British Numeric Signal Flags: 1827

In his book Télégraphie Nautique Polyglotte, Reynold show a system used in England to express the numbers of boats This code is a different system from Popham's or Marryat's codes.

• number 1: quartered red and white
• number 2: vertical tricolor red white blue
• number 3: vertical bicolor yellow blue
• number 4: horizontal tribar blue white red
• number 5: chess-board 3x3 yellow and blue
• number 6: white with a blue cross
• number 7: horizontal bicolor red and white
• number 8: diagonal bicolor white and blue
• number 9: white with red border
• number 0: white with blue border

Dominique Cureau, 19-21 September 2006

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Some of the individual flags, 1,2,4,5,8 and 0 had been used in Lord Howe's Code of 1790 as 5,8,9,6,2 and 0 respectively, but all ten flags, as a set, were probably introduced in 1827 when the Signal Books were revised.

The assigned values were changed in 1859 and the set of flags continued in use as the Royal Navy's numeral flags until 1948 when the assigned values were 1,6,5,4,7,3,8,2,9 and 0.
David Prothero 22 September 2006