Although I was born in Montrose, Scotland, my family travelled a lot so I grew up in Dundee (Scotland), Perth (Scotland), Belfast (Ulster), Accra (Ghana), Lagos (Nigeria), Montrose (Scotland), and Chesterfield (England). My time in West Africa introduced me to flags as nearly all my friends were from diplomatic families. At the age of nine, a Welsh friend and I decided that it was unfair that every other country had an embassy, but ours didn't. So we set up the Scottish and Welsh Embassies (the constitutional complexities of the United Kingdom had escaped us - as they still do!) We even had flagpoles in our gardens with our national flags on them, just like all the other embassies. The family boat flew a Scottish red ensign - one of the few boats to do so in the last four hundred years.

I've been interested in heraldry since an early age. My first real introduction to the subject was a set of arms carved into the side of one of my grandfather's farm buildings. They showed a lion rampant on a plain field, painted in white and green. Nobody on the farm knew who they belonged to. It took me thirty years to find the answer and then it was by accident. I was reading a historical novel by the late Nigel Tranter in which Lord Gray played quite a large roll. He lived in Red Castle, Lunan Bay. The farm was next to Red Castle, and the arms of Lord Gray were red with a silver lion rampant.

At college I took up Dungeons and Dragons and "used" heraldry a lot more. I also found the College's Grant of Arms in the library, along with the correspondance between the College and Sir Anthony Wagner about the design. My college, Westminster, Oxford, used to be in Westminster, London, where they used the city arms (improperly of course), but on moving to Oxford, and becoming part of the University it was no longer possible to continue with the "borrowed" arms, so new ones were required. Judging by the tone of the later letters Sir Anthony was gradually losing patience with the College's requests. The final arms are gold, with a blue chevron (the Thames which passes through both Westminster and Oxford), bearing three silver shells (to represent Methodism), above the chevron are two red lions rampant facing each other and holding a portculis between them (to represent Westminster - the only common feature between the old and new arms) and below the chevron a third red lion rampant. I took it upon myself to resurrect the under-used arms and become the college "herald". I managed to get the college to use the arms as the frontispiece of the next prospectus. This seemed to reawaken interest in the arms which then started to appear on cardigans, scarfs, etc. Funnily enough no-one choose to start wearing the college blazers again. Maybe pink, yellow and green stripes weren't in fashion...

It was while playing Dungeons and Dragons that I adopted the gold dragon on a blue field as my personal emblem, hence the flag at the top of this page.

After leaving Westminster College, I worked for the BBC as Software Editor. My job was nominally to manage the production of software to accompany the BBC Education TV programmes, but I decided to take a broad interpretation of my role. During the five years I worked for them I wrote the Advanced Teletext System for the BBC Micro, interfaced CEEFAX (the BBC's Teletext service) to the French Minitel system, did computer graphics for TV programmes (BodyMatters and Open University mainly), worked out the system for Roman Numerals in copyright lines, and tried to keep the BBC on the straight and narrow when it came to matters heraldic or vexillological (I objected bitterly to the new flag which was grey with the arms as an achievement, above the letters B B C, on the grounds that we had a perfectly good banner).

I left the BBC some ten years ago to join the MultiMedia Corporation, where I worked on Atlases and encyclopedia and dealt with lots of flags, so heraldry was actually part of my work. I kept a complete set of the World's national flags and as many others as I could find out about up-to-date for inclusion in our products (3D Atlas, Wide World of Animals, ABC NewsLinks, Oxford Children's Encyclopedia).

MultiMedia Corporation was closed down in 1997 and I started working more directly in flags. I am now the General Secretary of the Flag Institute and a director of Flag Institute Enterprises Ltd. I produce the artwork and prepare the layouts for the Institute's journal, Flagmaster. I also work under contract for the Ministry of Defence on producing the UK's flag book, "BR20 Flags of All Nations".

I now work with a small London design company, Nykris Digital Design, where I am a producer, creating website for a wide range of organization, from the Tate Gallery to Unilever plc. I worked on the redesign of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5 and Office 2001, both for the Macintosh, and project-managed an interactive installation at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht on the life and times of Malcolm Maclaren.

At the 18th International Flag Congress (ICV), held in Victoria, BC, Canada, I was elected Secretary-General for Congresses of FIAV, the international flag body. This involves working with the hosts of the ICVs to ensure that everything runs smoothly. The next Congress is in York in 2001, followed by Stockholm in 2003 and Malta in 2005. The three senior officers of FIAV each have personal flags for use at meetings, on cars, etc. Mine is blue with the FIAV knot surrounded by a white border:

My hobbies include heraldry, vexillology (surprised eh?), genealogy, and reading (mainly historical mysteries, sci-fi and fantasy).

 ©2002 The World Flag Database & Graham Bartram
 Flag Drawings © The Flag Institute & Graham Bartram
 Created by Graham Bartram graham@flags.net
 Updated Tuesday, September 17, 2002