Uncle George Remembers VII

Uncle George wrote about his life to amuse his family and descendants. The extracts here were all published in The Coat of Arms, the journal of the Heraldry Society. I might have read his memoir as a family member but actually did so because the current York Herald found it for me, unsurprisingly as he is an editor of the CoA.

“Young, handsome and proud of mien, an Indian Prince wanted to see his grandfather’s Coat of Arms which had been recorded in the Book of Indian Princes’ Arms in the College of Arms. It was a fine manuscript volume, containing the Arms of most of the Princes of India who attended the Delhi Durbar in 1877. I showed him the beautifully illuminated picture of his grandfather’s Arms, which he studied for a while with the deepest interest. He then explained to me the rhyme and reason for the various symbols depicted in it, some of which seemed very war-like, and went on to tell me about his family history, which dated back several thousand years, he averred with pride.

“My first ancestor, the founder of my family,” he told me in a hushed voice as if he were disclosing information of the greatest secrecy and significance, “was born from a lotus flower, and as he emerged from its sacred petals he was brandishing a scimitar in each of his little hands and shouting, “Slay! Slay! Slay!.”‘

Not everybody’s idea of how their baby should be born, I thought. I did not dare ask him for a fee.

Mr Shifty (not his real name, but he looked as if it should be) was a lawyer who called on me one day on behalf of a client of his who was a lady of means with social aspirations. She wanted, he explained after some beating about the bush, to enhance her social status by obtaining a peerage for her husband, and was prepared to pay me £30,000 if I would fix it. “Wrong shop!” I told him with regret, and explained that the College of Arms did not deal in such merchandise. I suggested that he try elsewhere – perhaps not a million miles from Downing Street. When I heard some months later that the lady’s husband had indeed been ennobled, I was really rather shocked. I knew enough to know that, in a transaction of this kind, the sum involved would be very much greater than what he had offered me. Peerages, however, were cheaper in Lloyd-George’s time and he may have been thinking of that.

From the cases which I have just described it can be seen that some of my clients were a good deal more rewarding than others. The best client I ever had, and certainly the most rewarding, was the one who permitted me to marry one of his daughters.

I then held the office of Somerset Herald and it transpired that my future wife was a descendant of a previous Somerset Herald, of Queen Victoria’s reign, James Robinson Planché. He was of a Huguenot family and, besides being a herald, was an antiquarian author and a playwright of considerable virtuosity; his plays are still performed today. The chambers in which I worked daily had once been his and on ceremonial occasions I bore the discomfort of the self-same tabard which had no doubt once tortured him.

Five or six years after the 1939 war was over I found myself poised for a great leap forward in my career. I was to become Garter Principal King of Arms, which is the top rung of the ladder in my profession. I had been a pursuivant and then a herald for nearly 30 years – which includes of course being a herald in RAF uniform for part of that time – and was, therefore, according to reasonable supposition, well enough qualified for the job. But Garter’s position vis-à-vis heralds of humbler degree is like a king vis-à-vis his peers – he is first among equals but what he says usually goes, if you will pardon the expression, and like a king too he moves on a higher plane and breathes more rarefied air than they do both in relation to the Powers That Be and the Public, as I shall to some extent be able to demonstrate to you in the pages which follow. I was therefore, over a period of eighteen months or so, carefully groomed for stardom by the then existing Garter, Sir Algar Howard, who was preparing to retire to Howard country in the north, and by the Garter before him, Sir Gerald Wollaston, who had long since retired to a less demanding post, about which pair of Garters I have already spoken elsewhere. When the day eventually came for my inauguration I was summoned to Buckingham Palace to be received there in audience by King George VI.”

(To be continued)

The Hon, Sir George Bellew, KCB, KCVO, KStJ,FSA.