August Armorial Announcements

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

More Crowns, More Confusion

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Recently the office of the Lieutenant Governor of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia released photographs of the erection of a decorative shield on the wall of the Drawing Room at Government House, featuring the cypher of Charles III. Aside from the violation of the rule of tincture (by having a golden cypher on a silver background), I was struck by the fact that it used the Tudor Crown, not the Trudeau Crown as at the federal level.

Photographs from as far back as the coronation in 2023 show that the Tudor Crown was already in use by the provincial government at that time, with the Trudeau Crown nowhere to be seen. Ironically Nova Scotia, as the name and shield both quickly give away, was founded as a Scottish colony long before the Acts of Union and was granted arms by Charles I in his Scottish rather than English capacity, using the Scottish heraldic style with the motto scroll above the shield rather than below. The unicorn supporter even wears the Scottish crown. Perhaps it would have made more sense for the cypher to use that one instead.

It might be prudent at this point to make a note about Canada’s viceregal flags. Until Elizabeth II’s accession all the lieutenant governors used the Union Flag defaced by their heraldic badge on a white circle in the centre. Quebec changed in 1952, using the provincial coat of arm on a large white disk on a plain blue background. The arms are topped by the Tudor crown. It seems the province never adopted St Edward’s Crown despite Elizabeth’s stated preference for it. In the 1980s the other provinces switched to a similar-but-slightly-different design with the shield topped by St Edward’s Crown on a blue background with ten golden maple leaves. As far as I can tell they have not changed over since Charles III’s accession. Nova Scotia was the last holdout with the Union Flag design, only changing over in 2024. This creates the paradox whereby the Scottish and French provinces of Canada are the only ones using the crown design named after an English & Welsh dynasty.

Closer to home, but also wider afield, The Queen’s Commonwealth Trust, a charity set up in 2018, announced on Friday that it would be rebranding itself. Anything set up during that reign (or the reigns of previous female sovereigns) with “Queen’s” in the name inevitably had some ambiguity about what would happen in the next one – did “The Queen” mean Elizabeth II personally and permanently, did it mean the incumbent sovereign (in which case it should have become “The King’s” in her son’s reign) or did it mean the incumbent queen whether regnant or consort (in which case it would now belong to Camilla, but in the reign of a king with no wife there might be no namesake at all). The trust has gone with the first option, renaming itself The Queen Elizabeth II Commonwealth Trust and changing its initialism from QCT to QECT. The press release said that existing social media handles would not change, although it didn’t specify if the website’s domain name would do so. Presumably this gives them an excuse not to change St Edward’s Crown to the Tudor Crown in their logo.

Checking up on the Blog (Again)

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At the midpoint of the year, another review on the blog’s statistics. I will compare the view counts to the same months last year:

Month 2024 2025 Difference
Jan 293 447 +154
Feb 248 385 +137
Mar 364 461 +097
Apr 330 380 +050
May 387 382 -005
Jun 375 401 +026
Total 1997 2456 +459

This means I have already exceeded the total readership for 2023 and fairly soon will have outdone all years prior to 2024.

I have recently undertaken a substantial rewrite of the About page, as well as absorbing the Portfolio page into it, to make it better representative of the current state of the blog instead of just the period of 2015-19, as posts from that era tend to get few if any views. In particular I have dropped the “Recurring characters” who haven’t actually recurred since then and inserted instead a “Main themes” section.

Other changes may come later if I ever get around to them.

Some Heraldic Snippets

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Today the Royal Household released the Sovereign Grant Report. I will discuss the actual substance of it – especially the planned retirement of the royal train – in a later article. For now I will note that the front cover and title page of the report both continue to use the old version of the royal arms with St Edward’s Crown. This was also true of the Birthday Honours published last month in the Gazette.

The Queen opened the Ratho Library in Edinburgh today. She travelled in the newly-acquired BMW G70 (also a topic for a later article) which had her banner flying from the bonnet. It was difficult to get a good look in the footage and the press stills don’t show it at all, but I think I could make out the impalement line, with the dexter side having a yellow top half while the sinister side was white on top and blue on bottom. That would indicate it to be the English marshalling of the royal quarters, surely an armorial faux-pas for an event taking place in the Scottish capital!

The Duke of Edinburgh is in Canada visiting his namesake island and regiment. The royal website’s page on the event depicts his Canadian banner of arms flying in at least one photograph, though again I can’t find it shown in any of the stills on Getty or Alamy.

Also last month another German car manufacturer, Mercedes-Benz, was recognised as a royal warrant-holder. I presume it will be the new Tudor crown illustration that they show, but I haven’t seen any photographs of it yet.

Mid-Year Reading Round-up

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Having already posted some months ago a long list of all the books I’ve recently acquired, I suppose at some point I should say something about the experience of actually reading them. Here, then, are some mini-reviews of the publications I’ve finished during the period of January-June 2025, in no particular order.

The First Four Georges by Sir J. H. Plumb

Already reviewed in a different post.

The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins

Although he is primarily famous for The God Delusion and maybe secondarily for The Selfish Gene, the professor himself generally regards this one as his true magnum opus. I’m not sure how famous Dawkins already was back in 1982, but this book feels as if written in his capacity as a biologist rather than as a public intellectual and activist. It is a much more academic work than his more famous ones and, having not been taught biology for just over a decade, I cannot claim full comprehension of the more terminologically-dense parts, but these aren’t really necessary for understanding the main thesis. Dawkins does not present new facts so much as a new way of interpreting facts we already possess: Normally the conception of evolution and natural selection is that they take place on the level of the individual organism, the family, the society and even the entire species. Dawkins instead looks at it in terms of the alleles of genes competing indirectly against each other with the organisms serving merely as a convenient – and disposable – host. The title of the book refers to Dawkins’s other big point that alleles affect the physical and behavioural characteristics of a species, which in turn affect the environment those species inhabit, as well as the ways in which other species evolve in response, so the phenotype of an allele in one species can be regarded as including the features observed in another species. The author also brings up a great many case studies of evolutionary adaptation and competition, including counter-intuitive examples such as between males and females of the same species, or even between parent and child! Of great interest here are his analyses of why some creatures are capable of adapting to “win” an evolutionary war while others are not. A theme which runs through the book as well is the difficulty of finding the vocabulary to comprehend these complex natural phenomena without slipping into metaphor and personification, which feels in some way prescient given the author’s later writings about religion.

The Final Curtsey by Margaret Rhodes

As with Lady Boothroyd’s autobiography, the early sections of this book felt a lot like reading my own grandmother’s childhood recollections, although from the opposite end of the class spectrum. Rhodes gives her account of her aristocratic early life, her experience of living through the war and her career as a courtier to the royal family. One thing that confused me a little was her choice of names for Britain’s senior mother and daughter after 1952 – the reigning sovereign is “The Queen” whereas George VI’s widow is “Queen Elizabeth”. Often I would get a long way into a paragraph before working out which one Rhodes meant. Despite being published in 2012, just four years before she died, Rhodes mentions a distinctly old-fashioned approach to writing. To modern eyes she appears curiously unfazed by the historical weight of her experiences, taking it in her stride that she dined nightly with the heiress presumptive while the bombs were falling, got roped into organising a faraway dynastic wedding, smuggled prisoners out of a country undergoing a violent coup and even watched a man drop dead in front of her. While the overall tone may seem a little twee at times it’s definitely worth the read and packs a lot into relatively few pages. The final days of the Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother are especially important for the record.

The Gathering Storm by Sir Winston Churchill

This is a very long book, and that’s only the first in a six-volume set amounting to more than three thousand pages in total. Churchill has written a great many well-renowned history books, but here it is a history in which he was a major protagonist so it also doubles as a memoir of sorts. The length here is justified as he writes in great detail about a multiplicity of topics, taking the reader step-by-step from the conclusion of WWI to the outbreak of WWII, with the volume ending at the point when he became Prime Minister. It’s astonishing to realise that he completed this enormous tome while he was serving as Leader of the Opposition, a feat of intellectual multitasking which feels impossible today. Given that Churchill’s reputation speaks for itself it almost feels redundant to comment further except to say that I am on the lookout for Volume 2, though given the backlog of books already accumulated it could take a while to get there.

The Glamour Boys by Sir Chris Bryant

Yet another World War II history, and also written by a sitting MP. Bryant’s behind-the-scenes account of the parliamentary machinations leading up to the war is in many ways complementary to Churchill’s own. The focus here is on the alternative, underground world that the “boys” were forced to inhabit, noting the parallels between their nonconformism, adamant against the mainstream of the time, on both personal and political levels. This book presents a major setback for anyone attempting a historical rehabilitation of Neville Chamberlain – his reputation before was of optimistic (or perhaps delusional) naivety rather than malevolence, but here he comes off as cruel and wicked in his attempts to suppress his glamorous detractors with an underhanded smear campaign. The only downside to this book is its length – at 448 pages it’s a rather weighty tome and it sometimes feels as if Bryant was padding it out to look more imposing on the shelves. Some critics have said he indulges too much in the lurid descriptions of the rebels’ relationships in the early part of the book, but I think the real waffle comes nearer the end, once the war has already gotten going, when the defining goal of the story has been completed and everything thereafter feels a bit more like generic wartime biography divorced from the specialist subject matter.

The King’s Painter by Franny Moyle

Going a bit further back this time takes us to the Tudor era. This is a biography of the portrait artist Hans Holbein the Younger, best remembered for his imposing image of Henry VIII. The biography covers the full length of Holbein’s life and career, with detailed analyses of his major works and the artistic innovations they represented. Not having studied the history of art (or art itself) much before I cannot fairly judge the quality of Moyle’s commentary here, except to note that she brought up verisimilitude so often it almost felt like a tic. Aside from the art itself, a lot of the book was dedicated to the religious and political upheavals in continental Europe which alternately expanded and restricted Holbein’s professional opportunities.

The Roman War Machine by John Peddie

Returning to the war theme but backing up even further to the ancient world, this is a book on the military structure and logistics of the Roman Empire. In some ways this felt like a throwback to my GCSE Latin course, in others like a memory of and educational field trip I might have done in primary school. This book is in English, of course, save for the heavy use of Latin military jargon. Peddie writes in detail, and with diagrams, about the ranks, formations, equipment and resources sustaining Rome’s military operations. Even here we cannot avoid World War II, for Peddie makes repeated comparisons to campaigns in the twentieth century to show the historical resilience of the Roman legacy.

The Penguin Guide to the Railways of Britain by Edgar Jones

This book was published in 1981 so a lot of the guidance here is obviously out of date now. On this note I would particularly highlight some lines from pages 36-38: “The Advanced Passenger Train represents the latest development in electric rail transport.”, “It is possible that a diesel-powered version of the APT will be developed for use on non-electrified lines.” and “At this moment 60 per cent of trains are diesel-powered. With the progressive introduction of the HST – the most advanced diesel-electric in the world – it is fair to say that this form of power has reached its apogee in Britain. Since electricity holds the key to the future, when these expresses become obsolete it is probable that the diesel, like steam, will disappear.”. The first fifty pages tell the history of locomotion in Britain from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth, including the evolution (with diagrams) of different types of rail vehicles. The next three hundred pages take the reader around the country, region by region, explaining all the routes can be taken and all the stations that can be visited. The writing, though concise and eloquent, can be a little dry and it was difficult to keep up the momentum towards the end. From the way it’s structured, it less resembles a conventional reading book than the railway version of Burke’s and Debrett’s, so perhaps one is better off treating it that way instead of trying to finish it in a linear fashion.

Classical Literary Criticism by T. S. Dorsch

It is a little strange to realise that not only has literature itself been around for thousands of years but that literary criticism has been too. Even though the source texts may be as old as the fourth century BC and the translations into English were done in 1965, a lot of the prose still feels contemporary to one familiar with book and film reviews both amateur and professional. Indeed, a lot of the talking points would not have been out of place in a modern day “reviewtainment” video essay. There are multiple chapters on individual narrative devices, as well a the structures and purposes of different types of plays and comments on stories already performed in the writers’ memories. Most impressively, there are multiple instances when one of the writers goes into detailed analyses of the subtleties of another writer’s word choices and sentence structure. All of this, of course, has to be translated from Greek and Latin into English with the nuances intact. There are even times when one of them criticises another critic’s literary criticism, such as when (p65) Aristotle notes that “Ariphades ridiculed the tragedies for using expressions that no one would use in ordinary speech… these raise the diction above the level of the commonplace, but Ariphades failed to see this”. The introductory note by the editor explains who the sources – Aristotle, Horace and Longinus – actually were. The former belonged in the fourth century BC while the latter two belonged in the first. The gap between them is greater than between Shakespeare and Wilde, yet to us know they seem interchangeable, a good reminder of how long the ancient Greek and Roman eras really were.

Shadow State by Luke Harding

The book was just over three hundred page but I devoured it very rapidly. It tells of how the Russian Federation went from the collapse of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev to the emergence of Putin’s regime in which the military, business, the mafia and the President’s personal interests are all effectively merged into one and how this level of corruption affects not just Russia itself but also the other nations with which Russia interferes. The stories told are the ones you’d expect – Hillary Clinton’s emails, the Salisbury poisoning, and Brexit. There is some poetry in the timing: The book was published in 2020 as Trump was heading to the election he would lose. I bought it from Red Cross on 28th August 2024, as he was heading to the election which would see him restored. This also of course means that Putin’s ongoing war against Ukraine cannot be included, though there is much about the events leading up to it and Zelensky (suited and beardless) makes several appearances. The hero of the tale is Eliot Higgins, a journalist who created the Bellingcat online information exchange that allowed amateurs to monitor and scrutinise world events remotely. Harding resists the temptation to grant Russia an Orwellian omniscience, noting instead that Putin’s schemes often backfired or fell flat, that he only turned to online subterfuge because he lacked the funds for traditional spycraft, that many of his apparent successes – including Trump – were coincidence or blind luck and that the quality of Russian operatives had declined since Soviet times. The story of Salisbury assassins Chepiga and Mishkin, in particular, plays out as something of a farce. Nonetheless the death and destruction they caused is very real and, at time of writing, the threat feels as pressing as ever.

The Ricardian Century by John Saunders

This may be the newest book I’ve ever picked up from a charity shop, as I found it at Oakwood Dog Rescue in February and the copyright notice said 2025. The book was in pristine condition and I worked very hard to keep it that way, although despite my best efforts a few bits of the corner flaked off before I’d finished it. This is the official history of the Richard III Society from its foundation in 1924 (as the Fellowship of the White Boar) to its centenary celebrations in 2024. The book is the product of a print-on-demand service rather than an established publisher and at times looks, to paraphrase Mark Corrigan, like a printout rather than a book. The cover design is especially poor: On the rear is a small square photograph of Saunders, in low resolution and squinting a bit, clearly cropped from a larger group shot, while the front has an equally-fuzzy raster of a depiction of the Society’s coat of arms from which not all of the white space has been cut out of the background. Aesthetic issues aside the contents are engaging enough, giving the reader a detailed look at all the twist and turns of both Ricardianism as a movement and the Society as an organisation. What fascinates me is that by all logic the Society ought to be a dissident fringe group. Though clearly there has been a shift in public attitudes to Richard III over the centuries (and certainly in this millennium) towards acquitting him of history’s more outlandish charges, the consensus among historians is still that he was the most likely perpetrator of the regicide of his nephews. Furthermore, as Ricardianism asserts that “the wrong side won” at Bosworth in 1485, and that sad side includes the current royal family, it is tantamount to asserting (much like the Jacobites) that the entire royal line thereafter to the present day must be illegitimate. Despite this the Society has been accepted by the wider academic community as a legitimate scholarly institution (even if they still ultimately disagree with its conclusions) and has even been accepted by the royal establishment with Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester serving as Patron for more than half of his and its lifetime and the College of Arms hosting the book’s launch. George Awdry, Wilbert’s brother, is also mentioned a few times. One thing that really stuck out at me was the revelation (p93-4) that the Society was not formally incorporated as a legal entity until 2019, which made me wonder how they’d acquired a grant of arms in 1988, among other things.