Today's Stories from our Past
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Today's Stories from our Past
E11 – The Watts Family Crest
Curious about your family's past?
Discover the fascinating story of the Watts family crest, featuring a greyhound and a golden arrow—a symbol born from a dramatic saga involving survival and colonial legacy. This episode dives deep into the history of family crests, untangling their significance in linking individuals to their lineage and societal standing during the Victorian era.
Our hosts unpack the difference between a family crest and a coat of arms while sharing the intertwined stories of ancestral identity and social ambition. The discussion navigates through the life of William Watts, illustrating the complexities of colonial influence and personal enrichment. The episode further explores the philosophy behind the Watts family motto, revealing insightful reflections on generosity and community spirit.
Listeners will also encounter quirky Victorian customs that underscore the era's fascination with status and reputation. Each story adds depth to the conversation about how identities are crafted, sustained, and sometimes fabricated through symbols like family crests. Join us as we draw connections between intrinsic family values and the ever-evolving concept of social climbing.
Whether you’re familiar with your ancestry or just curious about the oddities of history, this episode offers thought-provoking insights along with a sprinkle of amusement. Tune in, share your family stories, and let’s connect as we celebrate the rich tapestry of our past! Subscribe now and join our journey through time.
Contact us at todaysstories101@gmail.com.
Ah, so the Watts family crest is a rabid dog with a golden arrow shot through its foot.
Speaker 2:Yep, that's about it. G'day, I'm Peter.
Speaker 1:And g'day, I'm Greg.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Today's Stories from Our Past, a podcast about a history of Australia from about 1800 onwards.
Speaker 1:So what are we going to chat about today?
Speaker 2:Well, in the last episode we discussed John Watt's family in England to get some background about John's family and why he came out to Australia. But there was something mentioned in that story that grabbed my interest In the last episode when we were talking about John's father.
Speaker 3:There was a report that said in part to have exercised his usual great ability and skill to the uttermost. The wood is from the yew tree. At the top of the back appears the crest and motto of Mr Watts, on other parts the words presented to Thomas Watts, escarades by the members of the Frampton Mechanics Institute, and also the Latin inscription Premio Gratitudinis Largito Fruitur. The whole, with other suitable ornaments being carved in the wood and altogether forms a splendid specimen of Mr Butt's superior workmanship.
Speaker 1:Yes, that says the Watts family had a family crest and motto. Is that what grabbed your attention and do you know anything about it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's it. I've been down a bit of a rabbit hole looking into the family crest since then. That presentation happened in 1853 and there's an earlier reference to a crest in 1839. The Watts family obviously had a family crest back then and ever since it has appeared on various family items. I've got a set of silver cutlery with each fork and spoon having the crest imprinted on it, and there are other descendants who also have items with the crest inscribed on them. I hadn't taken much notice of it before, so I decided to find out.
Speaker 1:Family crests very posh. Does that mean you're a descendant from British nobility or something?
Speaker 2:Hardly. There's nothing noble about us.
Speaker 1:Aha, so you've got a coat of arms. Is it just one of those things you can buy on the internet, a descendant from British nobility or something? Hardly, there's nothing noble about us. Aha, so you've got a coat of arms, is it just?
Speaker 2:one of those things you can buy on the internet A nice printout of something with your surname emblazoned on it. No, we don't have a coat of arms. I guess that I'd better start by explaining the difference between a coat of arms and a family crest. A coat of arms is something that goes back to the days of chivalry, with knights in shining armour. You had to get approval from the monarch to have a proper coat of arms. On the other hand, a family crest is a small symbol, a bit like a company logo. If you had a coat of arms, the family crest would be included somewhere near the top. Coat of arms, the family crest would be included somewhere near the top. This symbol was used in various ways, for example, engraved on silverware or carved into furniture. You can be sure that any of those coat of arms from the internet are completely fake. However, our family crest isn't. It's been around for a long, long time.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, you'd better tell me all about your prestigious family crest.
Speaker 2:I guess that I'd better start by giving a description of the crest. As there's a whole industry around coats of arms and family crests in England, it might not surprise you to know that there's a book that lists them all. I found the 1905 version of Fairburn's Book of Crests of the Families of Great Britain and Ireland. It gives a description of the Watts Crest.
Speaker 1:Great, but what does it say?
Speaker 3:Well, it actually describes several Watts Crests, but the one that resembles ours is as follows A greyhound segent argent, supporting with the dexter foot an arrow or barbed and flighted of the first.
Speaker 2:Translation Sergent means a beast sitting on its haunches, argent means silver or silver-white in colour, or means gold or golden in colour, and dexter means to the viewer's left. Translating that to plain English, it's a side-on view of a greyhound sitting on its haunches with one leg extended and the paw of that leg is holding a golden arrow.
Speaker 1:Okay, that doesn't sound very regal.
Speaker 2:No, family crests aren't meant to be all that regal. As I said, they're a bit like a company logo. You use them to brand things that belong to the company, in other words, to the family.
Speaker 1:OK, so do you know where the Greyhound logo comes from?
Speaker 2:Yep. After some digging way down that rabbit hole, I found its origin. It goes back to one, William Watts. There's a whole wiki page about him.
Speaker 4:Wiki says William Watts, 1722, 4th August 1764, was a British official with the East India Company. He was involved in the overthrow of the last independent ruler of Bengal, leading directly to the consolidation of company rule in India and his own personal enrichment. Through his wife, begum Johnson, he had notable descendants, including a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Speaker 1:Now, that sounds impressive.
Speaker 4:Yeah, then wiki goes on to say Watts was born about 1722, a son of William Watts of London, an Academy Master, and his first wife, mary Hills. On 24 March 1749 in Calcutta, william married Frances Altham, née Croke, a well-connected widow. She is known to history as Begum Johnson and lived most of her remarkably long life in Calcutta, which in 1772 became the de facto capital of British India. This connected William Watts to the governors of Fort St David and of Calcutta. Watts was chief of the Khosan Bazar trading post of the East India Company. Robert Clive made Watts the company's representative to the Nawab's court at Murshidabad. Clive engaged Watts to work out a secret plan for the final overthrow of Siraj-ud-Daula and to install a favourable ruler instead. Watts thus set up contact with the dissident emirs of the Murshidabad court, including Mir Jafar, raid-ul-ab and Ya-Lutuf Khan. Watts played a role in forging the grand conspiracy against Siraj-ud-Daula which led to the Battle of Plassey. On 5th of June 1757, he visited Mir Jafar and obtained his Oath of Allegiance.
Speaker 1:So Clive of India used William Watts to create havoc amongst the different Indian rulers. And this is the British East India Company at work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it sure is, and William was rewarded for his efforts.
Speaker 4:Wiki says In recognition of his services, Watts was given £114,000 from the Nawab's treasury and made the governor of Fort William on 22nd June 1758, in place of Roger Drake, who had deserted the fort when it was attacked and captured earlier that month. This had been the location of the Black Hole of Calcutta on 20th June 1756. Four days later, Watts resigned in favour of Robert Clive to return to England. On his return to England, he built the South Hill Park Mansion, which lies to the south of Bracknell, Berkshire. The building is now an arts centre.
Speaker 1:Okay, William Watts was rewarded for his efforts. Did he live a long and happy life in jolly old England?
Speaker 2:Unfortunately for William, no Wiki says In June 1764,.
Speaker 4:He was in the process of buying Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire but died that August. The sale was completed for his son, Edward, who became Lord of the Manor. Watts died in August 1764 and is buried in the Watts Vault in Hanslope Parish Church. His memoirs of the revolution in Bengal was published in the year of his death.
Speaker 1:Impressive fellow. Do you know where the crest came from?
Speaker 2:Yep, there's a story or maybe it's a legend about how the design of the crest came about. While in India a rabid dog attacked William Watts, he was only saved from a mauling or worse death by rabies by the action of a bystander who fired an arrow through the animal's paw, thus saving William. As a sign of his good fortune, william had the representation of the hound with an arrow through its paw incorporated into the family coat of arms. So the greyhound on the crest is not holding an arrow. The arrow is shot through its paw.
Speaker 1:So you're saying that you have a family crest and it's a rabid dog with an arrow shot through its foot?
Speaker 2:Yep, that's us.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, that explains it. The wiki says that he is buried in the Watts Vault in the Hanslow Parish Church and that he bought Hanslow Park in Buckinghamshire. Did you look into that?
Speaker 2:Yep. With some quick googling I found pictures of the parish church. It has a spire and on top of the spire is a wind vane. The wind vane is in the shape of the family crest, greyhound with the arrow, and it's gold plated.
Speaker 1:Great, so you really are descended from a famous person.
Speaker 2:Well, I hate to say this, but my journey down the rabbit hole led me to disappointment. I went to Ancestrycom and created a family tree for William Watts. That was easy, as other descendants of his had already done all the hard work. I traced his tree back a long, long way. William Watts' line goes back to Scotland, where the family is first recorded, but I haven't been able to find any connection at all between William Watts of Handslope and my Watts family of Gloucestershire. We don't seem to be related at all. So what's going on here? Well, here's my theory.
Speaker 2:In England during the Victorian era, there was a very strict social ladder upon which you were placed. Typically, you were born into your situation and it was difficult to move up the ladder. A you were born into your situation and it was difficult to move up the ladder. A noble was born into the nobility, and that was that, unless you happened to be lucky enough to marry a noble or have a lot of money and buy your way into the aristocracy. So one way up the ladder was to accumulate wealth, which could be difficult to do in a society with a strict, rigid order. The Watts family, as we found out in the previous episode, had accumulated wealth, but they had new money, not old money, and not enough to become aristocrats. So I hate to say this, but I think the Watts family crest is a bit like buying that family coat of arms on the internet.
Speaker 2:I think that sometime in the early 1800s the Watts family of Frampton-on-Seven, who were an upwardly mobile, middle-class family, decided that they needed to improve their status by adopting a family crest. After all, they were the nouveau riche. There was already a Watts family crest available, so they simply grabbed it. I think this is just their way of trying to climb up that social ladder. Can they just do that? Well, probably not. In the preface to Fairburn's Book of Crests they discuss the issue of the right of a person to use the crest.
Speaker 5:They say, the question of the right of any particular person to the crest to which a claim is made depends upon proof of dissent from the original grantee. Such proof often amounts to a highly controversial discussion, and it has seemed to us that we were not called upon, for the purposes of the present work, to adopt any such standard, rather otherwise, because the omission of a crest in consequence of a lack of proof of pedigree would create a hindrance to the use of the book by those handicraftsmen who need to refer to its pages.
Speaker 2:So I think that this is a roundabout way of saying that, like those people who buy a coat of arms on the internet, Fairbairn's Book of Crests gives no guarantee that the user of the crest had the right to use it.
Speaker 1:So in 1839 or earlier the Watts family were probably just pretentious social climbers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so, but there is something else that I should add. When families have a crest, they often have a family motto. As we heard in the previous episode, the Watts family had a motto. The Latin translation of their family motto is the giver enjoys the reward of gratitude.
Speaker 1:Well, that's a bit cryptic. What does it mean?
Speaker 2:I think this is a good way of looking at it. Imagine a little girl is looking at a big bundle of balloons that a man at a fair is selling. She clearly wants one, but her mother says they don't have enough money for a balloon.
Speaker 2:A stranger hears this, buys a balloon and gives it to the child. The little girl's face lights up with joy. She says thank you so brightly and sincerely that the stranger has a smile on his face and a bounce in his step all day long, just knowing he made the child happy. Her gratitude is his reward. I think this motto completely suits the way in which the Watts family operated in their village. So, even if they purloined the crest, they have adopted a motto that is really reflected on them. I thought for this history lesson we might look at some of the stranger things that happened in the Victorian era, that period of rigid class structure when the Watts family was climbing up the social ladder.
Speaker 1:Okay, what have you got?
Speaker 2:For starters, or should I say as an appetiser, coming together over food has been something that humanity has done from the beginning of time. In the grand scheme of things, at least from a western perspective, nothing is off limits when it comes to our dining habits, but, whether through availability or squeamishness, or ethical issues, there are a great many foodstuffs that various people, for whatever reason, across the world, simply won't eat. In the past, though, special clubs have sought to change that approach. The Gluttons Club and the Ichthyo Phagos Club were two. The mantra of these clubs was to sample all the world had to offer in terms of food. It led to some truly bizarre dining experiences.
Speaker 2:Charles Darwin, the man behind the theory of evolution, was a keen eater of anything exotic. As a student in Cambridge, darwin presided over the glutton club, which met weekly to seek out and eat strange flesh. They tried hawk and bitten that's a wetlands bird but the gluttons chickened out after digesting a particularly stringy old brown owl, deciding to concentrate their studies on the effect of the alcohol in the wine that went down with their meal. Instead, darwin didn't abandon his fascination with strange flesh during his travels aboard the HMS Beagle. He purportedly ate armadillos and an unknown very large rodent, the latter of which he found particularly delicious.
Speaker 2:Some clubs specialised, such as the Icthyophagus Club. They dined on the strangest sea creatures they could find. Then there's John Gould. He was a 19th century businessman, publisher and obsessive bird collector who left a lasting legacy in the world of ornithology with his folio volumes of superb colour-plated illustrations of birds, admittedly painted by his wife, including many previously unknown Australian bird species. Gould gave a taste rating for almost all of the Australian birds that he found, then killed and ate. He particularly liked Wonga pigeons.
Speaker 1:Somehow I don't think that giving a taste rating for wildlife would win many friends today.
Speaker 2:No. Now, continuing on the animal theme, Women would wear stuffed birds on their heads. Taxidermy wasn't just for some hunters Women all over Europe and the USA wore hats that had taxidermied birds as part of them. Apparently, tucking a feather into their hat wasn't enough for the Victorian fashionista. Some of the images that I've seen of this practice look as if a whole bird is simply sitting on top of the wearer's head. The demand was so extensive that a conservationist estimated that as many as 67 species of birds were threatened with extinction due to this terrible trend.
Speaker 1:Oh, fashion can lead to such strange outcomes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, indeed it can. Now, staying on the taxidermy theme, some artisans if that's the correct term would create a whole tableau using taxidermied animals set up in a human scene, for example, a whole family of stuffed guinea pigs dressed up and sitting around a miniature kitchen table. The most famous artisan here was probably Walter Potter, who lived from 1835 until 1918. He was an English taxidermist noted for his quote anthropomorphic dioramas featuring mounted animals mimicking human life. He displayed these at his museum in Bramber and Sussex. The exhibition was a well-known and popular example of Victorian whimsy For many years, even after Potter's death.
Speaker 1:Gee, that sounds really techy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and here's an even stranger Victorian oddity Some wealthy Victorians kept people in their gardens as living garden homes. Garden homes are already pretty weird as far as I'm concerned, especially when people have extensive collections of them or they carry them around the world with you. If you lived during Victorian times and were affluent enough and perhaps a little bit insane, you would keep an old man as a sort of a pet in your garden. These hermits were often forbidden from grooming themselves and would live in nooks and crannies in the garden. In most cases, they weren't even allowed to speak.
Speaker 1:Now, that's just plain weird. Okay, well, that's a bit of a distraction. I think that it's time now to get back to the story of South Australia.
Speaker 2:Yep. In our second to last episode we discussed John Watt's background and in particular his father and his family values. One of the reasons why John's father was happy for John to go to South Australia was that his old friend, dr George Mayo, was already in the colony. So in the next episode we'll talk about Dr George Mayo.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thanks for listening so it's goodbye from me and it's goodbye from me, thank you.