My Very Own "Heraldry Helper"

Some of you reading this will have already heard that last October, I lost my wife of 31 years, Jo Ann Appleton, née Armistead.

Indeed, it was her cancer diagnosis in August 2023 that called a sudden halt to our travel plans, and thus we did not go to Lund, Sweden for 2023's heraldic Colloquium, nor did we go to Boston, Massachusetts for last year's International Congress of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences.

This sudden change of travel plans (we had already made, confirmed, and paid for our travel plans to Lund and thence to Karlshamn, Blekinge, Sweden, where my great-grandmother and her ancestors were born and lived) has meant that I was not gallivanting off to distant places and taking photographs of the heraldry to be found there. And this cessation of new photographs of heraldry from hither and yon meant that, since I was continuing to write blog posts at a minimum to two per week, I was in danger of running out of pictures of heraldry to share with you. (I mean, you don't really want me recycling pictures from old posts, do you? I certainly don't!)

But then, while going through my computer files to see what new items I might have to share with you, I ran across a few dozen photographs of heraldry that Jo, whom I sometimes think of as my personal "Heraldry Helper," took, because she knew that if I hadn't seen and photographed them myself, I would have if I had seen them. Or if we were together, but I was driving (and thus couldn't get out my camera), or we were on a tour bus and she was seeing different things out her window than I could out of mine, then she'd snap pictures for me.

Her interests were in flowers and unique architecture, and I often took pictures of things that I knew she would be interested in, if for whatever reason we were not at the same place at the same time. Or, again, if what I saw out of my side of the tour bus was different from what she saw out of hers. So it wasn't just a one-way relationship. We looked out for each other.

Of course, if we were together (as in the photo above, from our time in London in 2014, above, then we each let the other take pictures of what they were interested in.*

* This sometimes led to some interesting observations when the photographs from our trip, hers and mine, were shuffled in together by date and time. During our trip to Florence, Italy, Jo noticed that though we were together, our photos were of such wildly different things (me, heraldry; her, flowers and architecture) that you'd be hard-pressed to believe that we were actually on the same street at the same time!

So for now, and for the next few posts, I'll be sharing some of the heraldry that Jo photographed for me. Today, it's the arms of the Municipal Borough of Acton, Middlesex, England, that she caught from one of those ubiquitous double-decker tourist buses there.

Please feel free to click on the image above to be able to zoom in and really see the depth and detail of this carved coat of arms.

I could go ahead and blazon the arms for you, but it's probably just as effective, if not more so, to pull a color version off of Wikipedia and share it with you here.

Acton mean "oak farm," hence the oak tree proper as the primary charge on the shield. The charges on the chief are the arms of Middlesex County Council (in the center) between an open book and a cogwheel for education and industry in the borough, respectively. The crest is an oak sprig (again, playing on the name of the Borough) issuant from a mural crown. And the motto, Floreat actona translates as "Acton flourishes."

Is it a truly great coat of arms? Well, no. I could, if I chose, find several aspects of it to quibble about. For example, the use of the proper oak tree to get around the fact that the green and brown tree on a red field breaks the Rule of Tincture ("Metal should not be placed on metal, nor color on color"). And chief adds significantly, perhaps too much, complexity to the whole. but I wasn't consulted during the development of this coat of arms, and it is hardly my place to tell anyone at the College of Arms how to do their job. So I will simply relax in the ability to have a photograph of this very identifiable coat of arms, taken by my Heraldry Helper because she knew I would want it.