The Lost History of the Flag of Wellington
In 2016, while still a bit nauseous from a year of studying the New Zealand flag debate and referenda, I found myself perplexed by something I spotted on the Wellington waterfront: this garish flag you see below. Still on overdrive from flag-mania-2015, I was asking myself why on earth do we have a flag with this logo on it?! Surely that’s not our official flag.
Thankfully the internet told me it was not. What it did end up telling me was that we did in fact have one. One that no one I talked to knew about or heard about. A yellow flag with a black cross and some kind of seal in the centre. What did it mean? Who designed it? How long had we had it? Asking the City Council for information left me with no answers to these questions—just the simple fact that it exists.
Fortunately, Wellington has a City Council Archives. It is here that I discovered everything needed to tell this story of Wellington’s flag, and it turned out to be far more complicated and rocky than I had imagined.
Where it all Began
The quest for a city flag was first initiated by Councillor John Churchill in 1957. Churchill had suggested that the flag should simply use the city’s Coat of Arms, which itself had only been created a few years prior in 1951.
“Councillor Churchill has suggested that the City produce a flag showing the Coat of Arms. It is the Councillor’s recommendation that the flag be flown at City parks and reserves when functions or sports meetings are taking place and also on civic buildings…“ — Town Clerk, April 1957
Churchill’s suggestion was approved by Wellington’s Public Relations & Cultural Committee (PRCC) and the City Council subsequently adopted the idea of a flag for the city.
Following approval, the Town Clerk requested preliminary sketches of a flag design, as per Churchill’s vision, from the Architectural Branch of the City Engineer’s Department. The Department, however, felt that ‘design of this nature’ was outside their scope. Well-known commercial artist Len Mitchell was also sought out to render the ideas, but sadly there’s no record of the work or it ever being completed.
But, before a design could get any traction internally, Wellington’s media sparked a different idea.
Calls for a Competition, or Three
That same year, an article in the Evening Post debated the idea of a city flag, lauding concern that “there is no feature of Wellington’s coat of arms that is necessarily peculiar to [the] city” and that having an entire flag in the colours of black and gold would be “disastrous”. Ultimately the article suggests that a public competition be held.
“…the job of designing such an article is, as we have seen, far from easy. It might be advantageous, we suggest, to throw the question open for competition.”
From this the PRCC hastily approved the idea for a public competition in September 1957, with a call for entries opening that month and closing within only four weeks. Despite this swift timeframe, it was recorded that 61 entries were received and four judges were appointed by the PRCC to select a winning design. Disappointingly, the judges of the competition concluded that “designs submitted were too detailed and unsuitable”. No record of these submissions appears to have been kept either.
Astonishingly enough, another competition was launched just a month later — this time with criteria for design submissions being advertised to the public and a two month window to make submissions. By the time this second competition closed in January 1958, 44 entries had been received.
This time a worthy design was found by the judging panel. Dennis Beytagh was handed £25 in prize money for his winning design, which features two ferns and a shield of a southern cross and the letter W, all in black and gold.
This winning design provoked a flood of letters to the editor.
While the design won over the flag committee, the City Council in the end rejected it. The published comments of Councillor Highet suggests it was likely due to the negative reactions of people to the winning design.
Soon after this, the Council recommended that the public be invited to submit suggestions again (for a third time) and that this time an artist be employed to work on the best of these. Evidently this too went nowhere, with the PRCC recommending in April 1958 that no further action be taken on the matter.
Wellington continued to find itself without a flag.
Changing Tact
No further action was taken until the topic arose again in May 1960. A two-person sub-committee was appointed to select and recommend a flag design from the previously held competitions. A design was selected by this committee in 1961, but for whatever reason the committee’s selected flag was withdrawn from recommendation to the Council.
After constant failure and rejection, Council took a different approach, removing the dilemma of public competitions altogether. Records show that the Town Clerk reached out to the Windsor Herald of the College of Arms in London and requested that they submit designs for an appropriate flag for Wellington city.
The Windsor Herald responded, advising that proper procedure for a city flag would be to use the City’s Coat of Arms (known as a Banner of Arms), or by granting and registering a Badge for use on a flag. It was suggested that the Badge solution would offer more freedom of use by the public than a Banner of Arms. Taking on this advice, the City Council requested a Badge from the Windsor Herald in London.
The Windsor Herald’s badge design was born out of the symbolism found in the city’s Coat of Arms; a dolphin naiant (meaning to swim horizontally) on the sail of a ship (lymphad or galley)— both found on the city’s Coat of Arms. The ship also includes the St George Cross multiple times as well as oars out to the side.
The Final Flag
Further details about how the final design was chosen is not recorded, however it is clear by this stage that the Windsor Herald’s badge design was used in conjunction with a black cross (also derived from the Coat of Arms) on a gold background. By the 1950s, these colours were inarguably the region’s colours. They are thought to originate from the formation of the Wellington Rugby Football Union in 1879, where black and gold is used for the team’s livery.
At long last a flag design was found to be favourable by the City Council and this design was officially adopted as Wellington city’s flag in 1963—with the first orders of the new flag made in preparation for a Royal Visit.
And now?
Discovering this history has lead me to another set of questions:
Does it really reflect the city appropriately?
Is it too colonial, or where is local tangata whenua in this?
Does Wellington need a better flag?
The Dominion Post published an article about the flag, its history, and asked a few people what they think about it. I’d like to keep that discussion going.
Get in touch if you wish to know more or have opinions you’d like to share.
Update, February 2019:
A relevant Instagram post from Mayor Justin Lester:
We put this up in the office today for a visiting ambassador. People seem perplexed that this is what the Wellington flag looks like...Time for a new one? 😅
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