THE STORY OF THE WHITE POPPY

THE STORY OF THE WHITE POPPY

Though the Great War was called 'the war to end all war', it was not. The terms of its peace treaty were harsh: causes of new wars were blindly enshrined in it. Countries began rebuilding their armies - using men who had been children in 1914 and whose fathers were among the war dead. New weapons factories started work and making profits for their owners. People who wanted peace knew that all this was happening, and that lessons had not been learned from the past.

White poppiesThe Women's Co-operative Guild, founded in 1883, began its life preoccupied with the problems and issues of home and family, but by 1914 attention had turned to the bigger picture: the Guild's Congress declared that 'civilised nations should never again resort to the terrible and ineffectual method of war for the settlement of international disputes'. By the end of the war the guildswomen had learned first hand the extent to which war could profoundly affect and harm their lives. Many of them were the wives, mothers and sisters of men who had been killed. They embarked on an active campaign for peace.

By 1933 they were searching for a symbol which could be worn by guildswomen who wanted to show publicly that they were against war and for nonviolence. Someone came up with the idea of a white poppy.


Workers from the Co-operative Wholesale Society began making the poppies almost at once. Money from selling them, after the production costs had been paid for, was sent to help war-resisters and conscientious objectors in Europe.

The wearing of a white poppy on Armistice Day became a focus for the peace movement, and the Peace Pledge Union took it up in 1936 as 'a definite pledge to peace that war must not happen again'.

In 1938 'Alternative Remembrance' events began: a pacifist religious service was held in London's Regent's Park, followed by a march to Westminster and the laying of a wreath of white poppies at the Cenotaph. 85,000 white poppies, by then an acknowledged symbol of peace, were sold that year. Many people wore them alone, others wore a red poppy as well.

When an ex-serviceman broke the Armistice Silence at the Cenotaph in 1937, with his loud cry of protest against the hypocrisy of praying for peace while preparing for war, he had made clear what everyone was beginning to realise: the people who shared the Silence were not of one mind about what Remembrance meant.

The Second World War began in September 1939. That November the Armistice Day Silence was cancelled.

Four months before the war began a Guild mother had written a letter to the prime minister Neville Chamberlain. In it she told him that she hadn't raised her 20-year-old son to be a good citizen 'for you to claim him now to be a cog in the wheels of a military machine which threatens mankind...I hope I have behind me all the mothers of sons, and the mothers of sons who have already made the supreme sacrifice to show us that war is not the way to transform the world.'

The white poppy was and is a symbol of grief for all people of all nationalities, armed forces and civilians alike, who are victims of war. It has not always been understood. Some people wearing a white poppy have been accused of disrespect to the war dead; they have been shouted at and abused. Some people have been sacked from their jobs for wearing white poppies, and white poppy wreaths have been removed from war memorials and trampled on.

The British Legion strongly objected to the white poppy; for them the red poppy (though associated only with soldiers, and only the British) was a peace symbol, and they felt the white one was in some way competing with it. Some people associated the white poppy with left-wing politics. Many associated it with conscientious objection and the 'conchies' who had been thought of 'cowards and shirkers' in the Great War. There were times when it took strength of mind to go out with a white poppy pinned to one's jacket.

The Second World War was, like the First, a new kind of war. Weapons and machinery were embarking on the hi-tech age, and for the first time civilians as well as soldiers were made their targets. In this war there were up to 17 million military deaths. Up to 30 million civilians were killed, and millions more became refugees. Since 1945 war of some kind has been taking place somewhere in the world, continually, bringing the total of war-related deaths in the 20th century to over 100 million. There was also the Cold War, and the nuclear risks which it increased. The Peace Pledge Union's White Poppy Appeal slogan in the 1990s got it right: 'War cannot create peace'. The will and a way had to be found to abolish war altogether.

On the afternoon of Remembrance Sunday in 1980, a silent procession walked from Trafalgar Square to the Cenotaph and laid a wreath of white poppies. This was the inscription on the wreath:

For all those who have died or are dying in wars
For all those who have died or are dying as resources to feed or house them have gone to war preparations
For all those who will die until we learn to live in peace
When shall we ever learn?

The silent walk became an annual event, and the revived sale of white poppies grew. In 1986 a popular bishop reminded people that the white poppy wasn't a mark of disrespect for dead soldiers: 'there is space for red and white to bloom side by side'. The bishop's MP asked a question about the white poppy in Parliament; in response prime minister Margaret Thatcher forcefully expressed her 'deep distaste' for them. Suddenly the white poppy was a talking point, hotly debated in the press, on radio and television, in pubs and sitting rooms. On Remembrance Day that year veteran soldiers shouted abuse at the 200 anti-war demonstrators laying the white poppy wreath at the Cenotaph.

In recent years the number of white poppies sold by the Peace Pledge Union has continued to grow. Many are sold in schools side by side with red ones. One year, a boy chose a white poppy and wore it proudly to his Remembrance Sunday church Scouts parade - only to be ordered by the scoutmaster to remove it: 'it's not an appropriate symbol for Remembrance Day'!. The scoutmaster gave the boy a red poppy to wear instead. The boy quietly put the white poppy on again as soon as he left the church.