Red Ensign
EnsignWikipedia
10
MENTIONS
6
EPISODES
6
PODCASTS
Search complete. 10 mentions across 6 episodes found for "Red Ensign".
Sep 22, 2026
Peter DannNARRATOR
I remembered also the alarmist articles I had read about the great number of foreigners in the British merchant service, and I didn't know how far these lamentations were justified.
Peter DannNARRATOR
In my time the proportion of non-Britishes in the crews of the ships flying the Red Ensign was rather under one-third, which as a matter of fact was less than the proportion allowed under the very strict French navigation laws for the crews of the ships of that nation.
Peter DannNARRATOR
For the strictest laws aiming at the preservation of national seamen had to recognize the difficulties of manning merchant ships all over the world.
Peter DannNARRATOR
The one-third of the French law seemed to be the irreducible minimum.
40 MINS LATER
Peter DannNARRATOR
I am speaking now, naturally, of the sea, as a man who has lived on it for many years, at a time, too, when, on sighting a vessel on the horizon of any of the great oceans, it was perfectly safe to bet any reasonable odds on her being a British ship, with the certitude of making a pretty good thing of it at the end of the voyage.
Peter DannNARRATOR
I have tried to convey here, in popular terms, the strong impression remembered from my young days.
Peter DannNARRATOR
The Red Ensign prevailed on the high seas to such an extent that one always experienced a slight shock on seeing some other combination of colours blow out at the peak or flagpole of any chance encounter in deep water.
Peter DannNARRATOR
In the long run, the persistence of the visual fact forced upon the mind a half-unconscious sense of its inner significance.
Barry EadesNARRATOR
After breakfast we hang over the rail, discussing the nationality of the ship, which has now risen to her upper top sails perhaps, and bets are laid in favor of her being an Englishman.
Barry EadesNARRATOR
By and by her hull rises out of the water, and we see by the look of it and the cut of her courses that she flies the English flag long before she hoists the Red Ensign.
Barry EadesNARRATOR
Then the little mate assumes an air of great importance and proceeds to select from the locker the flags K, C, B, D, which in the international code language spell Mandalore.
Barry EadesNARRATOR
While he is bending them onto the signal halyards, much agitated for fear of putting D above B, Pete, the monkey, who, it will be remembered, was secured to the flag locker, has stealthily possessed himself of the signal code book, and before I could rescue it, has totally destroyed thirty or forty pages from the middle of the book.
Steve PaikinHOST
Because, uh, uh, you know, we've only had a flag for six decades, right? And the, the flag that your grandfather fought under in World War I or your Uncle Bob fought under in World War II, uh, was not the same flag we have today.
Steve PaikinHOST
That was the old Red Ensign.
Steve PaikinHOST
And I wonder, I mean, you've, you refer to this, so let's go here.
Steve PaikinHOST
What, what would they have thought when Lester Pearson came to Winnipeg in 1964 to promote the idea of the new flag, which is the one, of course, we have now?
Carol OffGUEST
You know, just, we so many times we think, "Oh, I wish our grandparents or our parents were still alive so we could ask them questions." But, um, there, there's th- this, this amazing video of that moment when Lester Pearson decided he was going to introduce this idea that the time had come for Canada to have its own flag, and he was [laughs] going to do it not just in Winnipeg, but he was gonna do it at the, at the g- the, the convention of, of veterans at, at the Legion.
Carol OffGUEST
Uh, an annual convention where there are 2,000 m- men and women, mostly men, who had fought in those wars.
Carol OffGUEST
And he introduced the idea that time has come to have our own flag, and to say the Red Ensign and the, and the Union Jack, God love them, but they are our history.
Carol OffGUEST
We're ...
speaker_0NARRATOR
The Royal Navy had not lost a frigate in single combat in living memory.
speaker_0NARRATOR
The assumption of British naval invincibility, not merely in London but in American ports, in the halls of Congress, in the hearts of men who had grown up watching the Red Ensign dominate every ocean on the globe, cracked at that moment.
speaker_0NARRATOR
Not shattered, but cracked, visibly and permanently.
speaker_0NARRATOR
Constitution was not finished.
Alistair EaglesHOST
Yeah, and since its inception, the campaign to highlight the Merchant Navy has grown into a national event.
Alistair EaglesHOST
The red ensign, effectively known as the Red Duster, is flown at historic properties, political establishments, village greens right across the UK.
Alistair EaglesHOST
If you can't fly the flag, we've been encouraged to join in and wear a splash of red at work or at home.
Nigel ThompsonHOST
Yeah, why not? Because today merchant seafarers handle 95% of the UK's traded goods.
RoryHOST
i
ThorHOST
I won't be flying that Red Ensign is what I meant to fly, isn't it? If you take your boat overseas, do you have to fly the Red Ensign? Or what happens to be done?
RoryHOST
Supposedly, but I think fewer and fewer people care about this kind of stuff.
RoryHOST
But anyway, just to go back to the origins of World War I and what it was really all about, I was doing some reading again i think it might have actually been in this titanic book about the origins of the first world war and apparently because i don't know if you know queen victoria had a house on the isle of wight osborne house and her and her um and of course all the royals in europe were all intermarried and whatnot but queen victoria's favorite grandson it said was a guy called they called willie who was to become Kaiser Wilhelm.