Patrick Reid - Wild Colonial Boy

 While I am primarily known as a magazine photographer I would like to point out that for many years I wrote stuff for Vancouver Magazine, I had a gardening column in Western Living and I wrote pieces for the Saturday Vancouver Sun and for Charles Campbell’s little Vancouver Sun Magazine Queue that had a feature called Rear Window. The following one ran on June 29.

Belfast, Ireland-born William Lockhart Reid (a.k.a. Paddy and Patrick) graduated first in his class from Sandhurtst in 1944. As a young tank commander in the North Irish Horse in Italy, he played polo on captured German Army horses during the lulls in the heavy fighting. In 1954, on a train on route from Montreal to the military college at Kingston, Ont, he heard some exchanges he thought were about the Canadian national emblem. The argument turned out to be about a hockey team in Toronto.

On St. Patrick’s Day, 1958, Patrick Reid played O Canada on the piano on the stage of the old Bay Theatre on Denman Street. It was a campaign rally for the Chinese Canadian MP from Vancouver Centre, Douglas Jung.

When Lester Pearson’s office called Reid, late in October 1963, to get the quagmired  proposal for the new Canadian flag in some order, he did quick vexillogical research and went home. He and his wife Allison, agreed the flag should be identical on both sides and a child should be able to draw it. Designer Jacques Saint-Cyr reduced the original 23-point sugar maple  leaf to 13. Reid suggested the axing of an additional two. The finished prototype (on a bedsheet sewn by Joan O’Malley) was delivered to Sussex Drive in Ottawa on November 8. The national flag of Canada was raised on Parliament Hill on February 15, 1965.

In July 1991, I interviewed Reid, ex-commissioner-general of Expo 86, then chairman of the Vancouver Port Corporation, on his involvement  with the trade side of the Abbotsford Air Show, Air Show Canada. Reid had always been in love with airplanes. He switched to tanks when his six-foot-five frame wouldn’t fit into a Spitfire cockpit. I suggested taking his photograph with a paper airplane. His eyes lit up like a child’s as he folded the paper for my shot. It was then that he revealed his contribution to the creation of the Canadian flag. “Although Jacques Saint-Cyr was the designer, my contribution was relatively minor but it was quick and spontaneous,” he modestly added.

Of his 46 years in Canada, Reid wrote in his 1995 memoir, Wild Canadian Boy:

“As a newcomer, I have been blessed. I have watched the dawn at Cape Spear, the wild Atlantic grasping at the hills of Newfoundland, I have sailed out of Halifax, followed the Cabot Trail, mingled with Japanese children at Green Gables, flown from Goose Bay across an endless unfolding of rivers, lakes and tundra, built an igloo near Churchill, explored Quebec’s North Shore, Learned French at Saint Foy, savoured the bistros of Montreal, followed the Rideau Canal from Kingston to Ottowa, climbed the Peace Tower, worked for the Canadian National Exhibition, borrowed a buffalo coat from a Winnipeg policeman to brave Portae and Main, light-planed over horizons of gold at Prairie harvest time, ridden out north of Edmonton on a crisp white day, nostrils flared on horse and rider, pale blue sky forever. I have trod the boards in Dawson City, seen cattle by the thousands in the Cariboo, sampled the harvest of the sun-drenched vineyards in the Okanagan, cruised from Vancouver through the Inland Passage, faced the Pacific surf thundering over Long Beach on Vancouver Island. It is a journey of a lifetime, traveling a land like ours, a land like no other.”

Patrick Reid & the Mig 29 

William Adrian Lockhart Reid (aka Patrick) - Statesman & Flag Designer