Canadian Service Flag
After three years of war, Torontonians were accustomed to seeing public expressions of individual commitment to the war effort. The wearing of pins, badges and tags indicated support for causes as disparate as wounded horses, comfort huts and Belgian refugees. By early 1918, a new marker appeared connecting family members at home and abroad in a personal yet public way.
Writing to a Toronto newspaper in October 1917, a “Canadian Woman” described a military service flag she had seen often in the U.S. and occasionally in Canada. The red-bordered flag had blue stars on a white field, each star representing a loved one who had “gone to fight for King and country.” While she had been assured that the stars had no association with the Stars and Stripes, a distinctive Canadian version materialized. Its blue maple leaves represented those in service; red leaves honoured those who had made the supreme sacrifice.
The Canadian service flag had Toronto roots. The designer was William G. Rook, president of the Canadian Home Journal and father of two soldiers. Production was carried out by the Canadian Service Flag Co. Rook said his goal in December 1917 was “to create an emblem which would symbolize the selfsacrifice and patriotism of the people in Canada.”
Patriotism had a competitive dimension. An “active service banner” was also marketed with maple leaves, but had different colours: “Canada’s National Emblem is at its best in the Fall when it is a Rich Red with the Autumn Tints (orange, yellow and green), and it fittingly represents the Red Blooded Canadian who is at his or her best when serving King or Country on Active Service.” Purple represented fallen soldiers.
The multiple versions chagrined Rook and others. “Be sure you buy the correct and registered flag — refuse substitutes – they are meaningless,” exhorted his company. Though Rook’s flag carried the mark “RD 1917,” this conferred no official status. The Daily Star called for a uniform flag with regulations governing its use, but to no avail.
Linking patriotism with profit, the Canadian Service Flag Co. marketed its products hard. Simpson’s advertised small flags for as little as 15 cents each. The company offered flags to patriotic organizations at a discount rate, urging them to resell the banners to raise funds for their “useful work.” A direct mail marketing campaign involved sending postcards about the flag to a soldier’s next of kin. The company told recipients “we hope one is already in your window.” Women were both consumers and recipients of the service flag. Mayor Tommy Church presented one to Mrs. Joseph Rogers, who had given seven sons to the war effort. Rogers was also recognized with other mothers in August 1918 at the CNE’s first Women’s Day. She was more fortunate than another Earlscourt resident, Mrs. David Ashdown.
All of Rogers’s boys returned to Canada, but three of Ashdown’s seven sons had died in service by the time of the presentation.
The communal value of displaying the service flag was underscored by the Daily Star in April 1918:
“These service flags placed in the window of every home entitled to fly them will make the residential streets of this city more companionable places for the mothers and wives of the absent ones to walk along. These little flags will be mute but eloquent evidence of the fact that we are to a large extent one people, and that far more homes in Toronto are sharing the hopes and anxieties of the war than anybody had supposed. There is a lonesomeness in the homes of the city these days, and there is need for just such a touch as this to broaden the knowledge and sympathy and fellow feeling up and down every street.”
Promoting the maple leaf as a unifying national symbol was a key legacy of the Canadian service flag. A postwar committee charged with creating a new coat of arms for Canada observed that “scores of thousands of Canadians” had displayed the flag; the design adopted in 1921 featured maple leaves as a uniquely Canadian emblem. One cannot help noting the similarities between the 1917 service flag and the 1965 national flag of Canada.
“These little flags will be mute but eloquent evidence of the fact that we are to a large extent one people.”
DAILY STAR