Obituary: Whitney Smith, vexillologist, died on November 17th

PEOPLE die for flags and kill for them. But until Whitney Smith, nobody studied them properly. He coined (aged 17) the name for the discipline, from vexillum, Latin for a military standard, and it consumed, fired and shaped his life. Flags, he wrote in one of his 27 vexillological books, 'are employed to honour and dishonour, warn and encourage, threaten and promise, exalt and condemn, commemorate and deny'. They 'remind and incite and defy...the child in school, the soldier, the voter, the enemy, the ally and the stranger'.Flags of a kind date back at least 5,000 years'he liked to cite an ancient Iranian one, made from copper. But their modern significance, he argued (and who would contradict him'), started with the 16th-century Dutch revolt against Spain. For the first time it was not a state or monarch being symbolised, but a people, a language, a culture and a cause.They mark landings (the moon) and victories, too. The American conquest of the Japanese island of Iwo Jima was a fine example. As he explained to People magazine: 'Six guys putting their lives on the line to...Continue reading
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