with Alan to render the artwork of each design and determine the final choice among the many designs submitted.”
Frances was given a working area in the House of Commons. There she made a panel bearing all the flags of the world, with a small area in the middle where a new Canadian design would be placed, visually affording a quick and easy way of avoiding duplication of, or similarity to, another nation’s flag. Design suggestions came from a national contest. Frances took these submissions, drew them to scale, and then placed each in the panel for consideration by Alan Beddoes and herself, and the members of Parliament. They decided yes or no, then moved on to the next submission. “There were some very good ones,” she said, “and some that were awful. Twenty years later, when A.Y. Jackson saw the flag we have now, he said it looked like a Japanese dishrag.”
During the time she worked on the new flag, she was preoccupied by thoughts of the future. The flag work would not last forever. Veterinary medicine appealed to her. So did art. So did music. And, of course, there was always Frances the torch-singer. She sang at the Valentine party in mid-February, receiving much applause. She had a lovely contralto voice, and was confident that with proper training she could sing professionally. But as a career? Well, Doris Day and Jo Stafford weren’t doing too badly. During February she thought about it, but did not forget the other possibilities. Another consideration was the Wrens itself. She could stay in the service and sign on for perhaps twenty years. There were men in the military who were doing just that, planning for a discharge twenty years down the road, with a good pension, only forty years old with twenty years experience in a trade! Get a job and you’re looking at two incomes — paycheque and pension. The only thing wrong with that, in her mind, was those twenty long years in the service — not very exciting or satisfying.
Earlier, in February 1946, she had applied to the Ontario Veterinary College at Guelph for particulars on the course. A few days later she received a reply: she was number 361 on their waiting list of veterans. They would look forward to taking her in the fall of 1948. “I was devastated,” said Frances. “I knew I simply couldn’t wait two years. Now was the time I should be getting my education.” Frustrated, depressed, anxious for her future, she didn’t know where to turn.
Meanwhile, at “Flag HQ,” Frances’s “command post” in Ottawa, work on the new Canadian flag was moving ahead and she was buried in the bureaucratic brouhaha that surrounded the flag’s development. Her discharge from the navy had come through on the twenty-eighth of February, but because of her work on the flag, a letter was written to the secretary of state, and the discharge was placed in abeyance for another six weeks.
As with all operations in the hands of bureaucracies, work on the flag went beyond the six weeks allotted for its completion, and when Frances’s discharge was official, she would be obliged to come back and continue the flag work as a civilian. But until then, most of April was a madhouse of work, changes, delays, more changes, and more work.
On the twenty-third of April, she was on a train to Toronto for a much-appreciated leave, a brief few days with her family. She was twenty-one years old, the war was over, her navy days were over, but looking into her heart she found … nothing. She felt she knew nothing of herself, what she wanted to do with her life, what she could do with her life. Just emptiness. A complete blank. She experienced a sense of frustration, and a profound weariness. Study music? Study art? Like a child, she wanted to do both at once, but as a grown-up could decide on neither.
After a few days at home with her family, she was back in Ottawa on the first of May, as a civilian now. Her situation had changed, but it was business as usual in the committee room: Chaos. There were cartons of new flags yet to be examined and evaluated, hundreds of “old” flags that had been tested and found wanting in one way or another, and scores of designs that “seemed to exhibit a certain merit” for which Frances would have to execute the final art for the committee’s consideration. By mid-May, she was reproducing what would become the lucky semi-finalists. “Most of them were stupid, though,” she said with a long sigh of resignation.
But as sometimes happens in the senseless backing and filling of committee work, a ray of common sense penetrates the clouds of confusion. Someone pauses, and says “Hey, hang on a minute. We’ve got these flags down to about twelve. How about this: Let’s submit them to a group of experts, people who know what they’re doing.” He then looks around at the committee members, all of whom are frowning, wishing they’d said that. Far away at her drawing board, Frances sighs again. “Should have been done months ago.”
But it hadn’t been done then, and it wasn’t done now. New-born common sense was buried beneath discussions, amendments, meetings, and delays. Bureaucracy was once more ascendant. Disenchantment settled over Frances. “The matter is back in the hands of a bunch of politicians who know nothing about the job. And still it goes on! Even the big shots are getting into the act. The prime minister himself, Mackenzie King, dictated a design to me which he thought was awfully good.”
On the seventeenth of June, Alan Beddoes delivered yet another large package to Frances at Flag HQ, the nerve centre of “The Flag Affair.” She opened the parcel.
“Twenty-one variations on the red ensign.” She marvelled at the consistency of the submissions, the number of treatments that doggedly dwelt on that single theme of the red ensign, at that time the de facto flag of Canada (though historically just the flag of the merchant marine). Frances was somewhat concerned. “I wonder if the ministers are aware that a lot of people don’t want to change.”
The next day, Alan Beddoes looked in and dropped another parcel on her desk. “More red ensigns,” he said, “and, oh, here’s a bunch with maple leaves. Not much imagination out there.”
Two days later a frazzled Frances plodded up the stairs to the committee room. “Twenty-four more red ensigns, complete with maple leaves, up to the House of Commons. Will this week ever end?”
After four more days of the same monotonous story, she was growing reluctant to show up for work. “Reported in, and got three more designs that must be ready for the day after tomorrow. Don’t know how long I can keep my sanity.”
The next day: “Two more designs to paint up.” After lunch Alan Beddoes looked into her office, hesitantly, and handed her another parcel.
“I don’t want to see you!” she cried.
“It’s, uh, not many. Maybe … could you do them after supper?”
The following morning she was called into Beddoes’s office. He tried to smile bravely. “Hi, Frances!” He shuffled a few papers around on his desk. “There’s a few, uh, sort of rush orders to paint …”
“A … few … rush … orders!” She almost stamped her foot. “Do you know? Have you any idea …” she stuttered. “Are you aware that I have yet to be paid for any of this flag business?”
The twenty-second of July was her last day, and she packed her bags and left for home. As usual, she thought, with the last shreds of exasperation, after all this bureaucratic brouhaha, all these weeks of work, it would have been so much easier if they had taken the millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money and simply flushed them down the toilet.
The Great Flag Affair of 1946 was shelved and never heard of again.
To move from the active pointlessness of navy life to the inactive pointlessness of civilian life was not much of a career change, and in the autumn and early winter of 1946, Frances found herself looking for a job, any job, and growing more and more frustrated and hopeless, not to mention poorer and poorer with no source of income. The world seemed filled with jobs that started nowhere, went nowhere, and in that dull progress provided neither the satisfaction
