Posted by Tom Napier on December 20, 2014 at 07:24:01 user Didymus.
In Reply to: Re: Captain Flint's Flag posted by Mike Jones on December 18, 2014 at 14:26:26:
"Was AR's memory at fault, bearing in mind also that there was much less material available printed in colour to facilitate looking up obsolete flags, or was he colour blind?"
One source that AR might have had access to was Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia. This was published as ten volumes from 1920 to about 1960 but I don't know when it started using colour plates. My parents had a set that (from internal evidence, the editions aren't dated) must have been published around 1940. I read it voraciously as a child but it was thrown out decades ago. It had colour sections such as "1000 flags of the world."
I bought a set on e-bay, the small-format, red-bound edition dating to about 1950. It shows four Siamese flags. Three have horizontal stripes of red, white, blue, blue, white and red, i.e. the middle blue strip is twice the width of the others. With no further adornment this is the National flag. Adding a central blue disk with a white elephant gives the Diplomatic flag. With a red disk and a caparisoned elephant we, finally, have the Naval flag. No green backgrounds in sight.
I would expect Dick to have a copy of this encyclopedia but I wonder if Ransome had.