A piece of Oshawa in Hampshire
Resident working to design flag for English county
Mike Jacobs holds up the design that he hopes will become the eventual flag of Hampshire in England. The Oshawa math teacher says he is pushing to have the flag registered in honour of his late father.
By Graeme McNaughton/The Oshawa Express
It is something that nearly every city, county, province and country has. They adorn flagpoles and, as seen during the Olympics, can become a source of pride, rising to the rafters at a medal presentation.
But not everywhere has a flag of its own – and when Mike Jacobs looks to where he grew up and lived for much of his life, he knew they needed one.
“I’m from Hampshire. And I have also lived in Cornwall and Devon, and these are places in England that had their own flags, and I thought Hampshire needed one too. I came up with a design, never really thought about it,” the Oshawa resident says of the work he did about 20 years ago.
“What was happening was a lot of counties around England were starting to get their own flags, so I pulled out my own design, made some changes to it and actually got one made. Since then, I’ve been trying to get people in Hampshire to adopt it.”
Jacobs has already made a trip back to Hampshire this summer, taking part of his vacation to drum up support for his design.
While he is no vexillographer – a professional flag designer – the Oshawa math teacher says there is plenty of symbolism in the flag he has designed.
“Hampshire has a famous design called the rose and crown, the crown representing the royal connections going back to Alfred the Great…and the rose is just a common motif used for Hampshire. So I had that as my central design,” he says.
“For the green, I had the downs, which are the hills in Hampshire and blue for the body of water in the south of Hampshire called The Solent, and then separating them is a thin white stripe to represent the chalk, which comprises the hills in Hampshire.”
When asked what was driving his push to get a flag for Hampshire, Jacobs replied with a long-time Hampshire resident: his father.
“A couple of years ago, my father took ill, and as he got more and more ill, it got more and more important for me to get this flag registered, which he did,” he says.
“After that, I thought that I really wanted to honour his memory, and push for the Hampshire flag to get registered, and that’s what I’m trying to do.”
Jacobs says he has not heard as to when exactly the county will be adopting a new flag, but says he has been notified by the county council that it wants to adopt one soon. The flag designer says that he imagines there will be a county-wide competition at that time, with residents voting on which flag they would like to see flown for all of England to see.