FACTORALY - E15 FLAGS

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

Flags. You probably see at least one every day. But where do they come from? What do they mean? And why do flagpoles sometimes wear cravats? All this and more this week on Factoraly. Check out the show notes on the blog at Factoraly.com, comment on Facebook, or better yet, give this episode and all of Factoraly a five-star review in your podcast player! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello! Hello everybody! Hello Bruce. Hello Simon, how are you? I'm very well thank you, how are you today? I'm feeling in fine fettle. Are you? Yes. That's good. Yes. So who are we? What is this? I'll let you explain. Well, we are voices. Well, everybody has a voice. Most people have a voice, but we use ours professionally because we're voice artists, voiceovers, voice actors, whatever you want to call it. We do the voices on stuff. Yes. And Simon and I have been friends for a while now, and we both have common interests. We both like facts. We both like useless facts, ideally. The more useless, the better.

And we're both fascinated by the world. I think generally the world, actually. Yeah, yeah. And with these podcasts, we pick a subject which we think is going to be quite dull, hopefully. Turns out never to be dull. But we don't discuss what we're going to be talking about. So it could be that Simon and I one day will have researched exactly the same things. And it'll be quite sort of, yes, I know that.

Yes, yes. But mostly it's, oh, you've researched that, have you? Great, because I didn't. We seem to complement each other well. We do. And I think it works really well. So what are we talking about today, Simon? What's the exciting and interesting subject that we're going to be discussing?

Well, Bruce, on this week's episode of Fact Orally, we are going to be discussing. Well, Bruce, on this week's episode of Factorily, we are going to be talking about flags. Oh, we didn't say what the podcasts call together, did we? That's all right. I've just done it. Okay, fine. Flags, you say? Flags, I say, yes. Are you talking about sort of like flags of all nations? I'm talking about all sorts of flags. Because I'm not. I've decided with one exception, I'm not going to talk about anything to do with national flags. Now, I've picked one particular national flag. I wonder whether we've picked the same one. We'll find out in due course. We will. We will. So, Simon, what's the definition of a flag then? It depends where you look. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of flags is long-winded and awkward and confusing. But the Merriam-Webster Dictionary says that a flag is a piece of cloth with a special design that is used as a symbol or for signalling.

The word flag, written as it is written in English, first appears around the 16th century. It's one of those words that etymologically we're not 100% sure where it comes from. But there are suggestions it might come from the Norse word flakka, meaning to flutter, or possibly the Proto-German word flago, meaning flat. But yeah, so that's what a flag is. So, I mean, the earliest flags that I could come up with were sort of either Chinese... You know when you watch those Chinese epics, like the martial arts epics,

where there's like two massive armies? Yes. And they've got those things fluttering in the breeze that they're practically wearing sort of strapped to their backs. Yeah. I mean, those are banners, actually, but a banner is a sort of a flag. Yes.

And early Chinese banners are sort of dynastic and quite interesting. There's often a dragon on these Chinese banners. Okay. But you can tell the rank of the person whose flag it is by how many claws the dragon has. Is that so? It's a bit like stripes on a uniform.

On a military uniform. Yes. Wonderful. So if it's a five-toed dragon, that's the emperor. No question at all. Okay. The emperor has a dragon with five toes. The princes, his children and his chiefs of staff, the generals, have dragons with four claws.

And people lower down the pecking have three-toed dragons. But I mean, they do go back to, I mean, you know, I mean, Egyptians didn't really have flags as such. They had 3D things, a bit like the Romans had the eagle on the top of a pole. It's not really a flag. It's a symbol. It's a standard, isn't it? I think standard is a word I kept coming across. I came across the word, I've never heard this before, vexiloids.

Ooh. Which is a word that's totally… You can suck this for your throat, can't you? Not these type um apparently i think i think this with this word is a relatively new invention 20th century but it basically means flag like things which is useful um but it certainly comes about from uh the roman word vexillum and a vexillum was a cloth banner suspended from a crossbar on the end of a spear, which is exactly what I think when I think of a troop of Romans marching along.

Specifically, for some reason, I'm thinking of asterisks carting. But there we go. Yes, Roman peoples. Do you think of Romans quite frequently during the day? Oh, unendingly. Yeah, all the time. Every time I walk on a straight road. Every time I pick up an army utility tool. Yes, exactly.

Yeah, every time. So yes, they had these things. As you say, they often had just a static image rather than a fluttering piece of fabric. You just had a long pole with a sculpture of an eagle or a snake or whatever it was. And these things are here to denote something that can't be easily said out loud over a large distance. I see. So, you know, you either have your army all walking around going, Oi, I'm with the 5th Battalion. Or you have a big flag or a banner or a standard or something. And therefore everyone around you knows who you are, what group you're with, where you're going, which side you're on. And that's useful. It is.

I mean, we have a royal standard in the UK, don't we, which has the leopards, not lions. They are three leopards. They are not lions. Yeah. And the salt, all the stuff that one expects from Scotland and Wales. Yes. Dragons. All that sort of stuff.

Yeah, absolutely. And, yeah, so we have a royal standard. In fact, you know when they say, oh, the flag's flying outside Buckingham Palace, so the king is in. Yeah. If there's a union flag flying outside Buckingham Palace, that doesn't mean that the monarch is there. The standard has to be flying

for the monarch to be actually in residence. Okay, that's interesting. That's interesting. I didn't know that either. So there are quite a few distinctions, obviously, to be made. And these things, as ever, they change and they morph over the years. So all rulers have kind of a personal standard, as you've just said, which denotes their family, their heraldry, sometimes even their name. And then you sort of have the flag of the nation, which is a slightly less official thing. I read recently that the Union flag of this country is not officially the flag of the country. It's kind

of a de facto flag that's generally understood to be the flag of this country. Oh, wow. Is that a bit like sort of currency being an agreement between two people to accept it? Yes, everyone knows it is what it is and therefore it is. But it's not actually written anywhere in law, per se. But yeah, so you sort of go back to, we go back to the medieval times

and you have heraldry you have these wonderful coats of arms of all of the individual knights that represent who they are some form of symbol emblem uh with an animal and their own particular personal colors and that tells you who that knight is and and who he's fighting for and who he's related to but yeah so if you're if you're following a particular knight, a particular leader, a particular ruler, it's good to have some kind of emblem so that you know you're following the right chap. It strikes me as being really silly because this standard being the flag where the person

in charge is or where somebody senior is. I mean, if I had a bunch of archers, the first thing I would aim at, rather than aiming at the soldiers coming towards me, would be to get as close as I possibly could to wherever the flag was and assume that the people standing around it were quite senior. Brilliant. Yeah, that's a great idea.

You should be in charge of military operations from a thousand years ago. I believe there was a tendency for, I mean, not all battles, you know, obviously there are famous battles where the king rode out right in front, you know, to lead the men. But there are examples of the leader of whoever it was hanging back and observing and giving commands from a distance and his standard bearer, the guy who bore the standard,

would either stay with him out of harm's way, away from the arrows, or sometimes ride ahead in front of the troops so that the troops were following that flag, even if they weren't actually following the person in question. Yes, like a proxy. Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, I think so.

Yeah. Good. And the king can kind of sit back and go, oh, there goes another standard bearer, better get another one. Yes. But wasn't there a thing like if you drop the flag or you mustn't let the flag touch the ground

or something like that? Yeah, I don't know whether that is actually accurate or whether that's just Shakespeare making stuff up for lols. Or movies. Or movies, yeah. But yeah, it's a symbolic thing, isn't it? That flag so represents the king. Yes.

That if the flag falls, that's it. You're done. Yeah. There is something about the Royal Standard, though, which is the UK Royal Standard, which is quite interesting. Which is, if there's a major tragedy, somebody dies or there's a big tragedy somewhere, generally what happens is that the flag is lowered to half mast. The union flag is lowered to half mast. However, the standard is never lowered to half mast. Oh, I see. What it can have, which is quite interesting, which is what this podcast is all about, is

a thing called a morning cravat. Oh, hello. Okay. cast is all about is a thing called a morning cravat oh hello okay so it's actually quite literally a piece of ribbon that's tied around the end of the flagpole like a cravat um so you don't have to lower the flag to half mast to show your respects um you can actually just tie a cravat around it oh i see which is around around the top of the flagpole right but there is there is a system for lowering a flag to half mast i don't know if you know this but i don't what you have to do is you have to put the flag all the way up to the top to show that you could have put the flag all the way to the top right but then you decide to lower it and not to halfway it's about two-thirds of the way up because that visually looks like about half.

Because you're looking at it from a distance. Yeah, because you're looking up and from a distance. The bafflement's getting away at the bottom. Yes, exactly. Right. Exactly. So it's all the way up, down by two-thirds and tied off. And if you want to, you can put a,

if you've got somebody who's got a long enough ladder, you can put a wooden cravat on the top as well. Flags are very, very useful. And in several different ways. You can run up a flagpole. And you can run a whole message up a flagpole which is which is absolutely lovely um and in the show notes i'll put a i'll put a a key code to what each flag means oh goody um but there are there are some fascinating things like i remember my late father-in-law talking about um because he was from the coast to my ships coming in flying the yellow flag yellow this called the yellow jack you know

we call it the union jack because it's a small flag the the yellow jack is a is a yellow flag on a boat right and the yellow flag on a boat means that there is something contagious on board and you shouldn't try and board the ship um you should basically just leave it alone until whatever malaise is affecting the crew has passed or the crew's all dead, one or the other. But, yes, so the yellow flag means death. But you can send in time messages just running flags up flagpoles. Or actually, they're generally not up the flagpole. They're generally up a sort of a line that's attached to the flagpole.

So they're more diagonal. Yes, okay. There are lots of different colors in them. And one of the colors of those flags is just a pure red flag. Okay. And it's quite a pretty red flag, which basically says, danger, there may be explosives on board. And it's quite a pretty red flag, which basically says danger. There may be explosives on board.

It's a warning. A warning flag. Red is a warning, yeah. Red means danger. It's a warning. And one of the most dangerous things at sea about 400 years ago were pirates. Ah. In fact, I'm not going to talk like that because you can only talk like a pirate on September the 19th. National Talk Like a Pirate Day. It is. I've made good use of that

in the past. But if you are a pirate and you are wanting to fly a flag, and you don't want to fly a flag of any particular denomination because you don't want to say that you're a member of the British Armed Forces doing a bit of looting on the side.

And you fly a red flag, which is pretty. And as the French would say, it's a pretty red flag or a jolie rouge flag. Hold the phone. Really? Now. Jolie rouge. Jolly Rouge. Jolly Roger. Obviously, because we're not, we don't let other countries let us dictate how we pronounce stuff. No, no, not at all. You're quite right. We will pronounce it our own way and do it wrong. Jolly Roger. Jolly Roger. Now. Is that substantiated? Well... Because if that's true, that's one of my new favourite facts. So I looked up the Jolly Roger and I looked into the basis of the Jolly Roger with the skull and what people call the skull and crossbones as well. Now, there are three different explanations of why it's called a Jolly Roger. The first one is that there was a Pembrokeshire pirate called Bartholomew Roberts, the Dread Pirate Roberts.

Oh, yes, I've heard of him. You have? Yeah. He was known as Barty Do, or Black Barty. Do being Celtic for black. Okay. And he had his personal flag, which was a skeleton on a black background.

And other pirates just liked the design and copied it. But Barty, this guy, Bartholomew Roberts, wore a bright red coat. And so the French nicknamed him Le Joli Rouge. Right. Which is another explanation. So it was a pirate corrupted into Jolly Roger and came to mean the flag rather than the person who flew it. But this guy, Bartholomew Roberts, or Barty,

was quite an interesting pirate. He was rather straight-laced. He banned drinking on all the ships, so he didn't have any, no rum allowed. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of mineral water, please. Exactly. He insisted on early nights for the crew. And he never attacked anybody on a Sunday.

This is not typical piratical behaviour. Yeah. He was killed in an encounter with a Royal Naval ship back in 1722. Probably on a Sunday, I would think. Harmonic. But there's another explanation, which is even weirder. Right. Which is that there's another possibility

that English pirates in the Indian Ocean began to refer to the red flag of Tamil pirates. And the leader of the tamil pirates was a guy called ali raja oh my goodness and they corrupted his name to ali roger and then ollie roger and they corrupted the jolly roger right so one way or another it all comes down to the fact that we brits can't be bothered to learn other people's pronunciations of their own words. And we corrupt it and we make it into something that we can understand. So the English flag is a red cross on a white background.

It used to be the other way around. It used to be a white cross on a white background. It used to be the other way around. It used to be a white cross on a red background. So somewhere around the... The Swiss had that, though, didn't they? They do, yes. I mean, it's not much of a nation, but the flags are plus. Oh. Where's my drum sound effect?

I'll plug that in later. Going back into medieval times again, Philip of France decided to make his country's flag a red cross and a white background. And England, Henry II, I think it was, decided to go for a red cross and a white background around the same time. No one knows why, but at some point or other they decided to swap and from that point forward it sounds like a drunken evening doesn't it i really like your flag i really like your flag man i'll tell you what we should do that's so off a moment it's possible um but yeah so so ever since then the english flag has been a red cross on a on a white background um and that's been you know come to be known as the the flag of saint george and is therefore used in many countries

that have saint george as their their patron patron saint so that led me to think about the union flag and uh i've never really looked into it but the union flag is uh a cross between the flags of england scotland and ireland um sorry wales don't get a look in because at the time around the 1500s wales was so a part of england that their flag didn't count sorry guys not even a small dragon in the corner or anything like that no no sorry it's a shame um but yeah so the union flag is a mixture of that of the the flag of saint george of england red cross white background the saltire which is a diagonal cross like a crisscross shape rather than a plus shape the saltire of scotland the white saltire on a blue background, and the saltire of Ireland, which is a red saltire.

Put those three things together and you get something that looks roughly like the Union flag. Hooray for the red, white and blue. Except that's America. That's America. But talking of, OK, this is the only national flag that I actually research. And I want to talk about burning them. Because I've always thought that burning an American flag says that you're rebellious. It says that you hate the West.

It's all that sort of stuff going on. However, Americans burn flags on Flag Day. And Flag Day in America is June the 14th. And it goes to the adoption of the flag in 1777. And that's when the basis of that 13 original states and all the multiple states since in the stars was adopted as the flag. However, we all know that flags get tattered a bit and they all get a bit scruffy. Yeah, sure. But what do you do with a scruffy American flag? You can't just chuck it in the bin because that would

be disrespectful insulting and disrespectful so they have what they they what they call they retire them so so you can retire an american flag you fold it up you know you see these you know funerals and things they've they've they've folded american flag properly yes so you fold it properly and then you chuck it on a fire, ideally on June the 14th. Right. So that's then a respectful way of retiring a flag. So all over America on that day, old, worn out, tattered flags are given a send off. Yes.

Huh. Yes. And they call that day Flag Day. Great. Whereas in the UK, we also have Flag Days. Right. But our Flag Days are more to do with charity. Okay. I don't know whether you – you're probably too young to remember this,

but these days when you donate to charity, they give you a sticker to stick on your lapel. Yes. Or you can get a nice badge. Yes. But when they first started doing Flag Day, they were actually a piece of paper that was scrolled around a pin. OK. Like a normal sort of dressmaking pin. Yeah. And that pin was what you put in your lapel. And this was started by a lady called Agnes Morrison in Glasgow just after the First World War, to raise money for soldiers. And so she would go around selling these little flags. And I'll put some pictures on the show notes. Some of them are

just straightforward Union flags. Some of them have got little messages on them as well. And they are delightful. And when I was growing up, they still did these little pieces of paper as flags that you sort of pinned to yourself. Right, OK. Now it's more likely to be a badge or a sticker. Yeah. But a flag day is generally a day when you give to charity. Right, so another area of flags that I had a quick look into,

so we've talked about the fact that they can be used for signalling, and you mentioned the flags that one uses at sea to transmit a message. I had a look down Semaphore. And Semaphore, for anyone who doesn't know, take a look at the show notes, there we go. You have two flags, you have a flag in each hand, and the position in which you hold those two flags you have a flag in each hand and the position in which you hold those two flags represents either a letter or a number and therefore you can wave these flags around in in particular positions to spell out a message and and the person at the

other end of wherever it is um knows that code uh and and can decipher that and and turn that into the message that it's meant to be transmitted as right um i didn't realize this but this is a more modern handheld version of an old semaphore system which involved semaphore towers uh which there's one fairly fairly near me actually there's a semaphore tower up on a hill that was part of the Trafalgar Way that had a series of towers from Greenwich to the sea, where the fleet was kept, and they transmitted signals from one tower to another to another by use of large mechanical arms.

So you picture the two little semaphores. Sticks, huge big sticks. Big sticks with a plank on the end. And these arms were mechanically shifted around into different positions in exactly the same way that a person holding two semaphore flags does. Or the other method was to have a light shining in this tower and sort of shutters in front of it. And those shutters would be mechanically opened and closed one by one

in different orders in different sequences. So the light showed this particular signal. And I had never realized. I looked into pictures of these mechanical semaphore towers and they look alien. Yes, it's a bit like sort of stick men. But you have to make sure that each of the towers on the way is manned, that the person who's in the tower is actually looking in the right direction.

Yes. Brilliant. But you can get a message from Admiralty Arch, well, you could get a message from Admiralty Arch down to the sea. That's pretty fast. And of course, you know what the most famous message in Semaphore is, don't you? The most famous message in Semaphore is New Unknown James Vocalist, or N-U-J-V. Now, James was the full name of James Paul McCartney.

Ah. So if you look on the cover of Help, the Beatles album, they're all doing semaphore. Yes. And you think, oh, that must be the semaphore for H-E-L-P. That's what I'd always assumed. It isn't. It's the semaphore for, well, it depends. In the UK, it's the semaphore for N-V-U-J,

which is how Robert Freeman shot it that way. But in America, they switched two of the Beatles around. So in America, it reads N-U-J-V. Right. And this is obviously in order to signify the fact that Paul McCartney had recently died. Yes, but no. Given that he's still alive. Or is he?

Or is he? But yes, so semaphore NVUJ is probably the most famous message that means nothing in the world. There is, however, one flag that we haven't mentioned yet, which is probably the best recognised flag in the world. Have you got a handkerchief? No, I'm a tissue man. You could still wave a tissue. Okay. The white flag of surrender. Well, is it surrender or is it truce? This is a big thing because if you wave a white flag, does that mean I've had enough? You can do what you like.

Or does it mean let's parlay? Let's have a chat and don't kill me while I come out. Yes. I think I see it more of a timeout thing than a I completely quit, yes. So that was started, well, it could have been started by the Romans in the Punic War in the sort of like 69 AD.

They had like sort of white sheepskin things that they would wave to say, you know, whoa, okay, give up. But it could also mean a truce. It could also mean let's have a chat and maybe we can settle this amongst ourselves. But the white flag is so well known now that putting up a white

flag is known globally as don't kill me, I'm either surrendering or I want to chat. And it's so powerful. This piece of cloth Don't kill me. I'm either surrendering or I want to chat. Yes. And it's so powerful. This piece of cloth with nothing on it at all, because we've been talking about very complicated standards and all sorts of things.

So this one piece of cloth with nothing on it is so powerful that it's actually in the Geneva Convention you are not allowed. It's illegal to feign surrender with a white flag. So you can't put up a white flag and go, oh, come on, you know, we surrender, come on in, it's really sorry, and then kill everybody as they come in. Right. That's actually illegal under the Geneva Convention, and you can be hanged for it. Right, wow. So, yeah, the white flag, massively important.

I briefly thought of another type of flag, which I could have sworn you were going to do, and therefore I've done no research on it whatsoever. Racing flags. I have done research on racing flags. Boom. But go ahead. No, flags but go ahead no no no I deliberately

didn't do any research on it because I thought oh Bruce will have that one covered and he did I didn't actually have to research to be fair I didn't have to research I just knew what they are anyway they're all there are basically martial flags which tell you various different things like you're on fire or or you're being a naughty boy, or there's dead chickens on the track.

It could tell you anything. So you have to be careful about that. Again, show notes, blog, factorily.com. Absolutely. There'll be a key to show you what they are but what's it what i found interesting was um that um they sell uh the checkered flags used at events so for example um in 2014 they in american events they generally wave two checkered flags yes and they're usually quite close to the track so there's some madmen out there waving two chequered flags. Yes.

And the ones from the Indy 500 in 2014 recently sold for $2.5 million. Oh, my goodness. Wow. And selling the chequered flags off afterwards, usually for a good cause that's motorsport-based, is a thing in America. Yeah. So, I mean, car racing flags, everybody knows the chequered flag.

Yeah, absolutely. The origin of the chequered flag possibly was an old tablecloth that somebody used to signal the end of a race. Okay. Usually, you know, probably a French thing because the French do have those nice black and white chequered tablecloths.

Do you have anything else on flags? I have a couple of records. Oh, go ahead. Obviously. Was his biggest flag, longest flag? Yes. Oh, cool. Excellent.

Let's go for this one then i don't think there would be an awful lot of points awarded for guessing which nation has the world's biggest flag would it be china okay i will award points because that's not the answer it's the good old US of A. Is it really? It is. There is a flag on Hoover Dam, which was installed there to commemorate the 1996 Olympic torch relay. Okay. And this flag, known affectionately as the super flag. Yes, in a sort of subtle, understated way. Very subtle, understated way. 505 feet long by 255 feet wide that's a lot of sewing isn't it and is it what is that the is that the uh it's the american flag uh as as it would be

it's sitting on hoover dan it represented the olympic torch relay going through america so of course it's the american flag each star on this super flag is 17 feet high. Blimey. That's a big star. Three of us standing on each other's shoulders. Isn't that incredible? That's a lot. And you see a photo of this thing and you just can't fathom the scale of it. It looks like it's either a regular-sized flag with a miniature Hoover Dam, or your brain just can't quite handle the size of this thing. It's phenomenal. That's crazy. By contrast, the world's smallest flag, 1.178 micrometers in length.

So about a hair. Even less than a hair, I think. A hair's width in length. It's tiny. Yeah. You can't see it without an electron microscope. It's printed on or carved into a wafer of silicon. And it was created by the Institute for Quantum Computing at Waterloo.

And whose flag is it? It's the Canadian flag. Aha. Yeah. So America has the biggest and Canada has the smallest. So that's it for flags, I think. I believe so.

I'm out of flaggy facts. I think I've fluttered and flown all my flag, flag, flag. Yeah, I'm done. How about you? Have you got any more? So should we lower the flag and fold it up neatly

and call it a day? Let's do that. Which is what you do at the end of a day in the armed forces, obviously, is you take the flag down. Yeah, yeah. With a nice bugle blowing in the background. Yes, last post.

Well, thank you so much for listening. I hope you've enjoyed this flagged podcast. In fact, could you flag it to your friends? Oh, that's good. Why don't you flag this? Flag it in a post on social media. Do that. And in fact, if you want to comment, we have our own Facebook page,

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