LEST WE FORGET
Not even the worldwide coronavirus pandemic could stop the Poppy Appeal, although last year the Royal British Legion was forced to abandon traditional door-todoor sales and spend £70,000 on hand sanitiser. Thankfully this November 11 (or the Sunday nearest) Remembrance ceremonies will again take place to commemorate the dead of the two world wars and many subsequent conflicts. And what's more, this year will mark the centenary of the sale of red paper poppies.
The choice of the red poppy symbol owes its origins to a poem written in 1915 by Canadian army surgeon John McCrae. “In Flanders Fields” was written while McCrae was serving behind the lines near Ypres. Sitting in the back of a medical field ambulance near an advance dressing post at Essex Farm, he was inspired by the proliferation of poppies growing both on the (as the scarlet corn poppy is officially known) had been noticed, either. The fields of Waterloo had been strewn with the same crimson flowers a century before and as early as 1694, Lord Perth was writing of the poppies that appeared after the battle of Landen, “as if last year’s blood has taken root and has appeared as this year in flowers.” Nevertheless, the first wreaths laid at the Cenotaph in 1919 were made not of poppies, but a variety of blooms including the Bleuet de France cornflowers, still the symbol of remembrance across the Channel. It was not until 1921, when the first Royal British Legion poppy appeal took place, that the red paper poppy now ubiquitous as the symbol of remembrance in the UK and Commonwealth was widely sold or worn. And the story of how this small, versatile and resilient weed became such a powerful icon of war and sacrifice is a complicated one, involving not only McCrae's poem but the campaigning efforts of two remarkable women.
