at the time and my main memory of that month is that of a school assembly in which our headmistress asked pupils what they’d seen on the news and a few had followed the story enough to relay it. I also remember a CBBC drama being made about the event a year later, but that’s about it.