Powell and Genealogy

It is often said, as Powell’s father Lt-Col PLW Powell believed, that the study of genealogy is either boring or snobbish. Powell observed that:

My father found family history uncongenial to a degree. Regarding his own advent into the world as a phenomenon isolated from the main stream of human causation, he was not merely bored by genealogy, he was affronted. He possessed little or no sense of the past; still less curiosity about the circumstances of other people, living or dead.

By contrast, however, Hugh Massingberd has observed¹ of Powell himself that:

… he used to say, if there had been a Burke’s Bank Clerks he would have been as eager a customer for that as for Burke’s Landed Gentry.

In 1964 Anthony Powell proved his pedigree to the satisfaction of the Heralds at the College of Arms in London and thus was granted use of the ancient Powell arms:

Sable an eagle displayed argent beaked and taloned or as shown on the left.

Powell had earlier, in fact during World War II, been similarly granted use of a much later, Powell arms:

Argent a lion rampant sable, on a chief of the second three goats’ heads erased of the first.

However Powell must have done considerable additional work to prove his genealogical line further back in time to have been granted the right to use this simple and ancient Powell escutcheon.

Powell was for some fifty years an active member of The Radnorshire Society, contributing regularly to the Transactions of the Radnorshire Society as AD Powell.

Towards the end of his life he was (perhaps belatedly) in 1997 elected a Life Vice-President of the Society of Genealogists.

¹Hugh Massingberd;
AD Powell’s “pleasure in genealogical investigation”;
in George Lilley & Keith C Marshall (eds);
Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of A Dance to the Music of Time:
Proceedings of the First Biennial Anthony Powell Conference 2001;
published by The Anthony Powell Society, 2001.