Colours of the University

Queen's official colours are gold, blue, and red - tricolour! The familiar tricolour appears on the university's flag, crest, sports jerseys, and on numerous souvenirs, clothes, publications, and promotional material.

Back in the 1870s, Queen’s had a motto and its crest, but nothing colour-wise to set it apart. The only formally designated colours at the university belonged to the soccer team, whose members wore "dark red stockings, white knickerbockers, and dark-blue jerseys."

Other players complained about the difficulties on the field when their nondescript uniforms mixed with their opponents. Some improvised colours for their uniforms, and students took to identifying their faculty by tying blue, gold or red ribbons to their hats, inspired by the colours on the college crest.

In 1884 the president of the Alma Mater Society formed a committee to address this. After consulting with Queen’s soccer and rugby captains, it passed a motion that consecrated blue, gold and red as the university’s official colours because they are the main colours of the university's coat of arms.

The colours were quickly adopted on and off the playing field and soon made their way into school chants and songs. The red, gold, and blue became a Queen's trademark and its teams came to be known as the "Tricolour," a nickname superseded only in recent decades by "Gaels."

At first, the “tricolor” was arranged in parallel bars, leading a Pittsburgh newspaper in 1899 to mockingly describe Queen’s hockey players: "The visitors presented rather an odd appearance, because their skating costume contains such a combination of colours as to make the players look like animated sticks of candy or skating barber poles."

The tricolour used American spelling, “tricolor,” until the mid-1970s. In 1978, the Tricolor yearbook became the Tricolour, and a decade later, Principal Ronald Watts empowered an advisory committee to bring uniformity and proper heraldic form to all Queen’s visual symbols. 

Most of Queen's faculties and many of its schools also have adopted colours. Arts and Science, Engineering and Applied Science, and Medicine were first to choose to divide up the tricolour, picking - respectively - red, gold, and blue, colours that are most evident in the faculty jackets worn by many students.