House flags of Halland & Nornan (shipping companies: Sweden)

The 18 November 2007 updated of the Maritime Timetable Images site yielded following interesting house flag, that of ‘Rederi AB Halland & Nornan (Hallandsbolaget)’, Sweden listing passenger and goods routes linking Swedish, Danish, and German ports.

The house flag shown on said brochure is a pennant, horizontally divided blue over yellow, bearing one white six-pointed star on the upper stripe and two on the lower which are red and green, respectively.

Allowing for a little speculation, the pennant in the Maritime Timetable source would then be the combined house flag for Halland and Nornan, a firm which amalgamated with the former in 1928 (brochure published three years later). In other words, the Nornan pennant would by then no longer have been in use.

Hallands Ångbåts AB founded in 1850 specializing in passenger traffic between Gothenburg and Lübeck and (later) to Fredrikshavn which came to be called Gothenburg Frerikshavns Lines or, commonly, Sessanlinjen. 1924 taken over by the Broström group. Amalgamated with AB Nornan (mainly goods transportation) in 1928, the new company name being AB Halland & Nornan. After World War II growing competition by other forms of traffic caused the firm to be closed by Broström.
Jan Mertens, 29 November 2007

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Rederi A/B Nornan is shown by Lloyds 1912¹ and Brown 1929¹⁰ so its flag is established but apart from the fact that it was a pennant. I do not know about speculating that there was a combination of two flags when they became part of Rederi A/B Halland & Nornan. Nornan was operated by Th. Ahrenberg (Lloyds Shipowners 1917-8) with the merger not being mentioned in the Broström centennial history. Whether it was a merger or just a joint service their Frederikshavn – Göteborg run in 1935 and Lloyds 1937 only mentions the existence of Hallands Angbats Aktiebolatget who were still operating in the 1950s. The interesting part of this timetable flag is that the stars have 6 points unlike the sources for the Halland flag for which Brown 1943 is the earliest that I have found so what [if any] they used originally is unknown. The bottom "green" star is also suspect both for the combined line and also the later Halland Angbats flag as shown by Brown 1951¹² as opposed to blue shown by Brown 1943 and 1958¹³ editions. The problem of course is that blue placed on yellow can produce a green look. For the best source I looked for the cap badge in Collectors Corner which like the timetable gives a sky blue upper half to the flag, places the stars bunched into the hoist with the upper white looking a little larger, and the lower two being red and what, to me, looks like dark blue.
Neale Rosanoski, 24 December 2007