Seamstress recalls making first Maple Leaf flag
Joan O’Malley stitched up the prototype for our Maple Leaf on a rainy night in 1964
A Canadian flag hangs from the garage of Joan and Brian O’Malley’s home just south of Ottawa International Airport. Red-and-white petunias line the walk leading up to the front door, where a small table bursts almost to life with red and white paper flags. Inside the house, the Great Red-and-White North theme continues: a Canada quilt draped over a chair back here, a wood box filled with Canadian flag lapel pins there, Canada table cloths everywhere. Joan herself is wearing a red outfit with a white sweater over top. Christmas may be the biggest holiday in the O’Malley household, she says, but barely. Canada Day is a serious rival worthy of decorations for the couple of weeks leading up to July 1. And on the day itself, Joan, 71, expects to head to Parliament Hill to soak up some of the fervour and pandemonium. “I just love Canada Day,” she says, somewhat unnecessarily.
And for the occasion of a reporter’s visit, she’s set her old brown Singer sewing machine on the dining table. It pales alongside the crimson tsunami of patriotism that has washed through her home, yet it is her possession most emblematic of the role she played in helping stir the bright monochrome of nationalism.
She’s been called Canada’s Betsy Ross, but the comparison is unfair. For whereas the story of the Philadelphian seamstress credited with creating the first Stars and Stripes is believed to contain more myth than fact, the Dauphin, Man.-born O’Malley most definitely sewed Canada’s first flag, on a cold and damp Friday night in November 1964 when she would have rather simply stayed at home.
A year and a half earlier, the Liberal party, under Lester B. Pearson, had come to power in Canada, promising, among other things, a new Canadian flag. The flag debate raged throughout much of 1964, as committees squabbled and thousands of design options, many submitted by citizens from across the country, were considered and, for the most, rejected.
On Nov. 6, a Friday, Pearson decided he wanted to fly three flags that weekend — the current Canadian flag; the infamous “Pearson Pennant,” with three red maple leaves bordered by a pair of blue vertical bars; and a third that resembled the current flag, but with a Union Jack and three fleurs-de-lis atop the red bars — at his summer residence at Harrington Lake.
The problem facing Ken Donovan, who worked as a purchasing agent for the Department of Trade and Commerce’s Canadian government exhibition commission and into whose lap the prime minister’s request fell late that afternoon, was that no such flags actually existed anywhere but on paper. They would have to be made from scratch.
S.E. Woods, a camping supply store in Hull was contacted: Can you provide 30 yards of bunting? Yes, was the reply, but it’s almost 5 p.m.; we can’t deliver it until Monday. Never mind, they were told, put it in a taxi and get it to our office on Kaladar Avenue.
There, two copies of each flag design were silkscreened onto the bunting and the flags cut. But who could sew the seams and do the stitching necessary for the rope, grommets and toggles? Donovan called up his daughter, Joan O’Malley, to ask what she was doing that evening.
“The weather was awful,” she recalls, “like a slushy snow. I said ‘We’re not going out.’ ”
She acquiesced, however, upon hearing of her father’s dilemma. Along with Brian and her sewing machine, the latter with only one needle, Joan arrived at Kaladar Avenue at around 7 p.m., and began sewing half an hour later.
She remembers when our current flag was put on her sewing table, she knew immediately that it was her favourite. “It would have got my vote, and I’m glad it’s the one we chose.”
Shortly after midnight, the flags were done, packed into Donovan’s car and delivered to 24 Sussex. Her father asked Joan to keep quiet about the evening’s events, which she did for a decade, until a newspaper reporter called her up with questions.
“I called my dad, who said ‘Tell him about it. People should know the story of the flag’s history.’
“It turns out he was prouder of what I had done than I was. He was one of the 136,000 Home Children who came over (from the United Kingdom) to work on the farms and get a better life. To be involved in the creation of the flag of his new country was really important to him.”
O’Malley’s sense of import regarding her own role didn’t really occur until 1995, when she was invited to Parliament Hill for a coffee with then-prime minister Jean Chrétien. Seven years later, she had lunch with the Queen, at Rideau Hall, as part of the Golden Jubilee celebrations.
In 2014, she was presented the Canadian flag that flew over the Peace Tower on Nov. 6, 2014, exactly 50 years after she sewed the prototype. It’s still in its box — she’s afraid she’d never get it folded properly if she unfurls it.
For the past decade or so, O’Malley has increasingly been an ambassador for the flag, visiting schools and seniors’ homes and taking part in parades and plowing matches, lugging her sewing machine around and sharing her story of Canada’s flag.
Last year alone, she estimates that she took part in two dozen to four dozen flag-related events, and already she has one booked for next year, Canada’s sesquicentennial, at a school in Nova Scotia. Additionally, the sewing machine will be part of a two-year display at the Canadian Museum of History’s new Canadian History Hall, launching July 1, 2017.
“At the time that I made the flag,” O’Malley recalls, “I didn’t think I was doing anything that important or making history. I was just doing a favour for my dad.
“But now it feels more special. I love the flag, and I really enjoy doing this, and I think it’s important for kids to know its history.”
At the time I made the flag, I didn’t think I was doing anything that important or making history. I was just doing a favour for my dad.