The Grant of Arms Document, as issued by the College of Arms, was formally handed to the chairman of Dursley Rural District Council (Mr Frederick G Bailey) at a council meeting in July 1952. The presentation was made by council clerk Mr Harold Pate.
When Dursley Rural District Council ceased to exist with local government re-organisation on 1st April 1974, the Grant of Arms was handed to Dursley Town Trust for safe keeping and is now in the Market Hall in a covered case.
The grant of armorial bearings is in the following terms:
Gules a Paschal Lamb proper within an orle of crosses formy argent on a chief vert between two cart-wheels of eight spokes Or an open book also proper garnished gold thereon the words HOLY BIBLE in letters sable, and for the Crest, Out of a crown vallery Or a mount of sand standing thereon a white-fronted goose close proper.
The main portion of the shield represents Dursley and the other ten parishes of the District. The Paschal Lamb is an ancient emblem of the wool trade and recalls the importance over many generations of the town of Dursley as a centre of the Gloucestershire wool industry. The ten crosses, standing for the remaining parishes, also appear on a red ground in the arms of the great Gloucestershire house of the Berkeleys, who had great influence in the district and who were created Viscounts of Dursley in 1679.
The green chief, representing the rural district, is charged with a Bible and two wheels. The former recalls the English translation of the Bible by William Tyndale, who was born in the Dursley Rural District and to whose memory a famous monument stands on Nibley Knoll. This historic translation is recalled in the motto, "God with Us", which is also the motto (in French) of the Berkeleys.
One of the wheels is for the Lister Engineering Company, whose first products were agricultural machinery, and the other is for Sir Isaac Pitman, who began teaching his shorthand system at Wotton-under-Edge, taking his phonographic symbols from an eight-spoked wheel.
The mantling above the helmet is red and white, the livery colours of the arms. The crest represents the Severn Wildfowl Trust; the white-fronted goose, a characteristic Severn fowl, stands within the protective circle of a "vallary" crown, an ancient type of heraldic crown representing an enclosure.
The arms were designed by H. Ellis Tomlinson, M.A. of Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancs.
