Vexillologist

Born: February 26, 1940;

Died: November 17, 2016

WHITNEY Smith, who has died aged 76, is one of the few people in the modern world who could claim to

have established an entire scholarly field of study and even invented a name for it.

Smith was the founding father of vexillology – the study of flags. He was only 17 when he came up with the term, marrying the Latin word for flag vexillum and the Ancient Greek suffix meaning study. He went on to design a national flag for Guyana when he was 20.

The flag has a red triangle on a larger golden triangle against a green field, the colours representing respectively nation building, forward momentum and agriculture and forests. He got his mother to stitch together a prototype (with the colours originally in a different order) and sent it off.

It would be another six years before the British colony, formerly known as British Guiana, became an independent country.

When it did officials had difficulty tracking Smith down and were surprised to discover that he was not Guyanese, but rather a middle-class, white, young man from New England.

The flag, known as the Golden Arrow, is now hugely popular and can be seen on private houses as well as public buildings throughout the small South American nation.

Whitney Smith Junior was born into an old New England family in Arlington, Massachusetts, in 1940. He traced his fascination with flags back to one day as a small child when his father gave him a little Stars and Stripes to wave at the Patriots’ Day parade.

Within a few years he was acting as an unofficial adviser on the erection of the flags at the parade. “I’d go down there before Patriots’ Day and tell the highway department crew how to set up the flags in the proper order of admission to the Union,” he said.

“The workers always looked as if they wished this kid would go home to his sandbox.”

The designs and the colours and stories of flags fascinated him. A studious and inquisitive youngster, he was determined to find out everything he could, but was disappointed by how few books and articles were available. So he began doing his own research, writing to consulates and publishing articles while still in his teens.

“Some of the kids thought I was weird,” he told one interviewer years later. “But to be 13 years old and literally the only person in the Western world who knew what the flag of Bhutan looked like, well, this was my world.”

Smith studied political science at Harvard and Boston Universities, writing about political symbolism for his doctorate. He subsequently taught at Boston.

He had founded the Flag Research Centre as early as 1962, and in 1970 he left teaching to devote himself full-time to the agency, which he ran from his 16-room mansion in Winchester, Massachusetts.

Smith managed to develop his childhood interest in flags into a hobby, a respected area for scholarly study, a full-time career and an obsession. In 1985, he told People magazine: “I have something that infuses my whole life. I relate flags to everything … I work at it nine hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.

“I’ll probably never get into music or drama, I have no television set in my house, only one radio. I drive a 1951 Plymouth. I don’t go out to eat in expensive restaurants.” By that point two marriages had ended in divorce. He had two children, who survive him, but do not share his fascination for flags – one became a restaurateur.

Governments and commercial companies came to Smith for advice and help and he worked on flags for the Caribbean islands of Aruba and Bonaire, the continent of Antarctica and the Saudi Arabian navy.

He founded various vexillology organisations and wrote numerous books and journal articles.

In 2011 Smith was named officially by Encyclopaedia Britannica as its most prolific contributor, with more than 250 entries.

In recent years, he had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease

BRIAN PENDREIGH