GOODWOOD
Formed: 1905; incorporated as municipality 1938, incorporating Goodwood, Townsend, Vasco and Richmond.
Additions: Elsies River 1944, Monte Vista 1946, Edgemead 1969.
Incorporated: into Tyger Valley Municipality, 1995; into Cape Town, 2000.
Division: Cape.
Magisterial district: Bellville.
Province: Cape (now Western Cape).
The arms were adopted by the town council and made official by Provincial Notice No 2626 published in Provincial Gazette No 2969 dated 1 May 1959. It does not seem as if they were registered under either the Protection of Names, Uniforms and Badges Act of 1935 or the Heraldry Act of 1962. They may be blazoned:
Arms:
Tierced in fess: 1. Argent, four tree of six leaves each, sable; 2. Gules, a
leopard passant gardant argent, spotted sable; 3. Argent, three pallets sable;
a cogwheel counterchanged.
Crest: Out
of a mural crown or, a palomino demi-unicorn issuant holding between its
forelegs a torteau.
Mantling: Argent and gules.
Motto: Procedo.
About
the arms:
The blazon is my own interpretation of the amateurish “heraldic description” used in the Provincial Gazette.
The illustration is taken from Goodwood and its History by Eric Rosenthal (1980).
The principal flaw of the description is that it does not acknowledge the division into three (tierced) and begins by describing the fess (the red band across the middle of the shield), then moving to the area “in chief” and then that “in base”.
The four trees are explained as being
representative of the original four townships – Townsend, Goodwood, Vasco and
The photograph at left shows how the “trees” were interpreted in renditions of the arms executed in metal and enamels and erected on plaques at both the town library and the civic centre: instead of trees, these images show flowers, outlined in black but with silver or white petals and leaves.
The leopard is curiously blazoned as “a South African tiger passant”, omitting the word gardant, which means that its face is turned towards the viewer. Passant means “walking”.
The word tiger is nonetheless significant: the early Dutch settlers at the Cape included a number of men who had served the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) in either India or the Malay regions (today Malaysia and Indonesia) and were familiar with Asian tigers (chiefly the Bengali, Peninsular [Malay], Sumatran and Javan subspecies of Leo tigris).
They spoke of the leopards (Leo pardus) found at the Cape, and notably in the ridge of hills lying east of Table Bay, as tijgers, so giving rise to the Dutch name for the hills, the Tijgerberg, or Tygerberg as it is written in Afrikaans and English.
To this day it is a frequent usage, especially among rural Afrikaners, to speak of leopards as tiers.
The explanation of the “significance” of the coat of arms (as it appears in Rosenthal’s book) states: “In fess the leopard, or South African tiger, is symbolic of the Tygerberg Hills, the background setting of the Municpality. The red background signifies courage.”
There is no explanation of the colouring
of the “tiger”, which is that of the snow leopard of the northern parts
of
Traditional heraldry had no leopard,
although lions that were shown gardant were sometimes called leopards, or lions leopardé. The three gold lions on red in the arms of
The heraldic tyger is a mythical
beast with a fearsome appearance, but the
The lower third of the shield is blazoned incorrectly as being “palis of seven argent and sable” – the spelling of paly is exceedingly strange, and since there are three black stripes on a white (or silver) background, the term paly is misapplied. These are three black pallets (small pales) on a contrasting background.
The term paly is used only of an even number of vertical segments – an odd-numbered division is treated as so many pallets.
The “significance” states: “In base the four silver
and three black vertical stripes represent the seven miles separating the
Similarly the arms of Bellville
feature a pale barry[1] of
12 pieces, also in black and white, symbolising the oldest recorded name for
the area where that town grew, namely Twaalfde Mylpaal (twelfth milepost) – it
lies 12 miles from
The description continues: “The cogwheel, while representing our industrial growth, is also symbolic of the industry and people of the town, the latter being predominantly working class.”
The colouring of the cogwheel is counterchanged – that is to say, the parts of it that are on the central pallet are white (silver), and the parts outside it are black. This is not reflected in the plaque version of the arms, which shows the cogwheel in pale blue – certainly not a heraldic colour usage, as there is far too little contrast.
The crest is odd because the unicorn, contrary to popular belief, is derived not from the horse but from the goat. This device treats the unicorn as a variety of horse, however, since its colouring is palomino (misspelled in the description as “palamino”). A note on colouring states additionally that the animal has black horn, mane and hoofs.
It holds between its forelegs a red roundel (a roundel gules), also termed a torteau,[2] which is tautologously blazoned as a “torteau gules”.
Despite being coloured and otherwise shaped like a horse, this beast does at least have cloven hoofs, as is proper for a unicorn.
A mural crown is often found as part of a municipal crest; it signifies municipal authority.
The description states: “The four original townships were developed by Messrs Joyce and McGregor, the township owners. The unicorn, from the arms of the McGregor, and the torteau from the arms of the Joyce family, arising from the gold mural crown, resting on an esquire’s helmet, is symbolic of a community which developed on and from lands owned by Messrs Joyce and McGregor.”
I have been unable to trace any McGregor family bearing a unicorn as either crest or charge (within the shield). This is not to say that there is no such thing – there could well be a branch of Clan Gregor that has a unicorn crest – but the clan chief and his principal relatives have for their crest a lion’s head erased, crowned with an antique crown.
(The term erased means ripped from the animal’s body – the line of severance is a rough one. An animal’s head neatly cut from the carcass has a straight line of severance and is described as being couped.)
Burke’s General Armory lists two other McGregor crests: a hand holding a dagger in pale proper and a pine tree eradicated proper. (Proper is the heraldic term meaning “in its natural colours”.)
Burke also lists four families surnamed Joyce. One of them, also named as Joice or Joys, has the arms: Argent, three torteaux in bend between two bendelets gules (a silver shield with three red roundels placed diagonally, between two diagonal red stripes).
Concerning the motto, the description has this to say:
“Procedo (Latin, meaning ‘I go forward’) denotes the steady progress and development of the municipal area in a progressive residential and industrial area.”
Following the official description is a note stating:
“The present Coat-of-arms was designed by Mr I Mitford-Barberton, ARCA, sculptor, an expert in heraldry of the Michaelis School of Fine Art[3] in Cape Town in collaboration with the Council’s town engineer and was adopted and approved vide Provincial Notice No 2626 published in Provincial Gazette No 2969 dated 1st May, 1959.”
Ivan Mitford-Barberton was an
accomplished sculptor, and was responsible for the leopard statue which stands
alongside Chapman’s
He also wrote, together with V
White, a book called Some Frontier Families, about early settlers in the
Previous
arms:
Before adopting the arms shown above, the town used a device rather amateurishly cobbled together in 1939, using gold stripes to outline the overly ornate shield and its subdivisions, and with the motto scroll looped through holes near the base of the shield.
The shield is divided into three
parts, more or less per pall inverted – not equally, but with the two upper
segments enhanced. The first segment is blue, and shows a white aircraft – a
four-engined propeller-driven South African Airways liner of the 1950s. This is
obviously a re-drawing of the aircraft earlier depicted. It represents the
Wingfield aerodrome, which served
The upper sinister segment is red and illustrates an oxwagon in brown and white above a green field.
The lower segment is green and depicts a steeplechase. The horse is brown with a yellow and red saddle, the rider is dressed in a red cap and shirt, white jodhpurs and black riding boots, the fencing white with red “emphasising lines” and the hedge in green and yellow. Below the fence is a pool of water in blue and white (amateurishly drawn). Below the steeplechase are five links of chain, the middle one circular, labelled the chain of unity, in gold, outlined in red.
The red-gold theme continues in the motto scroll, which has a gold inscription (the same Procedo as in the arms above) on red, with gold edging.
The crest is a springbok, garishly coloured in gold with brown horns and eyes.
The steeplechase was not only landscape heraldry –
a very degenerate usage – but inappropriate, since the races held at Goodwood
in
The oxwagon and the springbok were highly stereotypical images widely used by followers of the Afrikaner nationalist movement in the first half of the 20th century.
While the oxwagon as used by Boer farmers and
trekkers was developed in the days when the
The springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis) is an animal of the drier plains, and much used as a symbol by local authorities. The springbok in the “arms” of Goodwood was so badly drawn that Mitford-Barberton was obliged to point out that the real springbok had hooked horns and a white face and throat.
About
the town:
Goodwood, established in 1905, was named after the racecourse in England because its founders intended to make it a racing centre. However, after a course was constructed and one race meeting held on it, this idea was abandoned.
It lay along the old main road (originally
a wagon road) from
It was incorporated as a municipality in 1938, covering the townships of Townsend, Goodwood, Vasco[5] and Richmond, and in 1942 its area was extended northwards to the vicinity of the present-day N1 freeway.[6] Elsies River was added to Goodwood in 1944, followed by Monte Vista in 1946 and Edgemead in 1969.
The population of the town in 1971 was 19 000, all white. In that period it had more than 70 industries, mostly at Elsies River, including steel construction engineering, sawmills, and factories producing furniture, clothing, food products and earth-moving equipment, plus a motor assembly plant and a printing works.
Since the town grew up in the era
of segregation (until 1948) and apartheid (from ’48 onwards) the Coloured
population of
Although the municipality fell under the Chief Magistrate of Bellville, the town had its own magistrate’s court.
The railway line from
South of the railway line (and outside the
municipal area) lay the white residential area of
Also south of the line, and likewise outside the municipal area, lay the Goodwood Showgrounds, home of the Western Province Agricultural Society’s annual show. This area has now been redeveloped as a casino complex.
Somewhat further from the municipal area than the Wingfield aerodrome (and to the south-east) is the Cape Town International Airport, formerly D F Malan Airport.