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This summer marks 50 years since the creation of Saskatchewan’s official flag.
Even though the flag’s English designer, Anthony Drake, only lived in the province for three years, it’s clear to many that he made a lasting impact.
Drake and his wife moved to Canada from East Yorkshire in 1966 to temporarily work as teachers during a shortage at the time.
A couple of years after arriving, Drake decided to submit a design for the province’s official flag after seeing a contest in a newspaper offering a $1,000 prize.
“I just thought it was an interesting thing to occupy my mind with, to design the flag, and I had never done anything like it before,” he said during a recent conversation on 980 CJME’s Gormley.
Living in Hodgeville at the time, Drake said he thought of the province’s landscape when cooking up his design.
The flag is divided in half horizontally, using green to represent the northern forests and yellow to represent the southern prairies. The design also incorporates a tiger lily, Saskatchewan’s official flower, along with the province’s coat of arms.
“I saw that the province is really basically two colours. When you’re living in the south, you see the wheat … and it’s a kind of pale beige colour, then it ripens and it becomes yellow — that’s the bottom half of Saskatchewan,” Drake explained. “The top half (of the province) has a lot of wild grass and trees — it’s all more green.”
Drake’s design ultimately went on to win the contest. However, just before the flag was raised in the summer of 1969, Drake and his family returned to the United Kingdom.
The first time Drake saw his work flying on a flagpole was in front of Canada House in downtown London.
“It was quite a charming thing to see something you did yourself — and in the middle of the capital city yet,” he said. “I was quite moved and proud to see it flying.”
In 2015, Hodgeville resident Gail Hapanowicz brought Drake to the province to see his flag flying. This summer, Hapanowicz flew Drake back for a tour to mark the flag’s 50th anniversary.
