NOTES ON A SMALL CITY

from The Bath Magazine October 2022

WHAT’S ON

Richard Wyatt

Columnist Richard Wyatt investigates Bath’s coat of arms, considers its archive status and proposes that it is more actively used in the city. Along with a shake-up of the mayoral system –‘it’s time to modernise’ he cries!

Scattered around the city centre you come across old iron lampposts bearing what looks like a coat of arms. This is a sad, faded remnant of when Bath was a city council in its own right. It held this civic position from 1889 when it was made a county borough, until the demise of Avon County Council and the arrival of the B&NES authority in 1996.

The imposing Georgian building you see on the High Street is the Guildhall, built by Thomas Baldwin back in the 18th century. This replaced a 17th-century model which itself replaced an earlier Tudor structure. Apart from the Council Chamber, the Guildhall also houses the offices of the Mayor of Bath, currently, Cllr Rob Appleyard. The Mayor is just a figurehead now –an annually elected ambassador for Bath, he is a civic leader with no real power, but nonethless a rallying point for those with pride in their city.

I have often wondered why Bath didn’t have its own flag to fly above the Mayor’s residence and I have recently discovered that it does, and that it proudly bears the city’s coat of arms.

I went to see Mr David Dixon at Minuteman Press – himself a former councillor and now Honorary Alderman – who very kindly ran me up a little number from his archived image of the Bath flag.

The motto – Aquae Sulis (waters of Sulis) – is the Roman name for Bath. Here is a quick journey through what is on the flag, from bottom to top. Firstly a lion and a bear hold up the shield and stand on oak branches with acorns –these are linked to King Bladud, the legendary founder of Bath, and the man feeding his pigs acorns when they ran off to discover the steaming mud and thermal waters of the hot springs.

The shield depicts the town wall, the mineral springs, the River Avon and the sword of St Paul, one of the patron saints of Bath Abbey, which is also the city’s parish church. The lion and bear also display the crossed sword and keys, representing both patron saints. St Peter, who held the keys to the kingdom of Heaven, shares the protection of the Abbey with St Paul. Above them is the crown of King Edgar, the first king of all England, and this is held aloft by the arms of St Dunstan who performed his coronation in Bath in 973 AD.

The flag is now regarded more as ‘the Mayor’s flag’ as there is no longer a city council. Bath is now part of a unitary authority which does not display the crest on its documents or website. The Mayor does still have a pole on the Guildhall roof, which has recently been flying the flag of Ukraine.

I think it would be nice if the Mayor’s standard was hoisted, at least on Mayor Making Day. Let me explain. The office of mayor is shared among the councillors who have wards within the city of Bath. They are called the Charter Trustees and there are 28 of them.

It’s a bit of an inner circle and, no doubt, there is keen competition among them to see who will be next in line to wear the Mayor’s ceremonial robes. They hold their annual meeting in the Abbey and that’s where they formally elect Bath’s next First Citizen.

I wonder if it isn’t time to open out this office to people who are not councillors. Rather than an inner circle, taking it in turns, why not let the general public nominate people who have done much for the city and who are willing to be accorded the honour of voluntarily representing Bath for a year?

Draw up a shortlist that people could vote on. It’s a ceremonial role, so why should it go to an elected councillor who should be concentrating solely upon the job they were elected to do?

I haven’t got an official comment from B&NES, but I can tell you that the current view is that to be an historic civic ceremonial mayor there are certain criteria in place –including having been elected as a councillor and serving for six years on the parent council. The argument being that those who have served the city and its community could first become a councillor. So the general feeling is that the mechanism is already there.

I still think it’s time to modernise! What do others think?

By the way, the current Mayor’s flag is too tatty to hoist, so bearing in mind the strains on the civic budget, I am passing on the new one I had printed! Fingers crossed it’ll be flying high next year. n