The badge of Coventry City Football Club is very closely related to the city of Coventry coat of arms. The coat of arms in turn has some interesting aspects to it. These include biblical elements, history, and stuff of legend. Firstly Coventry City FC dates back to 1883, when some workers of the Singer’s bike factory thought they would start up their own soccer team. After all, clubs were springing up all over the place from institutions such as churches, colleges, schools, cricket, and rugby clubs. So why not a bike shop? Apparently, they were not much cop but that did not matter to much as the rules at the time were a bit cloudy, to say the least. So up to a point, they would use their own rules and that helped a lot! They also would have only been able to play games against other factory sides.
When Singer’s started up it was pretty much jumpers for goalposts as there were no real posts, nets or pitch markings like halfway lines. The art of tackling was called hacking, that’s the taking out of the man instead of the ball. This approach died out towards the end of the 1970s, but we do still have the modern-day equivalent of this brains in your boots approach but I had better not mention any names, or the names of the referees that allow them to do go unpunished, even with the so-called added help of VAR. Singer’s started to win some local cups and became semi-professional in 1894.
At the turn of the century, football was becoming bigger in stature and all clubs wanted to grow with the sport. Singer’s being no different thought it time for a change of name and in 1898 Coventry City Football Club came into being. 1899 saw a move to Highfield Road which was their home until they moved into the Ricoh Arena. In1908 Coventry was admitted to the Southern League. Coventry’s nickname comes from the 1960s, and the Jimmy Hill revolution. You know the fella, early Match of the Day pundit and presenter, big chin with a funny beard on it. In the 1960s Jimmy was manager at Coventry and they gained promotion twice with him at the helm. He changed the club, the team and the kit, dressing them in sky blue, hence the nickname “The Sky Blues”.
I think it best if I explain the city of Coventry’s coat of arms first. (PIC 1) As I mentioned earlier the club’s badge borrows a lot from the arms. The arms were granted in 1345 and the new arms are identical to the old with the exception of the supporters which were added in 1959. In the shield we have an elephant carrying a triple-towered castle. The elephant is representative not only as a beast so strong that he can carry a castle full of armed men but also as a symbol of Christ’s redemption, a sinless sacrifice for the sins of the human race. This would be a ransom to equal the sinless life that Adam lost, that sent mankind into meltdown. The elephant is also seen as a dragon slayer in medieval thinking. There is a long-forgotten (I wonder why) tradition of dragon slaying in the area and Coventry is believed to be the birthplace of St George, even though he was actually born in Turkey. He was, it is told in fabled forums, a dab hand when it came to a bit of dragon slaying. Legend has it and believe me it is as true as Father Christmas, that in the 11th Century a dragon ran amok in a town called Silene, which lay in a country called Libya. In order to appease the dragon, the good people of Silene fed it sheep and when the sheep ran out they turned to human sacrifice. This was done fairly in a democratic vote on who gets eaten, and just as we would today firstly choose a member of the privileged class, they chose the king’s daughter. This meant there would be no queen in line of succession and nobody wanted to take her place. Well, you can imagine the fabled confusion and gnashing of teeth, but the princess was saved in the nick of time by George, as he was known then, as the canonisation did not come till later. Then he went on and slew the dragon with his lance. The dragon died, the princess became queen and what of George, what became of him? Well, George was sainted by the Catholic Church for killing the dragon that didn’t really exist, but that has never stopped the Catholics from saying something is true when it obviously isn’t, and from there he went on to become the patron saint of the greatest of Britons. His flag the George Cross flies patriotically from the windows of houses the length and breadth of the country, stopping only where Hadrian’s Wall begins, whenever the World Cup begins.
The shield is coloured red and green, the traditional colours of Coventry that date back to 1441. On the crest is a wild cat guardant, or sideways, looking at the viewer, is considered to symbolise watchfulness. The helmet is that of an esquire, an esquire is a young man attending a knight, and helmets are used as a base for crests atop of arms. The supporters as I mentioned earlier were granted in 1959 and are an eagle and a phoenix. The eagle is that of Leofric, the husband of Lady Godiva, the naked sort on the horse who rode through Coventry. She did not do this for a bet but legend has it to gain a remission of the oppressive taxation that her husband imposed on his tenants. Sounds like a good enough reason for you to get naked. I wonder if Mrs Boris would consider it. The phrase “Peeping Tom”, originates from later versions of this legend in which a man named Tom watched her ride and was struck blind. The eagle also represents ancient Coventry. The phoenix is symbolic of the new Coventry reborn from the ashes of the old. Coventry was almost completely destroyed by German bombers during WWII. The aid raid on Coventry on the night of 14th November 1940, was the single most concentrated attack on a British City in the Second World War. Following the raid, Nazi propagandists coined a new word in German, Coventrieren, meaning to raze a city to the ground, they were good at that sort of thing, and so Churchill gave them Dresden to think about what they were doing. (PIC 2) The motto “CAMERA PRINCIPIS” translates as, The Prince’s Chamber, and refers to Edward the Black Prince.
The Coventry City FC badge has the elephant and castle, the eagle and the phoenix. (PIC 3) In addition the elephant stands on a football, no prizes for guessing the significance there. Above and below in the scrolls is the club’s name, and was lifted from a slightly earlier badge. (PIC 4) In the 1960s a crest appeared on matchday programs but not the shirts as they were still using the coat of arms at the time. This appears to be the birth of the elephant on the ball motif, and the three turreted castle does look a bit like a candelabra. (PIC 5) The name Coventry originated from the word, Coventre and is derived from the two words Covent, which stands for Convent, and Tre, which means a settlement. The Anglo-Saxon Nun St Osburga was known in the history books to have founded a nunnery there in AD 70 and a nunnery is a convent. The same rule applies to Covent Garden which was also a convent. So Coventry means a settlement full of Nuns. You would not want to have been sent there either as in the saying, because being sent to Coventry may mean getting the silent treatment today but it originates from the English Civil War. Back then Royalists who were rounded up were taken prisoner and sent to Coventry as it was a Parliamentarian stronghold and they were not known for their prison reforms. You can get 32,500 into Coventry’s stronghold the Ricoh Arena, but Coventry is having to share St Andrews with Birmingham at the moment due to a falling out with the cauliflower eared Wasps Rugby Club with whom they have to share the ground. Coventry’s rivals include Aston Villa, Birmingham, West Brom and Wolves. For more on Coventry City then strip off, saddle up and trot on to www.ccfc.co.uk
