Recreating an old UK Government Coat of Arms

When the NHS was launched in 1948, this leaflet was sent out to everyone. I wanted to recreate the coat of arms that was on top to print on a t-shirt.

Sadly, the scan available is too low a resolution for most modern purposes. Wikipedia has vector logos of most of the coats of arms - but not this one.

In desperation, I emailed the College of Arms. They sent me back the most delightful LMGTFY I've ever received.

Thank you for your e-mail which Rouge Croix Pursuivant has received as Officer in Waiting for the week. The Royal Arms you sent depict the Crown as used by Kings George V and VI. In 1953, The Queen chose to use St Edward’s Crown (which has a dip beneath the orb on the top, as opposed to having a semi-circular top). Government Departments use the Royal Arms without the Crest (the lion on top of the crown). If you google “British government coat of arms” - images, you will see what various departments are using, either the open line drawing shown under “commons.wikimedia”(line one far right) or the more stylised black versions (as used by the FCO) which may reproduce better when photoreduced to a tiny size. Nothing here is digitised, the College never having been publicly funded. If another Department cannot supply you with a high quality version, I can either send you a new drawing or scan in a previous one. In either case, I will have to charge for it – hence my advice on self-help above!

Using a reverse image search, I discovered a stock photo site had a copy.

Annoyingly, they've slapped a watermark over it and seem to be claiming copyright. Which is nonsense as the same image is freely available from The Internet Archive on Flickr! It's from the British Museum's Annual Report of 1925!

There are several version of this image available

With a little bit of editing, I turned it into a black-and-white version, which has cleaned up pretty well.

That's... OK. Not brilliant. Just fine. Even with better scans, there's a limit to what can be recovered from a 100 year old print.

I thought about trying to recreate it using the Wikipedia vector version as a template:

But there are some challenges:

• The "Honi soit qui mal y pense" is in lower case on the 1925 version.
• The lion's tail is significantly different.
• The crowns are a different style.
• The "Dieu et mon droit" are laid out differently.

So I think I'll just stick with my cleaned up version. If you think you can do better - or if you have a higher quality scan - please drop a note in the comments box.