Sherwood Foresters Collection
THE STORY OF POPPY DAY
HOW IT ALL BEGAN..
The areas of Northern France known as Flanders and Picardy, saw some of the most concentrated and bloodiest fighting of the FIRST WORLD WAR.
There was complete devastation. Buildings, roads, trees and natural life simply disappeared. Where once there were homes and farms there was now a sea of mud, a grave for the dead where men still lived and fought.
Only one other living thing survived. The poppy, flowering each year with the coming of the warmer weather, brought LIFE, HOPE, COLOUR and REASSURANCE to those still fighting.
In 1915, Major John McRAE, a doctor serving with the Canadian Armed Forces, was so deeply moved by what he saw that he scribbled the following verses in his pocket book;
Three years later McCRAE was to die in a Military Hospital on the French Channel Coast. Shortly before he died, with the British coastline visible on the horizon, he is said to have murmured;
Tell
them this, if ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep.
On the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month 1918, the FIRST WORLD WAR ended. Thousands had died, thousands more had been injured and scarred by their experiences.
Moina MICHAEL, an American War Secretary with the YMCA and herself a writer of verse, had been moved by McCRAE’s work and had written;
And now the Torch and Poppy
red
Wear in honour of our dead
Miss MICHAEL bought red poppies with money that had been given to her by work colleagues, and wearing one of the poppies she had bought, sold the remainder to her friends to raise a small amount of money for servicemen in need.
The first actual POPPY DAY was held in Britain
on November 11th 1921 and was a national success.
