Remembrance Day looms large in my family. Two generations of my mum’s family were conscripted: my great-grandfather in the first world war; my grandfather, still a teenager at the time, in the second.
He survived the fighting but never entirely recovered. Mum still cries when she thinks about what he experienced. His regiment was sent to liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he helped bury hundreds upon hundreds of the Nazis’ victims. “He never spoke about it,” she told me, “but he would wake up screaming.”
I didn’t get to know Grandad – he died of a heart attack shortly after I was born. But it is partly because of him that I wear a white poppy at this time of year, rather than a red one. I deeply respect those who find the red poppy a useful way to reflect on the destruction of war. But for me, the less-widespread white poppy has become the stronger symbol of the spirit of Remembrance Day.
I believe remembrance should dwell on the tragedy of conscription, and the many who, like Grandad, were forced to fight. I fear some modern red-poppy messaging blurs the stories of coerced and professional military service in a way that minimises this specific horror, contributing to a collective amnesia that sanitises history and disrespects the memory of conscripts. There is simply no equivalence between freely choosing a career in the army and being torn from your community against your will and made to pick up a gun.
Second, the white poppy explicitly acknowledges that the majority of those killed by war are not soldiers but civilians. Though army press officers like to talk of “targeted operations” and “precision strikes”, the grim reality is that the proportion of ordinary citizens killed in conflict significantly outweighs combatants.
This is true not just of past conflicts but of modern ones. The UN has reported that the number of women killed in conflict has doubled in recent years. In some wars, nine civilians are killed for every one soldier. The white poppy, first made in 1933 by the Co-operative Women’s Guild, has always affirmed that every life lost to war – not just military personnel – is a tragedy, which leads to a more full reckoning with the legacy of war.
Then there’s the money. Poppies are not just symbolic, they are fundraising tools. Sales of white poppies raise cash for the Peace Pledge Union, who work towards non-violent conflict resolution. And though cynical manufacturers churn out poppy-themed tat to cash in on remembrance sentiment, the proper red poppies – the ones sold by uniformed volunteers at train stations – raise around £25m a year for the Royal British Legion.
A charity set up in the aftermath of the first world war, the Legion provides important support for veterans and their families. Their vital work is admirable but it is fundamentally work that should be done by the state, not private philanthropy. I would gladly pay higher taxes so our veterans could receive better care, but will not voluntarily support an organisation that subsidises the government’s military budget.
Any nation that leaves it to charities flogging paper poppies in the street to fund care for those returning from the wars it has waged has no business going to war in the first place. Politicians who don red poppies – while at the same time refusing to fully fund proper veteran care – are hypocrites.
The final reason I prefer a white poppy is because, sadly, I sometimes find the timbre of Britain’s national conversation around remembrance to have completely lost touch with the “never again” spirit that should be at its heart. This week, memos will have gone round political parties demanding officials wear red poppies for all engagements. The BBC will have stashes in studios for anyone caught without one before appearing on camera. In some schools and workplaces, poppy-wearing is compulsory.
Remembrance should be a serious, sober, freely chosen tradition, not a cosmetic game of frogmarched performative allegiance. Staged patriotic fervour has nothing to do with sincerely honouring the memory of my grandad and his peers, and, perversely, risks tipping remembrance into unreflective sabre-rattling bravado – glorifying war rather than mourning it.
The UK is one of the largest arms exporters in the world and spends more per capita on its military than any other members of the G20, bar the US and Saudi Arabia. Our armies have fought more than 120 wars across 170 countries. Remembrance Day should be a chance to reflect on the long shadow our militarism casts.
My mum experienced a very different type of remembrance from today’s poppy pageantry. She recalls attending Armistice Day church services with her father: very silent, very sad ceremonies full of bereft men mourning friends who had not chosen to die. Nobody was judging the extent of other families’ pain or measuring the angles of their bows. It was a funeral, not a show.
Last year former prime minister Rishi Sunak claimed it was “disrespectful” for peace campaigners to call for an armistice on Armistice Day. It was a preposterous remark, emblematic of Britain’s drift away from serious forms of remembrance into self-parody. There can be no greater tribute to those who have suffered and died in wars of the past than working to end war in the present.
This year there will again be demonstrations promoting peace planned on and around Armistice Day. I will be there wearing my white poppy. I hope it’s what my grandad would have wanted.
Phineas Harper is a writer and curator
