The loggerheads of finance

 

Standing proud on the corner on Shrewsbury’s main square, the Salop Old Bank building is impressively stolid – as befits a bank!
The business had some pedigree: the Salop ‘Old’ Bank, set up in 1885, was the child of the already long-established Salop Bank (1812).

The loggerheads’ connection in this instance is in the institution’s bank-notes (which the bank issued themselves): the decorative motif on the left of the notes features the loggerheads.  The museum archives has a very good example of one of the bank’s £5 notes (SHYMS_N_2013_0017a).

Incidentally, this is yet another instance of a town politician associating himself with the loggerheads. Robert Burton, the bank’s main partner, had been town mayor for a while.

The bank didn’t last long, being taken over in 1907 and eventually falling into the hands of the Lloyds Banking Group – you can still see some arms carved into the side of the building.
But no longer is the building connected with banks. It’s now a jeweller’s.

+

To comment on this post, just use the Comments field down this page or email us direct.

To get an email alert into your inbox every time we make a new post (about once a week), just click 'Subscribe & Follow' (at the top of the column to the right on this page) and just fill in the form

Found in Huw's garden

 
Though the Romaldesham carvings would seem to be the oldest set of Shrewsbury loggerheads in existence (outside of documents and seals), there is another claimant.

The carving you see in the photo is likely a capital (head of a pillar) from an ancient town church. It is early medieval in age and was found in the Shrewsbury garden that once belonged to the antiquarian & author Huw Owen. (Owen doesn’t record what he thought it was).
It is now on display at Shrewsbury Museum.

Huw, who along with colleague John Blakeway was responsible for The History of Shrewsbury (1825), is also in Shrewsbury Museum, where a portrait of the pair has pride of place.  (See a detail of the portrait - showing Huw -, left).

However..., modern archaeologists (see the Salopian History report) want to say it is a loggerhead - which means it would predate the earliest solid evidence we have of loggerheads by over 200 years.

Hmm.  Could it really be a (single) loggerhead?
Maybe.

+

To comment on this post, just use the Comments field down this page or email us direct.

To get an email alert into your inbox every time we make a new post (about once a week), just click 'Subscribe & Follow' (at the top of the column to the right on this page) and just fill in the form

Heralding Ludlow

 
The newly refurbished Ludlow Museum features a display case with the costumes from the town pageant in 1934.

This one – simply labelled a ‘Herald’s outfit, in blue’ – carries the three loggerheads. There was no reason for a costume in a Ludlow pageant to carry the Shrewsbury symbol, so my guess is that the person who made it (they were all hand-made) was a Shrewsbury loyalist!
The maker also got the colours right – the main costume was in blue and the trims in yellow/gold.

These leopards are 'langued' in quite an extreme way - their tongues are very long indeed.

+

To comment on this post, just use the Comments field down this page or email us direct.

To get an email alert into your inbox every time we make a new post (about once a week), just click 'Subscribe & Follow' (at the top of the column to the right on this page) and just fill in the form

Lady Catherine & the loggerheads

The front cover of the first edition of Old Shropshire Life (1904) features the loggerheads, as you’d expect, even though these are the Salop loggerheads and not the Shropshire County ones.  They are not ‘langued’ either.

The book was written by the ‘minor author’ Lady Catherine Milnes Gaskell, who lived with her family at the grand house of Wenlock Abbey. They were one of the county’s leading families in the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

Catherine was something of a beauty, being sketched by the artist Dante Rossetti, but it was literature that inspired her. She wrote novels as well as profiles of the county and her life. Major novelists including Henry James and Thomas Hardy were frequently invited to stay.

+

To comment on this post, just use the Comments field down this page or email us direct.

To get an email alert into your inbox every time we make a new post (about once a week), just click 'Subscribe & Follow' (at the top of the column to the right on this page) and just fill in the form

A kerchief for Xmas

 

The Christmas Tree Festival at St Chad’s in Shrewsbury is always a welcome event. The town’s organisations all submit trees decorated to promote their various roles in the community.

Naturally the Shrewsbury Morris Dancers had to sponsor a tree, and naturally their loggerhead kerchiefs, as well as blue & amber coloured ribbons, were fully in evidence. 

+

To comment on this post, just use the Comments field down this page or email us direct.

To get an email alert into your inbox every time we make a new post (about once a week), just click 'Subscribe & Follow' (at the top of the column to the right on this page) and just fill in the form

Up to date street sign

 

In a previous post we noted that nearly all of Shrewsbury’s street signs are out of date, as they show the badges of the old Shrewsbury & Atcham Borough Council, which came to an end with local government changes in 2009. Shrewsbury then went its separate way from Atcham - and Shrewsbury Town Council was formed… with a revised badge.

Slowly, very slowly, the street name-plates are being replaced; to have the town’s own, new badge.  The designs of these newer loggerheads are more leopard-like than the old shaggy loggerheads of the S&Atcham days.

If you’re wondering what the red mark is where the mouth is, it’s a much-reduced version of the heraldic red-tongue.

+

To comment on this post, just use the Comments field down this page or email us direct.

To get an email alert into your inbox every time we make a new post (about once a week), just click 'Subscribe & Follow' (at the top of the column to the right on this page) and just fill in the form

Loggerheads in brown & yellow

 

After mentioning the way the Scouts' Shropshire logo features laughing-style loggerheads (see previous post), here are some more of the same - on the side of the Andy Miles Scout Centre at the West Mids Showground in Shrewsbury.  

The colours of the Scout Movement are brown & yellow, which is , I presume, why the loggerheads here are in those colours and not in their traditional colours of gold & blue. Earl Roger, who gave the gold & blue colours to Shrewsbury-Shropshire, may perhaps be turning in his grave!  (see our Earl Roger In Gold & Blue post)

+

To comment on this post, just use the Comments field down this page or email us direct.

To get an email alert into your inbox every time we make a new post (about once a week), just click 'Subscribe & Follow' (at the top of the column to the right on this page) and just fill in the form