Tag Archives: Universities

Articles detailing my visits and applications to various higher education institutions, and then my experience attending one.

A Grand Total

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It is not entirely easy to count how many heraldic illustrations I have made for Wikimedia Commons over the years. Do I count badges separately from shields? Do I include achievements I’ve made twice? What about ones that have been deleted?

When I finished updating my gallery at the end of July the shields and lozenges collectively numbered nine-hundred and sixty-six. Over the course of August I have illustrated at least another thirty-four.

My official one thousandth coat of arms is that of the Barons Darebury, a relatively short and low-profile line of peers whose distinctions include High Sheriff of Cheshire and Chairman of Aintree Racecourse.

Having cleared this benchmark, I move onto the next project. Last year I unveiled my armorial of universities in the United Kingdom. This year I have made a similar list for the universities in Canada. This one has so far progressed much more rapidly, as Canadian heraldry is very easily searchable in the Public Register of Arms, Flags and Badges, in contrast to British heraldry which often involves a great deal of searching around for clues. The register had blazons for fifty-four fully-fledged universities, as well as twenty-nine subsidiary colleges or faculties and four related voluntary bodies.

The items in this list are organised by province, though they are not evenly spread – forty of the eighty-seven institutions are in Ontario, with the University of Toronto alone having fifteen distinct grants. Newfoundland & Labrador and Prince Edward Island, by contrast, boast only one each. Another strange trend is that Canada’s heralds seem to have been inordinately fond of sealing their letters patent on the fifteenth and twentieth days of the month.

I am struck by one major problem – although I have quickly compiled many dozens of blazons I can find illustrations for only two of them. On the actual pages of these institutions one can frequently find an image of the coat of arms copied directly from either the register or the university’s own website, claimed under fair use. Such a justification does not fly on pages such as the one I am making, so I will have to call on the aid of all Wikimedia’s great armorial artists to fill the gaps.

It’s Just Not Cricket

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Armorial achievements of the Lord Cowdrey of Tonbridge (left) and Sir John Major (right)

Having exhausted what I could glean from the available editions of Burke’s and Debrett’s, I am ever on the lookout for new material on heraldry. Last week the College of Arms published its latest newsletter (which now regrettably appears only to print in October and January), but as usual the actual exemplifications of new armorial bearings were few.

I was delighted yesterday to discover this lecture on the development of English heraldry, given by the Somerset Herald David White in 2014. It is far from the only heraldry-related lecture video I have encountered online. Unfortunately I commonly find that the piece rarely goes beyond the basics of armorial composition and a brief overview of medieval chivalry, thus not telling me much beyond what I knew already – indeed it’s probable that the people making them are reliant on the same online and/or public domain resources that I am. This was not one of those, for it went beyond the Middle Ages to cover modern heraldry and much in between.

White’s lecture studied the artistic phases of heraldry, from the very simple designs of the medieval period to the more crowded ones of the early Tudors – when the nouveau riche were acquiring arms to display where they could be studied up close instead of glimpsed in motion – followed by a deliberate return to simplicity in the later Tudor and Stuart eras. There was a section on the infamous “landscape” and “seascape” heraldry of the Georgian years, with particular emphasis on Horatio Nelson, whose absurdly augmented escutcheon is often considered the nadir of the art. The Victorian era is not discussed in as much detail, save for a vague assertion that they went back to earlier styles as a result of the blossoming Gothic revival. Along the way he gave examples of families assuming arms and then later trying to get similar ones granted, or appropriating those of namesakes who were not actually related. The relative popularity of certain charges was also shown, with an ordinary or arms from the mid-1500s showing that already by then there were dozens of pages of lions (indeed a double-page spread shows thirty-two separate shields just with white lions on a red backdrop). White said that in modern times “one’s heart sinks” if a new applicant for arms requests a lion be included due to the difficulty of inventing an original design. He also speculated that the utility of heraldry as a system of identification might have been undermined by the preponderance of so many near-identical blazons.

Near the end of the lecture he showed some examples of reasonably recent grants of arms. Of particular interest was that of the cricket-player Colin Cowdrey, who was ennobled by John Major in 1997. His shield has a paly of four defaced by a bend dexter, representing the tallying of points. His crest had a set of wickets nosed by the white horse of Kent. Just to quash any remaining uncertainty, he also had crickets as supporters. Major himself became entitled to supporters upon his appointment as a Knight of the Garter in 2005. He too wished to have crickets, but was required to distinguish them from Cowdrey’s and so had them stand upon despatch boxes. Heraldry, of course, has no sense of scale. White called it a “slightly depressing thing” that the portcullis symbol was increasingly used on the shields of retired politicians to represent their profession.

The lecture I found was part of a collection of public lectures archived online by Newcastle University. The range of topics is as wide as you would find at Gresham, so well worth checking out.

Pictures in Unexpected Places (Part 2)

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Last year I made a post looking at some of the ways in which my free-licence photographs were being used online. Since then a couple more examples have turned up:

This article in The Boar uses my photograph of the laundry room at The Lawns Centre to head an article about the student union at Warwick changing their laundry contractor. Interestingly the image clearly shows signage with Hull branding on it. The article says “Card or credits will not be required to use their service, which will reportedly also handle potential machine breakdowns with quicker response times.“, which is of great interest to me, as I found the laundry facilities at The Lawns to be insufficient, overcomplicated, unreliable. After the first fortnight I opted to put my worn clothes into a travel bag and haul them to Rex Launderette just under a mile away.

The UK Human Rights Blog credited me for a photograph of Lord Sumption. I merely uploaded the screenshot to Wikimedia Commons, the video was actually produced by the Cambridge Law Faculty.

The Arms of the Universities

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Almost a year ago I embarked on a draft Wikipedia page listing the armorial ensigns of Britain’s many higher education institutions. I spent about a month on it before moving onto other projects, returning only a few months later to keep up a token level of activity so that the draft wouldn’t be deleted. In March, having decided that I had done enough by myself, I left guidelines on the talk page for other contributors and then stood back. Three days ago, without much ceremony, I discovered that another editor had taken up the mantle and, after further enlarging the page’s content, launched it into mainspace.

Unlike those of humans, arms of institutions are not recorded in Burke’s and Debrett’s. Luckily for us, the great heraldic scholar Arthur Charles Fox-Davies recorded the arms of a great many universities (and other organisations) in The Book of Public Arms in 1915. Of course, a lot of new universities have come into being since then, and I do not know of any similar book – or at least none in the public domain – published in the present millennium. I did, however, find a smattering of more recent arms on Heraldry of the World, a private Wiki set up solely to record impersonal heraldry, although that site’s own sources are unfortunately not listed. Many establishments have details about their armorial achievements on their own websites, though the level of precision is far from consistent.

The ancient universities and their constituent colleges often assumed arms in a time before heraldry was regulated, and subsequently had them recorded during the Tudor-era visitations. Later institutions matriculated from the College of Arms and the Lyon Court in the usual way. One interesting phenomenon to note is that the older institutions are mostly restricted to a mere freestanding shield, whereas the newer ones sport crests and supporters. The proliferation of such ornaments into corporate heraldry is a relatively new phenomenon, with heralds consenting to granting them only after realising that institutions would otherwise assume them anyway. Paradoxically, this means that new universities who seek grants of arms in order to approach the prestige of old ones may actually be sabotaging their own objectives by displaying them.

There was some difficulty in arranging categories, as not all universities have neccessarily always been universities – some started off as constituent colleges of others but later broke away, others evolved from more specific bodies such as teacher training colleges or medical schools. Arms could be matriculated at any stage, and possibly but not definitely carried forward through reconstitutions. Then there was the issue of how to list schools in Ireland which were part of the United Kingdom when their armorial grants were first issued.

My next list page, which I began on 10th March, is for the arms of who have held the office of Lord High Chancellors of Great Britain. Hopefully it won’t take a whole year to get that one approved.

UPDATE (August 2021)

Edward Teather, a Medium blogger, has written a graphic design critique of British academic heraldry.

Pictures in Unexpected Places (Part 1)

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Last week I and many other students received notice that The Lawns, that leafy undergraduate hamlet in the large village of Cottingham, would cease to offer accommodation in the next academic year. At some point I ought probably to make a post discussing this issue in more detail, but for now what piques my interest is the article which appeared in The Tab three days ago. The third photograph is of the balcony on the upper floor of the Lawns Centre, which I took in October 2017, about a month after moving into Ferens Hall, and subsequently uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. This got me wondering where else my images may have turned up.

Snooping around, I found this blog post by Beyond Nuclear International, which laments the recent death of Paul Flynn MP. Nearly two years ago I attempted to make a Wikipedia article listing all current members of the House of Commons in order of seniority. I eventually abandoned the project when I discovered that such a page existed already. Unlike the article just referenced, mine would have included the free-licence portraits of those members which had recently been published. The late Mr Flynn was not included in the new gallery, nor did there appear to be any other photographs of him that were available under the terms necessary for Wikipedia. After searching fruitlessly for a few days, I decided to fill the empty table cell with a cartoon image which I constructed using the shape tools on Libre Office. The fabricated portrait was never used on any real articles, so I rather expected it to languish in permanent obscurity. The use of my crude caricature on BNI’s sombre blog post is especially perplexing given that the page already features two photographs of the departed, the first a publicity shot courtesy of the CND and the second a screencap of parliamentary footage dubiously credited to Flickr-ite Ninian Reid.

Curiously there are to be found at least two photographs for which I am credited even though I did not take them: an editorial in The Oxford Student and a newsletter by the Shropshire Patients Group. In both cases the images were screenshots from short educational films which were released on the UK Parliament YouTube Channel in late 2012. In these cases it seems most likely that the creators of these articles found me listed on the file pages as the user who uploaded the images, and mistook that to mean that I had been the one who took those photographs in the first place. One dreads to consider what this says about the reading comprehension skills of the people of the people who produce these websites, and can only hope that the rest of their content is more carefully considered!

UPDATE (June 2020)

Fifteen months on I have produced a sequel.

Course Representative Training

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It’s that time of year again!

As the academic year 2018-19 got into swing (which, at university, can take a rather long time), in came the emails about recruiting course representatives. Naturally I went forward. There has been a slight reform of the role – or at least the nomenclature – this year, as School Representatives are given the more accurate designation of Subject Representatives.

There were also a few changes to the training experience: The session, held on the ground floor of the library, was led by education coordinator Benedict Greenwood and president of education Isobell Hall. We were taken through a slideshow about our responsibilities and told to contribute suggestions through Mentimeter. Also included were two videos: one tailor-made for the union, the other a generic motivational sketch which I am sure has been played at thousands of corporate training sessions before.

Later on we were divided into smaller groups and asked to discuss what we thought our main challenges would be, along with ways to overcome them. Unsurprisingly, this prompted a flurry of complaints about inconvenient timetables.

Today’s training was markedly different to that which I had a year ago. On the one hand I was disappointing by the lack of a refreshment table this time, for I had not brought any lunch. One the upside, I now have a badge to advertise my representative status, which somehow never came to me in my first year.

Revision Conference at Hull University

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Does anybody have the key?

Just one month after my Applicant Experience Day, I found myself again visiting the University of Hull. Announced just six days ago, this visit took was supposed to give all of Wilberforce’s advanced level students a crash course in revision and examination technique. The day had a less than auspicious start as it emerged that a rather high proportion of students had opted to boycott the event. Whereas the college and the university had been expecting hundreds of students, only a few dozen actually turned up.

Following a brisk ride in an unexpectedly spacious bus, we were ushered into a new conference hall to be presented with gift bags (including the 2018 prospectus, a branded paper pad and a non-functioning pen) and given an inspirational speech. Our first workshop focused on time management, with each of us making a tally of how many hours per week we spent on work, sleep, revision etc. In the second workshop we were taught about the different techniques for improving factual recall. This naturally involved being shown a long list of terms and challenged to remember all of them after a few minutes.  The third session took us to a computer suite at which we made revision timetables to follow. As we had no student accounts on the university’s servers, each of us received a free memory stick on which to store the files.

We returned to our original meeting point for the buffet lunch, which had been advertised to us in the automated email (perhaps in the desperate hope of enticing a few more visitors). There were no flapjacks this time, but the triangular sandwiches were as numerous as ever. When that had concluded we were, for reasons not entirely clear, taken on a tour of the Brynmor Jones Library, after which we were gathered for a few minutes in a small classroom and asked to fill out satisfaction surveys for future such visits.

Had this excursion been undertaken months earlier we might have seen the merit of it, but by launching it at such short notice and after the Easter holiday the university probably stripped the event of most of its usefulness because at this stage most people had already devised all the revision routine they were going to follow and many, if anything, resented the trip taking some hours out of their actual revision time.

Campus Tour of Bristol

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Dear Elliot

Today I completed my fourth and final university inspection. Whereas the visit to the University of Hull ten days prior had been a trivial pursuit, Bristol would prove a far greater struggle.

Though the university had offered several applicant experience days during the previous two terms, their timing would most likely have required another three day trek reminiscent of that for Cambridge – with the difference that Bristol would not be providing any accommodation. Rather than expend the necessary school time and parental money for such an excursion, I settled for a student-led campus tour which, though not allowing me access to the academic facilities, would at least give me first-hand experience of what it might be like to live there for three years.

It was a very long day – though the tour itself lasted only two hours, the journey from Holderness to Bristol took four hours each way. Should I end up studying at Bristol I would likely take the same journey six to twelve times per year by train – each trip being closer to six hours long. We were initially assembled at Beacon House, where two students were waiting in red jackets. Applicants were divided into two groups depending on their subject combinations and taken for a lengthy walk around the city campus.

We were shown the student union building, and around an example of the accommodation at Clifton Hill House. Though the interior was fairly Spartan compared to its external grandeur it at least seemed liveable (and the bedroom was bigger than my own at home). We were then shown inside the Wills Memorial Building, and told that the university had been set up to provide a fall-back for Wills’ son who had been rejected from Oxford (a legacy no doubt continued by many Bristol students).

A white room with a helical staircae

Inside the student union

The tour continued through the science departments (I could only look through the windows of the School of Chemistry but another applicant assures me that it left little to be desired.) and into the student gym. Along the way we also saw the reception area of the School of Engineering and a lecture theatre shared by multiple faculties, then wandered through the Literature block.

After an uneventful return journey through some of the leafier roads, we arrived back at Beacon House and promptly dispersed.

I would have liked to see the university in more detail, and in particular to see the laboratories in which I would be working, but my assurances from other students and Bristol’s reputation give me no great cause for concern.

Soon I will have to make a decision. With Cambridge and Durham out of the game, it becomes a binary choice between Leeds and Bristol for my first preference (Hull will be the backup in either case). Both are highly-regarded and both appear welcoming, I just have to make up my mind on which ultimately trumps the other.

Oh, and then I have to pass all my A-Levels, of course.

Yours, Robin.

Applicant Experience Day in Hull

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Dear Elliot

With just one month to go before the UCAS deadline for university choices, I find myself hurriedly scrambling around for chances to visit all of the places to which I have applied. Having visited Leeds in November, then interviewed (unsuccessfully) for Cambridge in December, I still needed to look around Bristol and Hull, both of which were happy to give me offers before Christmas without any further demands. Durham, in case you had wondered, rejected me in February, so there will be no visit to log here.

A far cry from the rampant road rage through Leeds and the tumultuous train journey to Cambridge, this university sits just five miles from Wilberforce, so today’s events could be booked at just a few days notice and accessed with a fairly short commute. It was also the least novel of the lot, given that I had already visited the campus for a UCAS fair last June, as well as attending the Top of the Bench competition twice and doing five days work experience at the Department of Chemistry in July 2013.

At the end of the winding concrete path from the car park I found myself at a brightly coloured tent where organisers in red hoodies scanned my ticket and gave me a transparent plastic folder containing a several leaflets and a branded pen. I was then essentially left to my own devices for the rest of the day – there were multiple activities on offer but I was never actively ushered from one to another. This meant I could find time to reacquaint myself with the environment.

My first visit was, naturally, to the Brynmor Jones library. When last looked it was undergoing a major refurbishment, with the result that scaffolding and dust sheets were visible on several floors while others were closed off entirely (the lift doors would open to reveal just a blank white wall barring one’s disembarkation. Four years on the work had been concluded and the library resembled the lovechild of a business-class departure lounge and a luxury hotel. There were even moulded metal water fountains just beyond each set of lifts.

Having finished browsing the collection I went back outside to join a guided walking tour of the campus. Our guide avoided covering many specific details, preferring instead to point out generic landmarks and walking routes that could apply to the majority of students. I then went to the Middleton Hall for a lecture about the student experience. In the tall chamber of curved wood and distant spotlights (perhaps resembling a cinema more than a lecture hall), we were shown a film about the weekly routine of an average student, narrated by a recent graduate. He was keen to emphasise the wide range of sporting activities and social venues available, as well as highlighting Hull’s City of Culture status this year.

The lecture finished just before midday, so I headed to the Chemistry block for the start of the course-specific afternoon events. Whereas four years ago one could simply press a contact button on the exterior door to alert the receptionists and have it opened, I now find that it is accessible only by card. The students conducting the afternoon events (themselves stranded on the doorstep) explained that the reception had been relocated to another building, and indeed I saw that the reception office had seemingly disappeared altogether.

After an extensive buffet lunch (featuring the triangular sandwiches, loose crisps, large jugs of juice and trays of flapjacks which only ever seem to appear in this specific situation) we were given a tour of the complex – our guide (Dr Mike Hird) explaining that the really dangerous experiments were kept on the top floor – and shown the £300,000 Nuclear Magnetic Resonance scanner. At a smaller lecture hall downstairs another faculty member (Dr John R Williams) talked us through the timetabling and content of the course, as well as his techniques for retaining information.

Our last activity was molecular modelling, guided by one of the PhD. I have dealt with model kits before, but these were different, coming out of small plastic bags and being generally more fiddly. We were asked to make the most complicated hydrocarbon we could manage (I ended up with 2,3-dimethylbutane.), then to model glucose and fructose (I ran out of oxygen atoms, and had to cannibalise the alkanes for hydrogen.), then to react them together as if for a dehydration.

When all this had finished we returned to the entrance hall for a formal goodbye from the faculty. Dr Williams wished me well in my studies – a somewhat paradoxical encouragement given that he knew Hull would most likely be my insurance choice – and I made my departure.

Four down, one to go.

Yours, Robin.