Black Poppies: Britain's Black Community and the Great War

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Celebrate Remembrance Day with your kids by teaching them about the importance of this event and why we celebrate it each year. But not everyone wears a red poppy. Instead, some choose to wear different colours of poppy to draw attention to different causes and campaigns. However, the blue ‘poppy’, which France’s President Emmanuel Macron also donned, is actually a cornflower.

We have a range of lovely resources for you to include use in your lessons and celebrations for Remembrance Day. Some people choose to wear the white poppy as a protest against “poppy policing” or “poppy fascism”– in which “people are lambasted for not wearing the flower”, The Independent reported.The charity started the appeal because it felt the animals that die at war – which tend to mostly be horses and dogs – are often forgotten. Lenhardt and Malleterre wanted to give the injured soldiers an activity to take their mind off of their pain, so got them making flowers, which the soldiers could then sell to the public for a small personal income. Teach your students about why red poppies have become a symbol for Remembrance Day with this clear and concise PowerPoint. But not everyone is convinced by such arguments. In 2018, Conservative MP and former British Army captain Johnny Mercer dismissed the white poppy movement as “attention-seeking rubbish”.

Ex-Colour sergeant Trevor Coult expressed his anger at what he saw as an attempt to politicise the poppy for different agendas.

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It was inspired by a proposal from LGBT poet laureate Trudy Howson in 2016 for a poppy to commemorate LGBT+ veterans. However, the design was met with controversy. The campaign was spearheaded in 2016 by Murphy’s Army, a West Yorkshire charity group for missing animals. They sell pin badges, wristbands and hand knitted purple poppies that can be worn by both animals and humans. Their private letters bring to light the day to day trials, tribulations, tragedies and triumphs of life on the battlefields as well as Vera Manley’s eyewitness account of the 1917 Russian revolution. He left his Caribbean island home to join a British regiment and served on the battlefields. After the war he joined the British Legion and became a tireless campaigner for the rights of ex-servicemen.