Tag Archives: Blogs

Re-Directed

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Bratislava New Year FireworksMy website Homework Direct slightly predates this one, having been established just over seven years ago using the development service Wix. After the first fourteen months, however, I had largely given up on it to focus my efforts here (and later on Wikipedia). There are two principal reasons for this – first that I was running out of ideas for what to include, and second that I found the Wix interface much more difficult to manage than WordPress.

Not only was updating the website a difficulty, but even monitoring activity was far more difficult than here – instead of a daily tracker I only received monthly reports by email, which frequently said there had been no views at all. In the entire seven years of operation I only recall getting one sincere communication from a client, and that was only to mention that there were spelling errors (but not specifying where!). I also occasionally got messages from a web review service saying that they had found code errors on the site which prevented it from being seen. The result is that, for most of its existence, Homework Direct has been a dead weight.

A few days ago Wix notified me that my business plan (for domain connection) was coming up for renewal and that the price, constant since 2015 was to rise 64%. WordPress, so far, has given no indication that it will do the same. This announcement was the impetus to finally make a move.

As of today, the contents of the website, as well as the domain name, have moved. I have also designed a new logo for the site (the 2015 version being little more than a placeholder), though the overall colour-scheme has been retained. This does not necessarily constitute a revival of the project, but at least what already been made is now in a more usable state (for both writer and readers) than it had been before.

EXTERNAL LINKS

A New Website

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I have written a few times, though perhaps not as often as I would have liked, about my father’s attempts over the last three decades to bring Paull Holme Tower back into a liveable state.

As of today the tower has its own website. At present it is a little bare with much of the content being placeholder, but I hope that soon it will be as busy as this one. In addition to logging the videos my father has made about his work, it will be a space to write about the history of the tower and the people who lived there, as well as whatever other tangential topics may come up.

You can see it here.

To whom these Presents shall come

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The shield of George Darley, poet and novelist, granted in 1804.

Among the most frustrating experiences for internet heraldists is the difficulty of actually finding citations for grants of arms. Burke’s and Debrett’s have long recorded the arms of the peerage and baronetage, but knights and gentlemen (or those whose higher dignities came and went between publications) are left out, and in any case the editions of either that can be read for free online tend to be decades if not centuries old, so that recent grants remain elusive.

The Canadian Heraldic Authority, of course, has its public register, but its British counterparts are in no position to form anything similar. The rolls of arms at the Lyon Court and the College of Arms may be inspected in person for a fee. There has been talk of the latter digitising its records, but even then their access will likely still be restricted, for the corporation would otherwise ruin its financial model.

Ireland, though, has provided an unexpected boon. Some days ago Stephen Plowman of Heraldry Online blogged that the National Library of Ireland had uploaded microfilm scans of all that country’s grants and confirmations of arms from 1630 to 2009. The volumes are labelled by single capital letters, which is a little misleading as the contents are not arranged alphabetically but chronologically. The handwriting and blackletter print are sometimes challenging to read through a computer monitor, but most of the text is legible.

Some of the stories revealed are quite fascinating – there are several cases of people seeking posthumous grants for their ancestors, as well as seeking “name and arms” clauses to inherit the arms of their in-laws. This sometimes leads to the Ulster King of Arms writing out complicated stories of marriages, ancestries and deaths.

As in other places, there is the dilemma of whether the herald should “grant” arms anew or merely “confirm” arms that were assumed long ago. My favourite reference so far (in Volume C) is to a shield long being displayed on a decorative plate in the petitioner’s house!

Although not all of the names mentioned in the books have turned out to be that famous, there have been a fair few additions to my Wikipedia collection. Even individuals who were not themselves notable may be the ancestors of those who were, and those fill in the heraldic gaps indirectly.

On Peers’ Websites (or Lack Thereof)

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The Right Honourable The Lord Walney (formerly Mr John Woodcock)

Members of the House of Commons generally have a personal website where constituents can contact them and get an overview of their representative’s work. These websites are variable in quality and effort. If you look through a large number of them in a short time, you’ll notice that a lot of them are practically identical, having presumably been created en masse from the same template (though different templates are favoured by different parties).

Members of the House of Lords generally lack any websites at all. There are some who were famous for other things prior to their ennoblement and who have websites about those (Dobbs for his novels, Lloyd-Webber for his operas) but few have sites that are specifically about their roles as peers.

Particularly interesting is that a large proportion (too large, by many reckonings) of the upper house’s membership comes from recent emeriti of the lower. Quite a lot of these ex-MPs have at some point used personal websites for that role, but these are nearly always abandoned once their owners move upstairs, sitting stagnant for months and then disappearing altogether when the domain registrations lapse (they might still be around having reverted to their subdomains, but I can’t find them). My best guess at the reason for this phenomenon is that MPs’ personal websites are maintained by constituency staff rather than the politicians themselves, and thus are not sustainable once those staff are no longer in service – or the peers just think that nobody will be interested in reading them.

Here is a summary of the personal websites of those ex-MPs whose life peerages have already been gazetted this year, omitting those who don’t appear to have had a website in the first place.

2020 Special Honours

2019 Dissolution Honours

2020 Political Honours