THE UNION JACK

The mood towards the Union Jack was still reverential in the 1950s, and less than a week before the

[Queen’s] coronation it had been one of the flags solemnly placed on the top of Mount Everest. But

among coronation souvenirs were certain garments bearing the Union Jack design. […] As the

1950s drew to a close, the critic Kenneth Allsop said “Every generation of kids since has been

swayed by the sort of skepticism and derision that produces Carnaby Street knickers with Union

Jacks on them”.

The sixties had begun, and bands such as the Beatles were seen as national exports, cultural

colonialists, ambassadors for a new Britishness. This was an entirely different way of flying the

flag, and informal and ironic patriotic gestures became the norm. After centuries of military and

imperial grandeur, the Union Jack changed almost overnight into an ultra — fashionable design icon.

The Union lack became a touchstone of the new generation, and the pop scene emphatically

embraced its colours and style. The flag not only appeared adorning girls ’  bums, it became the

commercial trademark of British cool, and it one of the defining commodities of the 1960s.

Was it art? Did Mod share the same ethos as the American Pop artist Jasper Johns, who had

famously painted the Stars and Stripes? The singer George Melly thought not, arguing that Carnaby

Street, the centre of Swinging London, was in a totally different spirit: “From shopping bags and

china mugs [the Union Jack] soon graduated to bikinis and knickers. Americans, for whom the flag

in their century of Imperialism has a great deal more significance, were amazed by our casual

acceptance of our flag as a giggle. They might burn their flag in protest but they ’d never wear it to

cover their genitaIia."

The flag was omnipresent in 1960s culture. This ubiquity may explain the enthusiasm for the Union

Jack during the 1966 World Cup, hosted by England. English football fans did not carry banners of

St George crosses or even standards of the three lions or the Tudor rose, but flew the Union Jack: in

other words, the competition was for the fans as much a celebration of Swinging London and the

sixties as it was the England football team.

Throughout the 1970s the flag remained strongly associated with the racist National Front, whose

first policy was ‘Stop all immigration and start phased repatriation’. There were, of course, positive

occasions for the flag. [...] Queen Elizabeth’s 1977 Silver Jubilee [...] was an attempt to rekindle a

sense of a united Britain and it also inspired the most pungent reinvention of the flag since the

Mods: the cataclysmic arrival of punk rock. The Union Jack was clearly a highly resonant and

contested sign, and so became a favourite design for punks.

(from Nick Groom, The Union Jack. The Story of the British Flag, London, Atlantic Books, 2006)