This post was inspired by a suggestion from Tina Adcock, and without her support and encouragement, it probably would have remained unwritten. So I would like to send her a huge extra-special thank-you. I would also like to thank the individuals who read and commented on previous versions of this draft, including Tina Adcock, Andrew Nurse, Jon Weier, Chris Schultz, and Maj. (ret.) Peter Scales MA. A special thank-you goes to Christina Wakefield for supplying me with information about the 1921 Great War Veterans Association. Finally, many of the points raised in this blog post emerged out of online conversations about wearing poppies, both on Facebook and Twitter. I would like to thank everyone who participated for their contributions and for making this blog post much more nuanced.
A few weeks ago, the Royal British Legion posted a series of images designed to bust some prevalent myths about what poppies mean. One of the comments caught the attention of Tina Adcock and myself:
“Poppies are not pro-war, they are a symbol of respect for those who sacrificed everything for our safety. But not commemorating past wars would mean we don’t learn from history.”[1]
That is one hell of a loaded sentence, especially when we are still in the midst of Monument Wars. But it did make me start realizing that we don’t know very much about the poppy’s history as a symbol in Canada. Since I don’t like unanswered questions, I decided to dig a little bit deeper to see what I could find. In today’s blog post, we’re going to talk about what I uncovered, take a look at the history of the poppy, what it means to wear one, and how we learn from the past.
A scholar from Treaty Six Territory, Sarah York-Bertram is a Canadian historian and PhD candidate at York University specializing in the socio-legal histories of the Canadian Prairies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
