Cheshire Heraldry Web Journal

This one made me really smile!

I noticed on ebay this morning that someone in the USA is attempting to sell The Observers Book of Heraldry by Charles MacKinnon of Dunakin for the princely sum of $22.00 (approximately £11.27) on a Buy It Now option. The seller appears to be specifically targeting UK buyers and is offering shipping to the UK at an additional $10.30. So, if you live in the UK and you are daft enough to buy this book from this seller it will cost you a total of $32.30 (approximately £16.54).

The ebay entry is headed ” SCARCE The Observers Book of Heraldry UK Coat of Arms 1966″.

Scarce!!??? It may be scarce in the USA but trying to sell one to the UK market is like taking coal to Newcastle. Every antiques fair I’ve ever visited has been awash with these little books and most are offered for sale at 99p!

If you live in the UK and you’re prepared to pay sixteen quid for one of these books drop me a line - I’ll sell you one for fifteen quid including post and packing and donate my profit to charity.

Time has been a little tight this week so I haven’t had the time to jot down the happenings at the AGM last Saturday but in brief here goes:

The Committee was re-elected en-block as follows:

Officers:

Chair  Mr. Harold Storey

Hon. Treasurer Mr. Denis Cranston

Hon. Secretary Mrs. Rutha Titterton

Programme Secretary Mr. John Titterton

Committee:

Miss M.K. Gilligan

Mr. D.G. Richbell

Mrs. M. Vaughan

After the AGM John and Rutha showed us a small selection of their “Goss” armorial ware specifically collected for its Ashbourn coat of arms. We then had a report from Mike Thompson on his recent trip to London to present the Badge of the Royal Observer Corps to the RAF.

[Photographs courtesy of the ROC Association]

Mike, the Badge and Peter Owen (from RAF News)

The following is a report first published on the ROC Association web site [My thanks to them]:

On Tuesday18th March a group of former ROC members met at the Hard ROCk Café for coffee before moving on to the RAF Club a hundred yards away, where we had been invited to attend the presentation of an ROC Badge to the club by Mike Thompson, a former member of 16 Group, 16 Post Poynton.

On entering the RAF Club and being directed to the Cowdray Lounge bar we were welcomed by Peter Owen the General Manager and Secretary of the Club, and offered wine or soft drinks.

Mike then gave an excellent talk on the history of the ROC and the reasons why he felt that the ROC Badge should be on display within the RAF Club. He then made the presentation of a framed ROC Badge to the Club, along with an ROC 50th Anniversary Commemorative Plate and a special version of the ROC Squadron Print of the wartime Spitfire, ‘Observer Corps’ ‘EB-Z’.

ROC Squadron Prints of the Spitfire were also presented by Mike to AM Cliff Spink, AVM George Black and Roy McDowell.

Peter Owen announced that the club would provide drinks and buffet lunch in the lounge. This very generous offer was very much appreciated by everyone present.

We were all very proud to be at the presentation, and felt a debt of gratitude to Mike for bringing his idea to fruition.

The Badge will be on display in the Badges Corridor, which is covered from floor to ceiling with paintings of RAF squadron badges and other units.

H.R.H. the Duke of Rothesay is due to unveil the new gates at Glamis Castle today and a splendid example of workmanship they are. It’s just a pity that no one checked the correct Scottish version of the armorial bearings of the late Queen Mother before embarking on the project to feature them on the gates.

The arms look wonderful and they are a super example of heraldic craftsmanship but unfortunately they are H.M.’s English armorial bearings!

The Scottish version of her arms show the English quarterings and the Scottish quarterings transposed (the Scots one first) and should have a unicorn and a lion as supporters. The Scottish version would also be more likely to show H.M.’s Thistle rather than Garter.  Below is an image of H.M.’s hatchment courtesy of The St. Andrew’s Fund for Heraldry to illustrate what her Scottish arms should look like:

Fast approaching is the Annual General Meeting of the Cheshire Heraldry Society to be held at the usual time and venue on Saturday 19th April.

Details can be found on the Society’s web page:

 http://cheshire-heraldry.org.uk/society

See you there.

I am always pleasantly surprised when I come across any armorial connections with Cheshire and this week has proved no exception when, whilst emblazoning the arms of the Gunpowder Plotters for a PowerPoint presentation I am preparing, I found that the family of Wintour quartered the arms of both Keveliok and Lupus in the arms recorded in the Visitations of Worcestershire for the year 1569.

Quarter 7; Azure, three garbs Or [Keveliok]

Quarter 8; Azure, a wolf’s head erased Argent [Lupus]

In addition, quarter 5; Gules, a lion rampant Or, is recorded in the Winter (Wintour) achievement as belonging to Dabigney (d’Aubigny Earls of Arundel); this is also the coat of Randolph Gernons, fourth Earl of Chester.

Quite an achievement!

Robert Wintour was executed on 30 January 1606 at St. Paul’s Churchyard, together with Sir Everard Digby, John Grant and Thomas Bates. On the scaffold, he was quiet and withdrawn, and did not speak much. Although he appeared to be praying to himself, he did not publicly ask mercy of either God or the King for his offence.

Robert’s brother, Thomas Wintour, was executed on 31st January 1606  at Old Palace Yard, Westminster, sharing the scaffold with Ambrose Rookwood, Robert Keyes, and Guy Fawkes.

I have recently been searching through my old copies of “The Coat of Arms”, the (what used to be quarterly) magazine of The Heraldry Society, for an article I intend to mercilessly plagiarise to form the basis of an illustrated talk (credit of course will be given to the original author), when I came across a rather clever advertisement for Guinness in the July 1958 issue. I thought you might like to see it and so reproduce it here:

First off, I would like to say that I thoroughly enjoyed my monthly visit to the Cheshire Heraldry Society Lecture on Saturday even though I was suffering from the onset of a cold. The lecture was given by the Chairman of the society, Harold Storey and it was patent to see that not only was he knowledgeable on his hobby of collecting bookplates but also extremely enthusiastic. We were pleased to be shown numerous photographic slides which represented but a tiny fraction of his collection; a collection which began over fifty years ago when, after reading a chapter on the hobby in Lynch-Robinson’s Intelligible Heraldry, he thought that as there couldn’t possibly be anyone else collecting bookplates, he might as well be the first!

He soon learned that not only wasn’t he the first, he was also a long, long way behind the real enthusiasts …. indeed, in the early days of his collecting, he was concerned that the cost of sevenpence ha’penny ( a tuppence ha’penny stamp, plus another enclosed on a stamped addressed envelope for the anticipated reply and then yet another on a thank you letter to those who had sent him a plate) might break the bank!

Judging by the size of his collection, not only wasn’t he put off by the cost but I think he may well have caught the others up by now.

When we are out and about, attending lectures or just generally observing what heraldry is to be seen, we shouldn’t always accept at face value and without question, what we see. Amongst the many examples of bookplates shown by Harold, I noticed one which, to me at least seemed to be rather strange in the way the label, denoting that the plate belonged to an heir apparent, was displayed. I questioned the chosen method of display and one of the Society’s long standing members “strongly disagreed” - Harold kindly allowed some debate to take place but I am afraid that a combination of the heat of the room and the imminent onset of a heavy cold coupled with a respect for the member who challenged my view, meant that I simply did not have the will to press forward my argument and as a consequence I think that I may have failed to make my point at all clear.

On the basis that I am feeling a wee bit better and declaring that of course I will allow a right of reply if my views are once again challenged, I re-state my case here for all to see.

I regret that I don’t have an image of the bookplate in question but it showed the cadency mark of a crescent (second son) upon which was displayed a label. I illustrate a “generic” example of what I saw below:

My instinct was that this was not a proper use of cadency and that this particular choice of display was wrong. It is my view that once an English armiger chooses to use a cadency mark to denote where he stands in the pecking order of the family, that cadency mark then becomes a permanent part of the arms; it therefore seems logical to me that his heir apparent ought to use the label in exactly the same way his cousin, who is heir apparent to the undifferenced arms, would.

Unlike all the other cadency marks, which are permanent, the label is not permanent and its function is to boldly bebruise the arms of the father during his lifetime.

Once an armiger has decided to use cadency marks to mark his place in the family he has in effect created an entirely new set of arms; the arms of a cadet branch of the family. It is a perfectly proper rule, though proven to be unwieldy in practice, to place one cadency mark on top of another to denote, say, the third son of a second son of the house. To see a martlet on top of a crescent would be perfectly proper but to include a label in this scheme, is, in my view at least, silly.

Once the second son has created his new coat of arms thus:

His heir apparent should use a label thus:

In sum, I do not think it at all appropriate to use a label as a minor mark of cadency upon another mark of cadency.

The Chairman of The Cheshire Heraldry Society, Harold Storey, will be giving this weekend’s lecture on his hobby of collecting bookplates.

Details of time and venue can be found on the Society web page.

The badge of the Society was designed by Lesley Holt.
The blue lion is from the Macclesfield arms, the sword from the Chester arms  and the garb on the lion’s neck is to indicate Cheshire.

When I last visited Macclesfield to attend a Cheshire Heraldry Society lecture I took a photograph of the entrance to Macclesfield Bus Station, for no other reason than it features, as do many of the bus stops in the area, the pseudo-armorial logo adopted by Cheshire County Council.

Now I don’t actually dislike this logo, indeed to an armorist its origins are quite plaint to see, but it doesn’t sit well with me simply because it pretends to be heraldic but isn’t. The County Council has a perfectly likable coat of arms which is described on their own website as “one of the most beautiful in England” so why, I wonder, did they consider it necessary to turn it into a logo? Worse still, their arms are not “Azure, a garb Or” as the logo would pretend to nod towards, and which is in fact the coat of arms of Grosvenor, but are in fact “Azure, a sword erect between three garbs Or“.

Cheshire, as a county, may be inextricably linked with the Grosvenor family but Cheshire County Council is not the Grosvenor County Council and it is doubtful if it could ever be considered proper for a County Council that has arms of its own to use the arms of the Grosvenor family.

Why have I embarked on this rant?

Well, the logo reminded me that for Cheshire County Council the end is indeed nigh. The Government in its wisdom has announced that the six district councils and the county council in Cheshire will be abolished and replaced by unitary local government.
There were two proposals for unitary government in Cheshire:

A single Cheshire Council with local decision making or two unitary councils (City of Chester and West Cheshire Council and East Cheshire Council). The Government have decided to create two new unitary councils in Cheshire.

There will be a lot of upheaval in the transition, all no doubt with the aim of saving money. A small, and possibly insignificant plea from this armorist is that the two new unitary authorities have the inclination to petition for armorial bearings anew. I am not hopeful.

Indeed I fear that even if the inclination is there, unless some imaginative herald finds a way to transfer the arms of Cheshire County Council by way of Royal licence to one of the new authorities, those arms so rightly described as “one of the most beautiful in England” may well find themselves consigned to the dustbin of history. That will be a pity.

 It is impossible to proof read your own work!

I’ve been preparing a talk for The Cheshire Heraldry Society and in doing so I have created afresh the images I will need. Looking back on the early images I have done for the Cheshire Heraldry web site, even I can see how much I have improved! Why, I wonder, did I decide to use grey for Argent/silver? I also spotted one horrendous mistake in the emblazonment of Clive or Clyff of Hurley [Huxley]. I don’t know why but in the second quarter I emblazoned a fess cotised Gules when I should have emblazoned a bend cotised Gules.

Clive or Clyff of Hurley
Arms: Quarterly of six coats -
1 and 6 Argent on a fesse between three wolves’ heads erased Sable as many mullets Or.
2. Ermine on a bend cotised Gules three crescents Or. [Huxley]
3. [Sable] three garbs [Or]. [Styche]
4. Gules, a lion rampant Or between three crosses formee fitchee Argent.
5. Quarterly Argent and Sable four cocks counterchanged.

1. Crest:  On a mount Vert a griffin passant Argent, ducally gorged Gules.
2. Crest: A wolf’s head erased quarterly per pale indented Argent and Sable.  

Incorrect version:

Correct (and improved) version:

Like a good wine, I’m improving with age!