Let's Avoid Making the Humble Poppy a Far-Right Symbol
Perhaps I have been living under a stone, but I had no idea—nor did my friends and acquaintances—that the symbolic poppy has been taken over by far-right groups. Neil Mackay raised this concern in his article published on November 6, noting how the poppy’s meaning has been distorted.
My late father survived the Normandy landings, and his father was injured at Passchendaele by a shell. He was evacuated to the Netley receiving hospital on Southampton Water, where he refused surgery to remove his legs. After being treated in twelve hospitals, he returned to Passchendaele to fight again, enduring harsh weather in his kilt. Even when he died, he still carried a fragment of shrapnel near his spine and a wound so severe that a fist could pass through it.
“Lest we forget.”
My mother’s boyfriend was lost with all hands when HMS Kite was torpedoed in 1944, a tragedy my father had only recently shared with me. It haunted her throughout her life and showed me the depth of sacrifice endured by those who went to war to defend democracy and the country.
My father instilled in us a strong commitment to the Earl Haig Fund and to wearing the poppy as a sign of respect and remembrance. I recall him standing to attention, tears in his eyes, during the minute’s silence each year on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
Author’s Summary
The author reflects on personal family sacrifices during wartime, urging that the poppy’s true meaning of remembrance should not be tarnished by extremist associations.