Remembrance poppy quotes3/27/2023 ![]() Laura Clouting: “If you look at photos from, say, the unveiling of the Cenotaph, the wreaths that are laid around its base were actually not of poppies. But at this point we can see that the poppy was not yet the flower of Remembrance that we think of it as today. In 1920, there were numerous acts of Remembrance across Britain, such as two-minute silence, the burial of the unknown warrior and the unveiling of the Cenotaph in London. Laura Clouting: “In May 1915, during a break from tending to wounded and dying soldiers, he wrote a new poem and it's a poem commonly known as ‘In Flanders Fields’, and it's has its setting as a cemetery and it's written as if it was it were being spoken by dead soldiers and this poem did become popular during the war, it was published in hugely popular magazines, it helped to, I suppose, connect the symbolism of death during the war with the poppy and McCrae himself did not actually survive the war, but it was really after the war that the poppy became the iconic symbol of Remembrance that it is today.” John McCrae wasn't an established writer but he had had poems published back in Canada and as a military doctor he used what rest time he had to write poems in response to what he was experiencing during the war. He was a medic in a dressing station very close to the front line near Ypres. So, I did that, I sent them to Jessica but when she died there was found among her belongings the envelope in which I had sent home those poppies with the remains of the poppies still there.”Īmong the millions of people who saw the poppies on the Western Front was a Canadian doctor called Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae. ![]() IWM actually has quite a number of examples of these poppies in our collection and they're an incredible thing to look at a hundred years later.”Īrchibald Dickson: “The Flanders poppied them all over this place, there was poppies had sprung up and they were so uh talked about regarded as symbolic in a way that I thought I’d pick a few and send them home. Laura Clouting: “Because they grew so commonly many soldiers not only enjoyed looking at them but lots of soldiers actually plucked them out of the soil and took the fragile petals to press into letters home and I think for soldiers, although we think of the poppy as being quite a depressing thing in some ways because we associate it with the lives lost, at the time many soldiers felt that they were a really beautiful sigh. Norah Baker: “Oh I do, yes, it is a very good symbol yes.” ![]() ![]() Interviewer: “So, do you think the poppy is a good symbol?” Norah Barker: “It is very poor agricultural land all the way along and I can remember the fields more or less red with poppies than anything else. Interviewer: “Am I right in thinking that area would have had a lot of poppies?” And they were everywhere, there was a huge profusion of them in the Western Front so they would have been something that soldiers saw very commonly.” Laura Clouting: “So the red poppy has arguably become the most enduring symbol of Remembrance and really that is linked to I suppose what we could call a botanical phenomenon uh because poppies provided this kind of shocking burst of plant life in very otherwise bleak landscapes on the Western Front and that really was helped along actually by the fact that modern weaponry, particularly artillery basically pulverised the soil and high explosive shells actually had quite a surprisingly generative effect and they basically created the perfect conditions in which this, the red poppy could grow. So, what is it about the poppy that captured the public imagination so profoundly? Why do some people see the poppy as a controversial symbol? And how was the poppy chosen in the first place? ![]() These evocative displays demonstrate the resounding popularity of the poppy over 100 years since the end of the First World War. This year the poppy sculptures are being installed at IWM North. Nearly 10 million people saw this display in total. Two parts of this installation later went on tour around the UK to 19 different locations before ending up at IWM London in 2018. In 2014, 800,000 ceramic copies designed by Paul Cummings and Tom Piper went on display at the Tower of London. ![]()
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