Poppy’s beauty is rebuke to bad actors who have sought to disfigure it

Your parents had told you simply that you were remembering all the young soldiers who’d died in the First and Second World Wars and that the poppy was the flower that grew on the fields where the battles had been fought.

Occasionally, if you asked them, they would mention the names of uncles twice removed who’d fallen, but told you little else. This was a time when memories of the slaughter were still raw and when those who had fought or lived through it were reluctant to share what they’d seen and heard.

I’ve since often wondered why old men who had been heroic in the face of the world’s greatest evil were slow to tell you of their deeds. I’ve come to understand though, that these men still grieve the loss of their friends and comrades and will bear that sorrow to their own graves. To speak of the circumstances of their deaths would be disrespectful to memories they still held to be sacred.

That morning in November 1975 though, the poppy-seller had come to our class in the midst of a lesson and our teacher (a very good one) wasn’t best pleased. He offered the opinion that naming the charity receiving our donations in honour of Earl Haig sickened him. And then he proceeded to tell us that this old aristocratic general had not only sent hundreds of thousands of young working-class men to their senseless deaths, but had stayed safely miles away from the fighting.

“How was school today,” my dad had asked me later.

“Fine. Did you know that we shouldn’t be buying poppies because it goes to a charity named after a man who was responsible for the slaughter?”

My dad, an old-fashioned Socialist and trade unionist, who had fought attempts by what we now call the hard left to infiltrate his union, thought he could spot a wrong ‘un a mile off. At the next school parents’ night it seems he had a brisk conversation with my history teacher.

Class system

IN time, I learned to sympathise with both of their positions. It was surely right that, early in our education, we were told of the senselessness of the 1914-1918 war and the iniquitous class system that then operated in the British Army. This was a time when battlefield strategy was often devised by feckless aristocrats considered too thick to be admitted to Oxford and Cambridge, even when the academic goalposts were moved to let in many of their fellow gentlemen.

But my dad probably felt, reasonably that politicising the poppy in this way to 12-year-old children was ill-judged. For him, the important thing was that children born in peace-time knew about the sacrifices of the fallen. And besides, we could arrive at our own conclusions when we’d read about the causes and effects of the Great War in our history classes.

In recent years, my views on wearing the poppy have become conflicted, due in part to its weaponising as a test of patriotic allegiance. Yet, conflicts about how Britain should mark the supreme sacrifices have been with us almost since the end of the First World War.

In his excellent essay on the subject, The Complicated History of Remembrance, the Oxford University academic, Dr Adrian Gregory writes: “In the early years of commemoration there had been regular protests by militant sections of the ex-service community. In 1922 there was a memorable march by the unemployed to the Cenotaph after the official ceremonies on 11 November where veterans wore pawn tickets instead of medals. There were frequent local protests on the same lines.

“At the same time there was a rejection of Armistice Day solemnity by other veterans, who wanted a more straightforward victory celebration of their achievements.

Disrespectful

THROUGH much of the 1920s there were regular ‘Armistice Day Balls’ where veterans partied to mark the anniversary of the ceasefire. These came under attack as the decade wore on as disrespectful and inappropriate, which was a major impetus towards their replacement by the consensus of a ‘Festival of Remembrance’.”

Read more

• Why humanists are right to ban Jesus from Scottish schools
• Let’s name and shame the banks and families who got rich on trafficking slaves
• George Square transformation: Inside Glasgow’s £20 million revamp

In Scotland’s Irish/Catholic community, the issue’s been further complicated by the British Army’s conduct in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, in particular the murder of 14 innocent civilians in Derry during the Bloody Sunday massacre of January, 1972.

Britain’s participation for highly dubious reasons in the second Iraq war has also added a measure of contentiousness to the poppy. I think it’s reasonable to state though, that the overwhelming majority of those who choose to wear the poppy do so in remembrance of those who died in the two World Wars.

Wretchedly, the poppy has been distorted and fetishised by increasingly aggressive right-wing ideologues. In this, the poppy has been used to target people who are caught in public without it. With each passing year, poppy displays have become more absurdly muscular and extravagant to the point where it has come to represent all that it was supposed to rebuke: vengefulness, authoritarianism, bullying.

Just as regrettable has been the move by the professional, middle-class flag-worriers who have produced a poppy stitched into the Palestine flag. The most evil of all the evils in the Second World was the Nazis’ genocide against the Jewish race. Distorting the poppy in this way, knowing that it will cause anguish to Jewish people still reeling from the savagery of Hamas on October 7, 2023 is callous.

Sacred emblem

THE beauty of the poppy lies in its simplicity and fragility. It was the first flower to re-grow on the charred battlefields of the Western Front and, as such, came to be an almost sacred emblem of sacrifice and hope overcoming death and destruction. Its power lay in its unarmed resilience. This is most profoundly conveyed by the verses of In Flanders Fields, written in 1915 by a Canadian doctor, Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae who had just buried his friend, Alexis Hermer who had fought and died at the second battle of Ypres.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

The poppy’s austere beauty is a rebuke to the bad actors on right and left who have sought to disfigure it. And so, I’ll wear it on November 11 to honour those who fought and died for us and for our freedom to protest and to resist.

Kevin McKenna is Scotland’s Columnist of the Year