This is what late City supporter Steve Spires had to say on the subject.
The Story of the Badge
Have you heard the one about the Dragon and the Elephant...
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The best answer I came up with when I researched that a couple of years back is that it (i.e. the elephant) was awarded to Coventry as a ward against dragons.
St George was from Coventry and he killed a dragon, and the elephant is supposed to be the mythical archenemy of the dragon. (don't know why -perhaps they used their trunks to put out the dragons fire).
Also, as an aside, Bolton also have an elephant & castle on their city's coat of arms. This is apparently a result of Bolton's "ancient ecclesiastical links with Coventry."
After discovering elephants all over the city and finding no one to tell me why. I thought it might have to do with a Coventry regiment that served in Inja, as the Colonel might say. The scholarly works, however, all say that the elephant was granted to Coventry with it's city charter from King Edward (3rd?), in recognition of it's historic connection with St. George (place of birth, marriage or burial according to various medieval monks/scribes).
It seems the elephant was the enemy of the dragon in medieval bestiaries (remember, both the elephant and the dragon were rarely seen in England in those days and were probably considered equally mythical), because the dragon's favorite meal was not virgins after all, but baby elephant. This pissed the elephants off, as you might expect. St George being the dragonslayer, he was a hero to elephants, too, hence the elephant on Coventry's crest.
The phoenix was added by Elizabeth II after WWII for obvious reasons. The bird on the left (facing the arms) is not a phoenix, by the way, but the eagle of Leofric.
(The monarch was...)More likely to have been Edward II (of Bannockburn fame). He was murdered by means of a red hot poker shoved up his bum in Berkeley Castle near Bristol on the orders of his adulterous wife Isabella, the so-called She Wolf of France who was by all accounts a thoroughly unpleasant character. I was told that she was filled with remorse at her actions when approaching her later years (in the mid 1300's) and went around the country endowing various charitable institutions by way of penance.
One of these is supposed to have been the forerunner of Bablake School which was the school at which Thomas Wheatley was educated and which he also later endowed. If this is true, then Bablake would be older than Eton (1440) and Harrow (1571).
The Castle
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Centuries later, when Coventry was granted a royal charter to build walls (couldn't just wall in your city without the King's OK, of course), the castle was added to the city arms.
I think the castle comes from coventry being allowed to have a city wall by some king or other (pre civil war as charles II knocked them down as a punishment for supporting the roundheads).
The other side of the coin
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Alternatively........
"Some people reckon it's got something to do with St George but that's a pile of poo".
But St George, being not only a totally mythical saint, was also an Italian mythical saint. How the hell he ended up being tied in with our fair city is beyond me.. Monks - what did they know anyway? Okay, so they helped keep ancient information for use in the Renaissance, but they didn't half keep some crap too.
The real answer is something along the lines of Coventry being a fortified city in ye olde dayes - elephant + castle = don't f**k with us cos we're hard. Coventry was bigger than Kenilworth & Warwick - they had castles but the whole of Cov was fortified until the walls were torn down after the Civil War (1642-48 ish).
Discussion
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So it seems the elephant was either out to dowse the dragon with "thine snoutage full of holy water" or was there to provide himself as dinner, so a little controversy there! Red hot arse death sounds extremely avoidable.
Steve Spires