Walking around Huddersfield town centre yesterday morning, I spotted only six people wearing poppies. They were all very old.

On television, by contrast, poppies are mandatory. A women on a panel show not wearing one was assailed by the indignant of the internet. Poor David Lammy in Parliament (who has a lot to worry about at the moment) forgot to wear his the other day, and was criticised and mocked.

For those very much in the public eye, the poppy is mandatory, and can become a fashion statement. On Strictly yesterday Tess and Claudia were both in stunningly plain black dresses, against which the red poppies showed up dramatically.

For such public people, the poppy is mandatory. In ordinary life now, less so, it would seem. A very pleasant lady was running a stall in our local Morrison’s, but was not, I think, doing very good business. Marion and I each bought paper poppies, but she had decorative (metallic, enamelled, bejewelled) for sale. I remarked that the TV people semed always to wear the posh decorative ones. I wondered whether they kept these to wear from year to year, rather than buying new ones every November. ‘I bet they do,’ said the stallholder, maybe thinking of her lackof customers.

Back in the twenties a joke figure was the man so mean that he ironed his poppy after use and kept it for next year, so avoiding having to put cash in the can. But these days, if you paid a lot for a smart one – well, you’d want to use it again.

Back in my youth, in the 1950s, with the Second war just over, almost all adult males with experience in the services, and almost everyone with memories of loss, poppies were mandatory for everyone, of all ages and classes. Now it’s eighty ears since that last big war (and several of the little interim ones are wars that we’d rather forget). Now only a small minority have experience of life in the forces, and poppies have personal meaning for fewer and fewer each year.

I’ve always divided memorials into ‘We remember’ ones and ‘You ought to remember’ ones. Village war memorials in 1919-1920 were very much we remember – the whole village commemoratinga shared loss. ‘You ought to remember’ memorials, are put there not by the community, but by an elite group, sometimes of outsiders. An example might be the Stolpersteine, the tripping stones placed in some German streets to remind citizens of the place’s unpleasant past. ‘We remember’ ones are the voice of the community. At their best they are unofficial. At times the market cross in the middle of Huddersfield becomes, without official sanction, a place where tributes are put. The first time I noticed this, soom after I moved here, there were notes absd flowers for Lee Rigby, who had just been killed. A card i recall was from the women working at a local bakery.. Other atrocities have been commemorated there too. In Victoria Station, Manchester, there is a huge, rather untidy collection of tributes to those (mostly young girls) who died at the Ariana Grande concert a few years ago. It is kept going, I think, by additions and renewals from the public.

A century ago, Poppy Day definitely began as a ‘We remember’ institution, the country uniting behind the Haig Fund and the wish to help the war-damaged. In 2025, though, I suspect the younger generation (and many of their elders) see it as nothing much to do with them – just other people telling them what they ought to remember.

This entry was written by George Simmers and posted on November 9, 2025 at 2:16 pm and filed under History, memory, Military, popular culture, war memorials with tags History, poppies, Remembrance, Remembrance Day poppies, remembrance-day, war memorials. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.