Poppies and remembrance.

Apologies if there's already been a thread on this - I looked, but couldn't see one - but I'm interested in your thoughts on the wearing of poppies on players' shirts. I note that James McClean of Sunderland (and Eire) opted not to wear a poppy on his shirt yesterday; the players apparently having each been given the option to wear one or not. (Presumably there were others that did the same elsewhere?)

I can only imagine that the decision not to wear the poppy was political, rather than driven by some other conscience, such as pacifism?

 

Uber, I just asked a similar question on the "beautiful day" thread but you didn't answer it!

 

Obviously political, he's from Derry which is a hotbed of the Republican movement in Ulster. It's his choice in the same way black players can choose not to wear the 'Kick it out' shirts...

 

Shame that the poppy is seen by some to be exclusively British. McClean obviously doesn't know his history, many Irish volunteered to fight in World War One and Remembrance Day is about respecting their and every other soldier, sailor and airforceman's personal courage and sacrifice, no matter what the rights and wrongs of the cause.

Would be interested in Nuts' view as our only, to the best of my knowledge, serving military man.

Interesting book published this week - War Memorial by Clive Aslett, telling the story of all the names on the War Memorial in the tiny village of Lydford near Tavistock in Devon.

 

I'll go take a look, Swords, and report back.

Update: nothing to add on the origins of the poppy as a symbol of rembrance to the responses already given on that thread.

 

It is a British tradition though Stan - and a fitting one it is too. The problem is, in Derry during the troubles the place was consumed by something akin to Civil war. Unfortunately, bitterness still persists on both sides. That said, that chap McClean comes across as an idiot who just loves courting controversy. He should have worn the shirt like all his team mates. Those clowns that wouldn't wear the "kick out racism" shirts are the same. Trying to make some sort of point.

Players should just do what they're told and be grateful for the job and salary that they have.

 

I agree with most of what you say Swords, but the very freedoms that those heroes died for in the two world wars are the same as the freedom to choose not to wear the poppy for whatever reason. Martin O'Neill wore a suit with the poppy but chose not to wear training kit with the poppy.

We don't know McClean's reason but should respect his view, however misguided it may be...

 

Sorry to be pedantic Soopy but I had come to the conclusion that it was for all war dead everywhere. Now you're telling me its the two World Wars again! I think there's some ambiguity as to the symbolism of the badge/flower and that's where the problem lies. Some people are just confused as to what it actually represents.

I take your point about people opting out. I suppose it is their right.

 

Good call mate, you are right it is more British than anything else and I should know better given the number of times I have had to explain wearing a poppy to Europeans and also Americans and Canadians, who are meant to share it as a symbol.
Couldn't care less about McLean, it's his choice and nobody should be forced to toe the line if they have objections. Just think its based on ignorance of what the Poppy symbolizes and, whatever the political history, the sacrifice of individual Irishmen it also commemorates.

 

The poppy tradition is not exclusively British - We do it too

This irelatively well known poem was written by Canadian doctor in May 1915. Coll Mcrae did not survive the war though his demise was mor by disease than enemy action:

In Flanders Fields

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.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

 

Nice poem mate. Is it a wide-spread tradition in Canada or do just some people wear it?

 

If McClean's reluctance to wearing the poppy is political, then in my opinion it is nothing but another case of the indoctrination of the young and impressionable to keep the hatred going. Until such a time as young men such as McClean realise that they are quite at liberty to think for themselves, this stuff will go on and on. Presumably, he makes some sort of subconscious distinction between Britain the 'country' and Britain the 'people' that enables him to come over here to work and receive the adulation of thousands of Mackems, whilst maintaining some type of integrity through a stand against the rembrance of the fallen servicemen of the oppressive enemy?

 

It is about ALL wars, I used the two world wars as examples because they were about maintaining our freedoms from dictators who would brook no opposition and deny freedom of speech or any other freedom of expression...

 

You could say that that's what he was doing!

 

Maybe (sniff).

 

If the Irish won't wear the poppy then play in the Irish league

 

.

 

Here we go with the generalisations. How many Irish players were playing this weekend and how many didn't wear it?

Only the one as far as I know.

Besides, you wouldn't wish your worst enemy play in the Irish League. Not even John Terry!

 

Maybe someone should of taken him aside and explained the Poppy is worn in remembrance of the young men, from ALL countries including his own, who fought and died so that he could have the luxury of the life that he leads.
To turn it into some political symbol is quite frankly absurd and not what it is about.

I was told a story once by an old fella at work who talked about his father. In 1915 he went to join up but as he was only 15 years old the recruiting Sargent told him he couldn't go unless he was 16. With a wink he said ok, went off for 5 mins, then returned to the same Sargent saying he was 16. Of course he was gladly accepted and went on to fight at the Somme.
Now that's real bravery.

 

What's Robert Fisk banging on about then? :


I turned on the television in my Damascus hotel room to witness a dreary sight: all the boys and girls of BBC World wearing their little poppies again.
Bright red they were, with that particularly silly green leaf out of the top – it was never part of the original Lady Haig appeal – and not one dared to appear on screen without it. Do these pathetic men and women know how they mock the dead? I trust that Jon Snow has maintained his dignity by not wearing it.

Now I've mentioned my Dad too many times in The Independent. He died almost 20 years ago so, after today, I think it's time he was allowed to rest in peace, and that readers should in future be spared his sometimes bald wisdom. This is the last time he will make an appearance. But he had strong views about wearing the poppy. He was a soldier of the Great War, Battle of Arras 1918 – often called the Third Battle of the Somme – and the liberation of Cambrai, along with many troops from Canada. The Kaiser Wilhelm's army had charitably set the whole place on fire and he was appalled by the scorched earth policy of the retreating Germans. But of course, year after year, he would go along to the local cenotaph in Birkenhead, and later in Maidstone, where I was born 28 years after the end of his Great War, and he always wore his huge black coat, his regimental tie – 12th Battalion, the King's Liverpool Regiment – and his poppy.

In those days, it was – I recall this accurately, I think – a darker red, blood-red rather than BBC-red, larger than the sorrow-lite version I see on the BBC and without that ridiculous leaf. So my Dad would stand and I would be next to him in my Yardley Court School blazer at 10 years old and later, aged 16, in my Sutton Valence School blazer, with my very own Lady Haig poppy, its long black wire snaking through the material, sprouting from my lapel.

My Dad gave me lots of books about the Great War, so I knew about the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo before I went to school – and 47 years before I stood, amid real shellfire, in the real Sarajevo and put my feet on the very pavement footprints where Gavrilo Princip fired the fatal shots.

But as the years passed, old Bill Fisk became very ruminative about the Great War. He learned that Haig had lied, that he himself had fought for a world that betrayed him, that 20,000 British dead on the first day of the Somme – which he mercifully avoided because his first regiment, the Cheshires, sent him to Dublin and Cork to deal with another 1916 "problem" – was a trashing of human life. In hospital and recovering from cancer, I asked him once why the Great War was fought. "All I can tell you, fellah," he said, "was that it was a great waste." And he swept his hand from left to right. Then he stopped wearing his poppy. I asked him why, and he said that he didn't want to see "so many damn fools" wearing it – he was a provocative man and, sadly, I fell out with him in his old age. What he meant was that all kinds of people who had no idea of the suffering of the Great War – or the Second, for that matter – were now ostentatiously wearing a poppy for social or work-related reasons, to look patriotic and British when it suited them, to keep in with their friends and betters and employers. These people, he said to me once, had no idea what the trenches of France were like, what it felt like to have your friends die beside you and then to confront their brothers and wives and lovers and parents. At home, I still have a box of photographs of his mates, all of them killed in 1918.

So like my Dad, I stopped wearing the poppy on the week before Remembrance Day, 11 November, when on the 11th hour of the 11 month of 1918, the armistice ended the war called Great. I didn't feel I deserved to wear it and I didn't think it represented my thoughts. The original idea came, of course, from the Toronto military surgeon and poet John McCrae and was inspired by the death of his friend Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, killed on 3 May 1915. "In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row." But it's a propaganda poem, urging readers to "take up the quarrel with the foe". Bill Fisk eventually understood this and turned against it. He was right.

I've had my share of wars, and often return to the ancient Western Front. Three years ago, I was honoured to be invited to give the annual Armistice Day Western Front memorial speech at the rebuilt Cloth Hall in Ypres. The ghost of my long-dead 2nd Lieutenant Dad was, of course, in the audience. I quoted all my favourite Great War writers, along with the last words of Nurse Edith Cavell, and received, shortly afterwards, a wonderful and eloquent letter from the daughter of that fine Great War soldier Edmund Blunden. (Read his Undertones of War, if you do nothing else in life.) But I didn't wear a poppy. And I declined to lay a wreath at the Menin Gate. This was something of which I was not worthy. Instead, while they played the last post, I looked at the gravestones on the city walls.

As a young boy, I also went to Ypres with my Dad, stayed at the "Old Tom Hotel" (it is still there, on the same side of the square as the Cloth Hall) and met many other "old soldiers", all now dead. I remember that they wanted to remember their dead comrades. But above all, they wanted an end to war. But now I see these pathetic creatures with their little sand-pit poppies – I notice that our masters in the House of Commons do the same – and I despise them. Heaven be thanked that the soldiers of the Great War cannot return today to discover how their sacrifice has been turned into a fashion appendage.

Robert Fisk