Last modified: 2017-11-28 by rob raeside
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Regarding the entry in the Dictionary of Vexillology for "Insurance
Flag":
"The term for a 19th Century flag, now obsolete, usually
showing a vessel’s insurance number and issued by the appropriate marine
insurance company, association for mutual insurance or similar – a number
flag. Please note that this is not an established term, but has been
introduced by the Editors since no contemporary source describing such flags
could be found."
A vague reference to an insurance flag was made in Lowestoft Magistrates' Court on 22nd July 1885.
H.J. Sandwell, Master of the trawler 'Sea Flower' LT 566, was charged with
concealing the nationality of his ship by flying a Dutch flag. Sandwell
claimed that he did not know that it was the Dutch flag. Red, white and blue
were English colours and the flag had been hoisted as a signal to the four
other trawlers accompanying him that he was raising steam and would be hauling
in his trawl in one hour. The only other flags on board were a burgee and the
flag of the club in which the ship was insured.
[National Archives (PRO) MT
10/432]
David Prothero, 3 February 2009
I am not sure if this was indeed the "insurance flag" as meant in the
Dictionary of Vexillology or was it simply a flag of the club (insurance
here mentioned being incidentally), but I have no idea what was the 1885
practice there.
What is meant to be covered by the Dictionary of
Vexillology entry (as far as I understand it) are those flags (cf. the
alternate term "number flag") used
for example in Austria-Hungary and some other European countries, to be
hoisted atop of a mast containing a large number of the ships "registration"
or insurance number (whatever it was actually called). In many 19th century
paints of various ships (a popular art discipline in 19th century) these
flags are clearly visible. As far as I have noticed, these were monocoloured
flags with large two or three cypher numerals. I have seen the flag being
blue, red or white, with white letters in the first two cases and blue in
the last. I suspect that the colours may have something to do with the port
of registration (or some other such rule, maybe the insurance house), since
it appears that the ships of the same owner used the same colour pattern for
those flags.
Cf. http://www.ppmhp.hr/files/24-1004-full.html the blue
flags on the foremasts (also note the onomasts
on the main).
I have not found any literature regarding these number
flags and they are largely a mystery to me, however, it seems that they
appear regularly on the Austrian-Hungarian ships of 19th century.
Željko Heimer, 6 February 2009
I expect the "early 19th century" might be a bit local. We have the painting of De Groninger Eendracht showing it flying the number/registration flag of the compact Orange, before being wrecked on Lundy in 1942. That's considerably later than the early 19th century.
These flags had to be simple, but Orange, for example, used an orange field with a Dutch Canton, Zeemanshoop used an anchor in the canton, several merely wrote the numbers in the white stripe of a tribar, etc. I guess the colleges might have used more elaborate flags than the compacts.
Compacts were usually local organisations. Insurance elsewhere probably was little different. The organisation's choice of colour would often be inspired by the local flag, if any, but could be different, as the reference to the Royal House of Orange demonstrates.
See the Zeemanscolleges page for the colleges, and the introduction there plus the
notes on Orange on for the
compacts. "Insurance flag" might be a bit limited, as it excludes the
colleges, and probably similar organisations elsewhere. Obviously, as the
insured with the compacts were "flag members", the flags will have been
"member flags". I don't know whether insurances elsewhere were mutual as
well, or whether they would have had a different form of registration.
Peter Hans van den
Muijzenberg, 21 February 2009
There is a good article in [dsa] by Johhan Schmidt "Signal- oder
Nummernflaggen", Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv 6 (1983) pp. 265–271.
http://ww2.dsm.museum/DSA/DSA06_1983_265271_Schmidt.pdf
Apparently,
these insurance flags were introduced indeed after the initiative of the
insurance companies to more easily track and identify individual ships. They
seem to appear in 1820 in the Netherlands and by the mid-19 c. spread through
Germany (and presumably other countries, we know that Austria[-Hungary] used
them as well).
It appears that by the mid-second half of the 19th century
these insurance flags were replaced with 4 numeral flags of the International
Signal Code ("Marryat"), although apparently that was not everywhere implemented
at once.
Željko Heimer, 7 July 2017