The leg carries the badge

 
There are few greater signs of fealty than having one’s body tattooed with the badge of the institution that commands one’s loyalty…  Here we have a particularly good instance: this leg will carry the loggerheads-badge of Shrewsbury Town FC for many many years. 
Fans fought hard for the loggerheads badge when the club wanted to do away with it - and the fans won!
Curiously, the gentleman to whom the leg belongs is not alone in this type of homage. On summer days, when shorts are ubiquitous, one can spot quite a few of them in and around the club’s Meadow Stadium. 

It's interesting to note that, as well as the loggerheads motto Floreat Salopia (Let Shrewsbury Flourish), our man has the words 'Proud Salopian' tattooed too.  That phrase has its own, separate, but equally fascinating story...

This limb was photographed at The Prince Of Wales pub, a place where fans gather to celebrate their passion. Thanks to MC for the sighting.

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It's Loggerheads Day!

 

Today (May 2nd) is Loggerheads Day… at least, so far as Shrewsbury Town Football Club supporters are concerned.  It was on this day in 2015 that the Shrewsbury loggerheads were rightfully restored to the club’s badge, after a hiatus in which a rather ordinary lion had replaced them (Lord knows why!).

It only happened however because of a year-long and very loud campaign by fans (which was of course dubbed the Bring Back The Loggerheads Campaign). To their credit, the club’s owners listened, and then agreed with the fans. 

The campaign is remembered in a lovely poem, a framed copy of which is to be found in The Loggerheads Pub in central Shrewsbury.  It’s a funny pastiche on the stirring St Crispian's Day speech by the king in Shakespeare's play of Henry V.  It’s really clever.

The mystery is:  who was the author?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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