Who owns all the swans? (and it's not the queen)

This instinct is most strong when the fact contradicts something that I previously assumed to be true, which is what happened to me this week. One of my regular fact providers, to call him my muse might be a little strong but you get the idea, claimed that, contrary to popular opinion a swan has never broken anyone’s arm with its wing. This is amazing to me!

Having spent a considerable proportion of my childhood messing about in boats I’ve always been terrified of swans for this very reason. I’ve always known what they were capable of doing to my poor defenceless arm. But apparently this is all a lie, quite possibly put about by swans themselves to get a bit of peace and quiet.

The other lie that was exposed in this fascinating swan based chat was that not all the swans in the country belong to the queen, again contrary to my previous assumptions. It's not strictly true that the Queen owns all swans in Britain.

Every year there’s something called The Swan Upping ceremony (more on that later) in which all the mute swans on the Thames are marked as belonging to the Crown or the Vintners and Dyers Livery Companies. After this the queen owns all the unmarked mute swans on open water but not any of the other kinds of swan. Doesn’t sound like she’s doing all that well on the swan ownership front to me.

So to swan upping then, which is pretty much as intriguing as the name suggests. As just explained the mute swans that live on the Thames are owned by either The Queen, the Vintners (they sell wine) or the Dyers (they dye stuff). To work out which swans belong to who in the third week of July swan uppers representing each of the three row up the Thames in skiffs, and catch the swans.

Family groups are rounded up and the signets given the same markings as their parents. Those caught by the Dyers are ringed on one leg, the Vintners swans get two rings and those caught by the Queen’s uppers are left unmarked. The process of ringing the swan’s legs is a fairly recent introduction, before which the Dyers’ swans received a nick on one side of their beaks, the Vintners’ on both.

If you’ve been thinking all the way through this column that ‘mute’ is a pretty odd name for a breed of swan then you’d probably be right. But as with most things there is an excellent explanation. Mute swans get their names from the ancient belief that they are completely silent for their whole lives yet will sing a beautiful song at the moment of their death.

Ovid, Shakespeare and Tennyson have all featured the swan song even though it’s always been widely agreed to be false. This, now unsurprisingly, is where we get the idiom ‘swansong’ in reference to a final spectacular performance or accomplishment.

Swans also give us the phrase ‘Swanning around’ although this seems to have less to do with the birds themselves and is actually thought to originate from WWII. It describes a tank moving apparently aimlessly across a battlefield like a swan swimming aimlessly about: supposedly the gun barrel is reminiscent of the swan’s long neck. I might be up for some swanning about myself actually after all that swan-based focus.

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