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Crown Agents, United Kingdom

image located by Al Kirsch, 24 April 2001

Description of the flag

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United Kingdom

Description of the flag

The logo and, as it is rectangular, presumably the flag, of Crown Agents, an international consultancy. A black and white version can be seen in the 21 April 2001 issue of The Economist where they advertise for someone to fill a position. The color version is from their web site, www.crownagents.com .

I cannot decipher the curious logo in the upper hoist. It does not appear to me to be a crown, and though it looks like the letter K in a back-to-back design, there is no K in the name of the company. (Perhaps the founder?) It may also be said to look like the Cyrillic "zh", but that's even more far-fetched.
Al Kirsch, 24 April 2001

It might perhaps be two superimposed arrow-heads, one pointing up and one pointing down? The original Crown Agents were appointed by the Colonial Secretary to act as agents in London for British colonies and protectorates. I don't think they had a badge or emblem, but government property used to be identified by being marked with an arrow-head. Many colonies ordered their flags through the Crown Agents.
David Prothero, 26 April 2001

Our logo was originally designed to suggest but not replicate the flags of those of Crown Agents' client countries which, when the flag was created in the late sixties had recently become independent. The yellow (ideally, gold) motif is a stylized crown, representing the Crown in our name which in turn references our traditional links with the British Crown and government. Unlike other entities which used and still use a naturalistic crown in their emblem, ours is deliberately non-representational as an indicator of our links with, but distance from, UK government. Furthermore it was to avoid the combination of red, white and blue – in order to avoid too close an identification with the United Kingdom. Our blue in print is Pantone 289, notoriously hard to reproduce exactly, and chosen to avoid direct comparison with other countries' blues. The diagonal blue band and the blue triangle in the right-hand corner together represent a stylized letter A for Agents.

Prior to this emblem, it is correct, as your correspondent David Prothero says, that we had no fixed badge, although there has always been a distinctive CA watermark that Crown Agents Stamp Bureau still uses on its security paper.
Stanley Adamson, 27 July 2005