All football clubs have home kits and away kits that they play in, even if the ones lower down the English Football League pyramid might not change them very often. Similarly, pretty much every club has a nickname that supporters use to refer to it, even if this can sometimes be quite simplistic. Liverpool are known as the ‘Reds’, for example, because of the red kit that the players wear in home matches. What not every club boasts is a motto, but Blackburn Rovers are one of the sides that definitely does have one. The question is, what is it and where has it come from?
The Blackburn Coat of Arms
If you want to get a sense of what it is that Blackburn Rovers Football Club has a Latin motto associated with it, you first need to look at the Coat of Arms of Blackburn itself. The Coat of Arms is made up of a shield that is silver or white, which is emblematic of the calico that Blackburn bees produce. In fact, the bees themselves have a prominent place on the shield, with one on the top and two underneath, all of which are in flight. The letter ‘B’, of course, is there to represent Blackburn. Between the three bees is a black wavy line, which represents the Black Brook upon which the town was built.
There are two gold fusils, which are diamond-shaped, at the top of the shield, coming from the heraldic emblem of spinning and pointing people to the invention of the ‘Spinning Jenny’ by James Hargreaves, who came from the area. Between the fusils is a silver bugle horn, the crest of the first mayor of Blackburn, William Henry Horny Esq., as well as being a symbol of strength. They sit on a green background, which is in place to remind people of the era of Edward the Confessor, the time when Blackburn was one of the Royal Forests. At the top is a dove with an olive branch in its beak.
You might well be wondering what any of that has got to do with Latin phrases, which is entirely fair. The answer comes in the form of the fact that there are three Latin words on a banner at the very bottom of the shield, which say ‘ARTE ET LABORE’. You might well read numerous different interpretations of what that translates to, but the answer according to the Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council is ‘By Skill and Labour’. That sounds like an entirely fair motto for a football club to boast, requiring both hard work and ability in order to win matches and progress through the leagues.
What the Latin Stands For
As mentioned, you are likely to come across different interpretations of what ‘Arte et Labore’ means, depending on where you get your information from. The club’s own Academy, for example, says something slightly different to the local council. On a page on the Blackburn Rovers website that looks at the Values and Vision of the Academy, it says that the ‘Arte et Labore’ motto translates to ‘By Skill and Hard Work’. Obviously, it’s not as if that is night and day different when compared to ‘By Skill and Labour’, but it is interesting that it is a slightly different set of terminology in play.
When The Guardian newspaper answered a letter about Latin on football club crests back in 2004, which was a time when Blackburn Rovers still played in the top-flight, they said that the translation was in line with the local government’s interpretation of it. The truth of the matter is that we’re really arguing over semantics here. Whichever way you look at it, the motto has roughly the same meaning, which is that you need to combine ability with working hard in order to succeed. There have been countless footballers who have had one but not the other over the years.
Speak to the people in charge of any football club’s Academy and they will be able to give you countless stories about players who would put in huge amounts of hard work, but who simply didn’t have the ability to be able to match the effort and therefore fell by the wayside. Although less common, there will also be numerous tales of players who had bags of ability, but who felt that they didn’t necessarily have to put in the effort because of that ability, inevitably failing to make it at the top end of the game because of the requirement to mix the two traits together to succeed.
Is it Accurate?
If you were to ask whether or not the Latin phrase that is Blackburn Rovers’ motto was an accurate one, you would probably get a number of different answers depending on who it was that you were talking to. On the one hand, Blackburn Rovers won the Premier League at the end of the 1994-1995 season, having also won the top-flight title at the end of both the 1911-1912 and the 1913-1914 campaigns. The club has also won the FA Cup and the Football League Cup, in addition to the Full Members’ Cup and the Football League War Cup, plus the Charity Shield.
None of that would have been possible without hard work and skill. On the other hand, Blackburn were relegated out of the Premier League when the 2011-2012 season reached its conclusion and they haven’t returned at the time of writing. The club even dropped down to League One for a season. In other words, it would be untrue to suggest that every single person associated with the football club has followed the motto’s meaning in every aspect of what they do, else they would be competing for the top-flight title on a much more consistent basis.