A haven on the shore

I did not know this.

Wellington—the old incorporated municipality of Wellington—has an official coat of arms and flag. You can look it up on the Web to get all the official registration details, or if you want a better quality image than the newspaper can reproduce.

The coat of arms and flag have fallen by the wayside with amalgamation, but now that Wellington is celebrating its 150th, I say why not bring them out and display them proudly. It sure beats the alternative proposed by County staff—selling our Town Hall and Museum buildings.

How did we get to be so lucky? Well, although Picton beat Wellington to the punch in getting a coat of arms and flag in 1989 (we got ours in 1992), it so happened that the Chief Herald of Canada was one Robert D. Watt, who grew up in the County. Mr. Watt’s family on his mother’s side were from Wellington and had deep loyalist roots. So when approached he was quite sympathetic to the idea of creating a design with loyalist and Wellington connections.

Mr. Watt, who is now retired as Chief Herald, and who is a citizenship judge in British Columbia and who bears the honorific title “Rideau Herald Emeritus,” walked me through the imagery. The flag, which is also reproduced on the coat of arms, is a stylized “W” against the background of red and white Canadian colours. The three crowns are “loyalist coronets,” traditional representations of loyalist ancestry.

The coat of arms bears the motto “a haven on the shore”, a phrase coined by Mr. Watt himself as a nod to Wellington’s connection to water and to its earlier incarnation as a getaway from the big city, The mixed lion/fish characters are traditional in heraldry as well, and in this case represent both the lakefaring connection and the British connection. The helmet and cornucopia are both traditional heraldic symbols, and the horse sitting on top of the whole shooting match is a Hanoverian horse having a connection with the Duke of Wellington. It also serves a tip of the hat to Wellington’s agricultural roots.

The key to a good coat of arms, Mr. Watt told me, is to do it right because you only get one chance; and to make it simple, but striking and beautiful. Well for my money, he has succeeded. Just looking at the coat of arms and flag makes my heart flutter.

I understand that the Wellington and District Business Association plans to reproduce the flag for flying up and down the village later this year; and that the coat of arms could be reproduced on mugs and T-shirts. Mr. Watt noted, with a hint of tremor in his voice, that heraldic crests are not the sort of thing to be putting on underwear or sporting as tattoos, although he had every confidence that the commercial powers that be would exercise restraint.

Which prompts me to wonder. Obviously, the rudely stuck-out tongue logo of the Rolling Stones is owned by the Rolling Stones, and licensees pay for the right to use it. Did the County acquire all the proprietary symbols of the old Village of Wellington when amalgamation took place? If it did—and I acknowledge that we are not talking about the Rolling Stones, or Adidas or Coca Cola, but nonetheless a nice image that deserves to be reproduced—why the heck is it talking about closing the Town Hall and Museum when there is money to be made selling licensed products with the coat of arms or flag on it?

I would even—and I hope Mr. Watt will not roll over in his grave-to-be on this—go so far as to say “put it on underwear if it will sell”, if it will bring some money to the County’s coffers to forestall the sale of such wonderful old buildings. Who’s to know what the limit might be? With the Drake Hotel people having acquired the Devonshire Inn, what will stop the trendy Queen Street West crowd, who will now be starting to visit Wellington, from starting to sport hydration bottles and yogawear bearing the Wellington coat of arms? We would have started a trend that, as trendy people would say, could go viral.

And then we might actually be able to breath a sigh of relief, secure in the knowledge that our heritage buildings are safe again. At least until next year’s budget.

David Simmonds’s writing is also available at www.grubstreet.ca.