Dear Paul

And the answers are…

In FT June I asked, ‘Purple only appears on the colour of two national flags. Can any of our readers name the two countries and the reason why?’

Purple appears in the national flags of Dominica and Nicaragua and the colour was not widely used, at the time when most flags were designed. In early times synthetic colours were not available and the colours used to make flags were extracted from natural sources and purple was very expensive to extract.

Reader Don Powell also correctly identified the second Spanish republic as having Purple in its flag, but of course The Second Spanish Republic lasted from 14 April 1931 to 18 July 1936 (military uprising) or 1 April 1939 (Republican defeat). So technically it’s no longer a recognised flag.

In FT August I asked, ‘Why did the BBC issue an appeal to the general public for postcards in 1942?’

The clue was obviously the year and many of you correctly identified the connection to WW2. Millions of