THE GROVE PRIMARY SCHOOL, Claremont, Cape Town.
Sir William Herschel / Sir John Herschel / Herschel arms / Afrikaanse blasoen
Arms registered at the Bureau of Heraldry, Certificate No 514, on 6 January 1972. The blazon reads:
Arms: On a pile reversed Azure, between 2 trees proper, an obelisk Argent; on a chief Azure 3 mullets Argent.
Motto: Spes in arduis.
About the arms:
The most significant charge (placed on a blue pile) is the obelisk which stands in the middle of the entrance courtyard at the school. Quite properly, the obelisk is silver in the arms, whereas the actual monument is in a variety of shades of stone, mostly pale.
The inscription on the obelisk, which appears in English, Afrikaans and Latin on different faces, reads:
HERE STOOD
FROM MDCCCXXXIV TO MDCCCXXXVIII
THE REFLECTING TELESCOPE OF
SIR JOHN F. W. HERSCHEL, BARONET,
WHO DURING A RESIDENCE OF
FOUR YEARS IN THIS COLONY
CONTRIBUTED AS LARGELY BY
HIS BENEVOLENT EXERTIONS TO
THE CAUSE OF EDUCATION AND
HUMANITY AS BY HIS EMINENT
TALENTS TO THE DISCOVERY
OF SCIENTIFIC TRUTH.
——————
ERECTED MDCCCXLI.
The dates given in roman figures are 1834 and 1838, being the years of Herschel’s residence, and 1841, the year the beacon was erected.
During his residence here, Herschel recorded the locations of 68 948 stars in the southern skies, and was made a baronet[1] on his return to Britain.
The school stands on the site of Herschel’s house, Feldhausen, in which building it was founded in 1885. The house also bore the name The Grove – hence the currrent name of the school. In it early years it was sometimes called the Feldhausen School, but was also at times known as the Beechey School, from the name of a long-serving principal, Mr Beechey, who retired in 1923.
The street on the eastern side of the school (the side away from the mountain) is Feldhausen Road. A street in Claremont named for Herschel is Herschel Road. However this street is not close to the school: starting opposite St Saviour’s Church (the Anglican parish church on Main Road) it heads diagonally up the hill towards Wynberg, and where it crosses the former municipal[2] boundary into Wynberg it becomes Herschel Walk.
The three silver stars (in heraldic terms, mullets) represent the stars so carefully observed by Herschel.
These arms replace the school’s previous badge, illustrated at left, which showed three silver trees placed 2 and 1 on a blue field, representing a grove.
The shield has a thin outline in white – a frequent usage of badgemakers, employed to differentiate the shield from the blazer, which often has the same colour. In other words, it was probably not intended to be a border or demi-border.
Retained from the earlier badge are two trees (not identified as being of any particular species), rather than three, which appear in natural colours (brown bark, green leaves), rather than the silver (white) of the old badge.
In Britain (and in Germany), when a blazon states that “a tree” appears in a coat of arms, an oak is usually meant, but the leaves of these trees are ovoid and elongated.
The motto translates as Hope in adversity, and is unchanged from the earlier badge.
Sir John Herschel and his family:
John Frederick William Herschel, born 7 March 1792 at Observatory House, Slough, in the English county of Berkshire, was the only child of the German-born astronomer Frederick William (Friedrich Wilhelm) Herschel and Mary Pitt.
Herschel senior, born 15 November 1738 in Hannover,[3] was the son of an army musician. Like his father, Friedrich played in the band of the Hanoverian Guards, but following the French occupation of 1757 he escaped to England and earned a living by copying music, then becoming a music teacher, performer and composer. In 1766 “he was appointed organist of a fashionable chapel in Bath, the well-known spa”.[4]
After reading Robert Smith’s Harmonics, which dealt with the theory of music, William[5] turned to A Compleat System of Opticks by the same author, “which introduced him to the techniques of telescope construction and whetted his appetite for viewing the night sky”.[6]
Realising that he wanted to study not only the Sun, Moon and the familiar planets – as other amateur astronomers at the time were doing – but also more distant objects, he took to making his own telescopes, purchasing the best lenses available and grinding his own mirrors. In due course his telescopes were superior to those at the Greenwich Observatory, and his strongest had a magnifying power of 6 450 times.
He was assisted at Bath by his brother Alexander and sister Caroline who had joined him from Hannover.
In 1781, Herschel came upon an object which was not an ordinary star, and which proved to be the planet Uranus.
Introduced to the Royal Society by his friend Dr William Watson jnr, he was awarded the Copley Medal and elected a fellow. Through Watson he was also awarded a royal pension of £2 000 a year by King George III.
Herschel then moved his household to Datchet, near Windsor Castle in Berkshire. In his work as an astronomer (using ever more powerful telescopes) he was able to conclude that the nebulæ, which until then had been thought to be composed of a luminous fluid, were in fact composed of many bright stars.
The Herschels moved to Old Windsor in 1787 and in ’88 to Slough, to a house which came to be called Observatory House. William would spend his nights observing the stars, employing a watchman on cloudy nights with instructions to wake him if the clouds cleared. Caroline would spend the daytime summarising the results of his work.
In 1786 his neighbour and friend John Pitt died, and in 1788 William (then aged 50) married Pitt’s widow, Mary. Although he planned to move into the Pitt house, Mary wisely chose to move into Observatory House.
William was knighted in 1816 for his contributions to science. He had produced three catalogues listing 2 500 nebulæ and star clusters (previously only 100 milky patches had been identified) and catalogued 848 double stars. He published 70 papers which included studies of the motion of the solar system through space and in 1800 the discovery of infrared rays.
Herschel’s son John Frederick William (born when William was 54 and the holder of a personal appointment as Royal Astronomer to King George III) struggled with ill health all his life. Sent to nearby Eton College at the age of eight, he was promptly removed by his mother (who had seen him involved in a fight) and sent for a private education.
He entered St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1809, and there became a friend of the mathematicians Charles Babbage (inventor of the first computer) and George Peacock (later also a theologian).
In 1812 John was Senior Wrangler at Cambridge. Also in that year he, Babbage and Peacock founded the Analytical Society of Cambridge to introduce Continental calculus methods into English practice, replacing Sir Isaac Newton’s symbological system with that of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
Following his submission of a mathematical paper to the Royal Society in the same year, John Herschel was elected a fellow in 1813. In the same year he took first place in Cambridge University’s mathematical examinations.
Advised by his father to become a clergyman, John instead began to study for the Bar in London. In 1815 he applied for a professorship in chemistry at Cambridge, narrowly missing the appointment. Later that year he became seriously ill, and was forced to give up his legal studies. He returned to Cambridge to teach mathematics, but in 1816 went home to Observatory House (finally leaving Cambridge) to assist his father in astronomical work.
John continued to make important contributions to chemistry, the physics of light, and mathematics. It was as a mathematician that he was awarded the Royal Society’s Copley Medal in 1821.
In 1829 John was among the founders of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Working with James South (later Sir James), John compiled a catalogue between 1821 and ’23 which, published in Philosophical Transactions, earned them the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1824 and the following year the Paris Academy of Sciences’ Lalande Prize. This was their only collaboration.
John travelled extensively in Europe, visiting scientists, during the 1820s, and was away in 1822 when Sir William died on 25 August.
From 1824 to ’27 John was secretary of the Royal Society, and in 1827 he was elected president of the Royal Astronomical Society.
In 1825 he turned his attention to nebulæ, and in ’26 his studies of double stars led him to “the very important problem of measuring the ‘parallax of the fixed stars’, which is the apparent shift in angular position of a given star as viewed together with its neighbour or against the background of the sky; a shift caused by the Earth’s revolution around the Sun”.[7]
Following Sir William’s death, his sister Caroline moved back to Hannover, where she lived a further 25 years. In her retirement she prepared a catalogue of the 2 500 nebulæ and star clusters her brother had discovered, and in 1828 the Royal Astronomical Society awarded her its Gold Medal.
In 1829 John was married to Margaret Brodie Stewart, daughter of a Presbyterian minister, by whom he had a large family. In 1831 King William IV made him a Hanoverian knight.
Following his mother’s death in 1832, John felt free to undertake a long postponed voyage to the Southern Hemisphere. He first completed the revision and extension of his father’s catalogues, which were published in 1833, and in November of that year Sir John and his family left aboard the Mountstuart Elphinstone for the Cape of Good Hope. He took with him a large reflecting telescope for observing faint nebulæ, similar to his father’s favourite instrument.
John held no official position at the Cape, and he arrived in the colony at about the same time as his friend Thomas Maclear, newly appointed His Majesty’s Astronomer at the Cape. They collaborated closely for four years.
The Encyclopædia Britannica describes Feldhausen as “a Dutch farmhouse six miles southeast of Cape Town”. Here John “spent four years of intense scientific activity”,[8] making the most of the relatively clear skies of the Cape Peninsula.
By the time of their departure in March 1838, he “had recorded the locations of 68 948 stars, amassed long catalogs of nebulæ and other stars, described many details of the Great Nebula in the constellation Orion, as well as the Magellanic Clouds – actually two galaxies visible only in the Southern Hemisphere – and observed Halley’s Comet and the satellites of Saturn”.[9]
“In addition, his descriptions of sunspot activities and his measuring of solar radiation by means of a device he had invented contributed to the development of systematic studies of the Sun as an important part of astrophysics.”[10]
F G E Nilant writes in the Standard Encyclopædia of Southern Africa: “Using an instrument of his own design, the astrometer, for comparing the brightness of a star with a reduced image of the full moon, he founded objective stellar photography.”
John also devised an instrument for measuring heat radiation, the actinometer, experimented with solar cookers.
Nilant notes: “He made many sketches of flowers and, using a camera lucida, produced numerous sketches of scenery. He took some part in the work of Maclear on geodetic surveying and tidal observations, and was active in the establishment of a meteorological committee in Cape Town.
“With John Bell, Secretary to the Governor, and John Fairbairn, schoolmaster and newspaper editor, Herschel proposed a bold scheme for a state system of education in the Cape. Their memoranda provided material for an official dispatch by the Governor in 1838, and Herschel’s influence was probably decisive in the almost immediate adoption of the scheme and the subsequent appointment of James Rose Innes as first Superintendent-General of Education for the Cape, with a staff of 12 teachers.”
His discoveries at the Cape formed the main basis for the southern part of Dreyer’s New general catalogue of nebulæ and clusters (first published in 1888).
Following his return to England, he was created a baronet in Queen Victoria’s coronation honours list.
Sir John also heard about the pioneering photographic work of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and himself became involved in photography, producing a photograph of a solar spectrum in colour. He discovered “hypo” as a fixing agent for photographs, and introduced the use of the terms “positive” and “negative”.
In 1840 the family moved to Collingwood in Kent, where Sir John worked on Outlines of Astronomy (for educated laymen) and Results of Astronomical Observations, Made during the Years 1834-38 at the Cape of Good Hope (published 1847). When this work was complete, he devoted his spare time to translating the Iliad.
Despite the burden on his health of his written work, Sir John also sought public appointments, and in 1850 was made Master of the Mint. Other work, including preparations for the Great Exhibition of 1851, forced him to spend more time in London and also affected his health. In 1854 he suffered a nervous breakdown, and in ’56 he was forced to resign from the Mint.
Following further work on star catalogues, he died at Collingwood in 1871.
The village of Herschel in the Eastern Cape Drakensberg was named after him when it was founded in 1879.
Herschel coat of arms:
A Herschel family coat of arms appears in the book Motley Heraldry,[11] but there is a bit of a mystery attached to it.
The text (appearing below a poem) states that these are the arms of Sir John Herschel, but for two reasons I suspect that the arms were in fact granted to his father, Sir William, and subsequently inherited by Sir John.
Firstly, the symbol in the chief is that of Uranus, which was discovered by William Herschel. Secondly the shield has no indication that the arms belong to a baronet – properly, Sir John’s arms should from 1838 onwards have had a small inescutcheon or canton of the red hand of Ulster.
The poem reads:
Herschel, who scanned the firmament with hope,
And a home-made reflecting telescope,
The planet Uranus to Earth revealed,
And set its lustrous symbol on his shield.
The arms are blazoned:
Arms: Argent, on a mount vert a representation of the forty-foot
reflecting telescope with its apparatus proper; on a chief azure the
astronomical symbol of Uranus irradiated gold.
Motto: Coelis exploratis.
Afrikaanse blasoene:
Die skoolwapen mag in Afrikaans so geblasoeneer word:
Wapen: Op ’n punt van blou tussen twee bome in hulle natuurlik kleure ’n gedenknaald van silwer; op ’n blou skildhoof drie vyfpuntige sterre van silwer.
Leuse: Spes in arduis.
Die driehoekige blou wapenfiguur word ’n punt genoem omdat dit in die Nederlandse wapentradisie uit die skildbasis uitsteek, anders as in die Engelstalige tradisie, waar dit uit die skildhoof uitkom. In die Engelse blasoen word daar dus gepraat van ’n “pile reversed”; met ander woorde dit is vanuit die normale Britse posisie omgekeer.
Die blasoen van die familiewapen mag so vertaal word:
Wapen: In silwer, op ’n skildbasis van groen ’n voorstelling van die
veertig-voet weerkaatsende teleskoop met sy apparaat in hulle natuurlike
kleure; op ’n blou skildhoof die sterrekundige simbool van Uranus in goud, goud
bestraal.
Leuse: Coelis exploratis.
