As the Bercows unveil their boastful coat of arms, the vulgar truth about family crests



The Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, has just spent £37,000 of taxpayers’ money having his portrait painted, and having a coat of arms drawn up. I am sure that in these straitened financial times, you will all agree that this was a very much-needed expenditure.



But even if you do not, the Speaker certainly wins first prize for the most politically correct motto of any coat of arms yet devised: All Are Equal, with the words punctuated by pink triangles to acknowledge his support for gay rights.



Some people will want to add to that motto — in the bitingly satirical words of George Orwell’s Animal Farm — ‘and some are more equal than others’, for it costs in the region of £3,000 to get the heralds at the College Of Arms to come up with a coat of arms.

To the ladder born: Speaker Bercow's new coat of arms

Bercow’s shield displays a ladder, representing the fact that he climbed up from lowly origins (his father was a taxi-driver) and four balls, a nod to his love of tennis.



Absent from the coat of arms are four money-bags, representing the four years that Bercow was top of the parliamentary league-table for claiming more expenses than any other MP. Also absent are the knives which many MPs on all sides of the House would like to stick in his back — or indeed in his front.



Nor does he have what in heraldry are called supporters — that is, the figures on either side of the shield, which in his case might include a golden-haired wife with mouth wide open shoving her foot in it. (Her motto should be Exsolve Me Claram — I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here.)



A politically correct coat of arms seems a bit of a contradiction in terms. I prefer the chutzpah of Elizabethan pirate and brilliant seaman Sir John Hawkins, whose coat of arms consisted of a shield with a seashell representing his seafaring life and a rampaging golden lion pacing the seas — signifying Hawkins and British sailors making money on the Spanish Main.



And if you doubted how he had made his money, you had only to look at the crest at the top of the shield: a black person tied up in ropes. Hawkins was a slave trader and, in those days, proud of it.



Margaret Thatcher, a heroine in the Elizabethan mould, has her shield supported by a sea-admiral on the one hand, and Sir Isaac Newton on the other, a reference to her use of the Royal Navy to reclaim the Falkland Islands, and her earlier career as a scientist.

Taking root: Golden acorns for Kate and the Middletons

When Kate Middleton, as royal-bride-to-be, was granted the right to a coat of arms for her family, the design included three acorns — a hardly bashful reference to the fact that the three Middleton children would grow into great oaks, a symbol of England and strength.



Kate’s mother, Carole, does not miss out either. Though there are no aeroplanes to acknowledge her days as an air stewardess, she takes centre stage with a dramatic gold chevron which pays heed to her maiden name, Goldsmith.



You do not have to be princess or a lord or a lady to be eligible for arms. All you have to do is apply to the College Of Arms in England, or to the Court Of The Lord Lyon King Of Arms if you are in Scotland.



Having taken your £3,000, a herald will then help you to make a symbol of your achievements in life by inventing . . . well, by inventing an achievement, for the very word is a term in heraldry which refers to the various components of a coat of arms — the shield, the helmet, the crest, the motto and so on.



The former Labour Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine, who scandalised taxpayers by spending tens of thousands of pounds on wallpaper for his apartments, has three holly leaves on his shield, either to symbolise his evergreen virtues or his prickly character. The fact that one of his supporters is a fish presumably alludes to his love of the Scottish West Coast, rather than to his legendary drinking tastes.

Often the motto is a pun, so the Labour peeress and champion of hunting, Baroness Mallalieu, has ‘Evil be to him who speaks evil’ — but in French this reads as something very like her name: ‘Mal a lui qui mal en dit.’



Twang dynasty: Guitar and Liver bird for Macca

The late wit and philosopher Tory peer Anthony Quinton chose his motto from Voltaire — Dare to doubt. Some of the mottos tell the story of the coat-of-arms’ bearer’s life — ‘Vixi Scripsi’, or ‘I have lived, I have written’ is that of Ruth Rendell, the great crime novelist.



The motto often used to be in Latin, or in Norman French, but it can be in any language. The former Labour fund-raiser Lord Levy’s is in Hebrew, which must have posed problems for the heralds, since Hebrew reads from right to left, and so much of the symbolic importance of a coat of arms depends on what is on the right (known as dexter) of the shield, and on the left (sinister)



The Chief Rabbi got round this problem by being one of the few new peers — together with Roy Hattersley, Philip Gould, the late pollster and architect of New Labour, and Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury — who has not applied for a coat of arms.

Captain Fantastic: A football and piano keys for Elton John



Those from the world of showbusiness are far less retiring. Sir Cliff Richard’s coat of arms, crowned with mysteriously ageless leaves, and crested with a song-bird, has a cross at its centre, presumably a reference to the singer’s religious belief. The motto is ‘Sing a New Song’, which some people might think was a bit ripe, coming from a man who still belts out his Fifties hit Living Doll at the drop of a hat.



Elton John’s has piano keys and a football, with the Spanish motto ‘El tono es bueno’, meaning both ‘Elton is good’, and ‘the sound is good’. Paul McCartney’s arms sport a guitar and a Liver bird, the symbol of Liverpool, with the motto: ‘Ecce Cor Meum’ or ‘Behold My Heart’, the title of an oratorio he wrote when his wife Linda was dying of cancer.



I have been puzzling over Lord Sugar’s coat of arms. At the top is the crest — a cockerel (emblem of Tottenham Hotspur football club, of which he used to be chairman) holding some ripe sugar-cane standing on some sugar lumps. Geddit? The supporters are owls — not for wisdom, surely — wound round with film tape. On the shield are two spurs, another reference to Tottenham Hotspur.

Crowing: Cockerel and sugar cubes symbolise Sir Alan

The blank screen in the middle of the shield is presumably a reference to his fortune as the pioneer of Amstrad computers, rather than to disgruntled television viewers switching off The Apprentice, the programme which made him a household name.



Sugar’s motto is ‘Tute id fac’ — Latin for ‘I made it all myself’. But woe betide you if you try to invent your own, unofficial coat of arms — as Posh and Becks did, with a crest of a swan described by the College Of Arms as ‘cartoonish’. Or worse, if you use someone else’s arms, as when Mohamed Fayed put up the arms of the Ross clan chief over the gates of his Scottish castle, Balnagown.



The owner of the coat of arms, David Ross of Ross, who lives in a modest modern house in the Perthshire village of Stanley, made Fayed dismantle the elaborately crafted fixture.



For generations, people have been using coats of arms as a way of promoting themselves, and projecting their personalities on to the world. Shakespeare is probably making some obscure joke about his own family’s desire to better themselves with the ludicrous figure of the butler Malvolio in Twelfth Night, who appears in yellow stockings cross-gartered — the very colours of Shakespeare’s father’s coat of arms.



The bard’s own arms, for which he applied in 1602, have the pun of a spear on the shield. Ralph Brooke, the York herald who sketched out the design for this coat of arms, described it snootily as being ‘for Shakespeare ye Player’. The old curmudgeon clearly thought it was inappropriate for a mere luvvie playwright to be applying for arms.



In the same way, today’s heralds must surely smile to themselves as they draw up coats of arms for the show-offs and showbiz personalities, the shady businesspeople and vainglorious politicians who today apply for the honour.

