FESTIVE NEWS • DECEMBER 2014 • PAGE 19
HOW THE POPPY BECAME THE
SYMBOL OF REMEMBRANCE
This display of poppies by Hereford in Bloom on Victoria Street won lots of praise
The horrors of World War 1 were poignantly
captured by some of the finest poets of the time,
honed by their own ghastly experiences on the
blood soaked battlefields. Their names live on in
their poems, often penned in breaks from the
bitter fighting: Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sasson,
Rupert Brooke head a list of soldier poets who
shaped the words which came to epitomise the
most terrible of wars.
As we commemorate this year the start of that
war a century ago Festive News reflects on the
role of the poppy.
It was a Canadian army surgeon of Scottish
Presbyterian stock who so precisely summed up
the futility of war and by chance created for the
humble Poppy a special place in all our hearts on
November 11 each year when we utter the simple
words: ‘We Will Remember Them.’
Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae was treating
the dying and wounded in the second battle of
Ypres in 1915 when a close friend was killed.
That night, in the trenches, he penned a tribute to
him…’In Flanders Field’ with the immortal first
line… ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow.’ Little
did he know in that moment of despair that his
eulogy to a dead comrade would capture so
starkly the tragedy of war and sow the seed for
the blood red Poppy to become its very symbol
even now a hundred years later. The poem was
published in Punch magazine the following year.
McCrae himself would die of pneumonia in
France in January 1918.
DEATH OF AN ARTIST
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.
If World War 1 had not
claimed the life of Hereford
artist Brian Hatton his name
might well today stand
alongside that of Constable
or Gainsborough. He volunteered with the Worcestershire Yeomanry and was
killed in action in Egypt in
April; 1916. He was 29.
Hatton was already an established artist,
specialising in landscapes, mostly of country
scenes around Hereford and had a particular
talent for painting horses. He was also a skilled
portrait painter, as this self portrait so evidently
shows. His family lived in Broomy Hill, and a
young Hatton would regularly walk the lanes
around Breinton seeking inspiration for his
paintings, many of which can be viewed at Hereford Museum’s art gallery or go on line,
googling ‘Brian Hatton’ to view his complete
collection.
Merry Christmas
and a Happy New Year
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HERO VICAR KILLED IN THE TRENCHES
Hereford lost many men in the horror of the trenches in The First World War. One of them
was the Vicar of Holmer, the Rev Francis Henry Tuke who signed up as an Army Chaplain
when war broke out in 1914. He was killed in France in July, 1916 when he braved the
withering gunfire to take water to his men in the trenches who were suffering agonizing
thirst. He was 49. He is just one name of the 64 Holmer men listed on the war memorial
in the parish church where he had served as vicar from 1908. A high number of casualties
from what would then have been a small parish on the outskirts of the city.
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