Remembrance Assembly at the Senior School

Headmaster's Remembrance Assembly Speech

This year marks the centenary of the poppy being used in the UK as a symbol of respectful remembrance of those who had died in what, back in 1921, was still referred to as the ‘Great War’. The idea arrived on these shores via France and America, where two women, Anna Guérin and Moina Michael, had championed the sale of silk poppies in their own countries as a means of raising funds to provide occupational and financial support to those who had served during the war.

For Moina Michael, the inspiration behind choosing the poppy as the symbol of remembrance was a poem written by a Canadian Lieutenant Colonel, John McCrae, who served as a surgeon on the battlefields of Belgium and Northern France. Composed in 1915, the poem was a response both to the death of one of McCrae’s colleagues and also to the recurring image that he encountered of hosts of red poppies which seemed to thrive in those scarred battlefields, despite the churn and turmoil and horror around, and which frequently grew over the graves of fallen soldiers. 

The poem is called In Flanders Fields and has become one of the best known of the many written at that time. It is short – just three stanzas, which I will read to you this morning:

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.

I have long felt that there is a change in tone between the first two stanzas – sombre, regretful, carrying a sense of futility and deadening loss – and the third stanza, with its notes of defiance and its call to arms, but there can be no doubt that the poem, like so many at the time, was born of sorrow. His friend and fellow soldier, whose funeral McCrae presided over, had been killed at the 2nd Battle of Ypres, an encounter which became notorious, for, amongst other things, the first mass use of poisonous chlorine gas on the Western Front, itself the subject of Wilfred Owen’s famous poem, Dulce et Decorum Est.

Since 1921, the poppies that are worn by so many around the world at this time of the year have emerged in different sizes, different materials, different designs and even different colours. Back In 2014, the Tower of London marked the centenary of the outbreak of The First World War with the commemorative art installation Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, which saw the moat filled with thousands of ceramic poppies. I remember it well as a tapestry of red flowing down from those medieval towers, an incredibly powerful image which, despite its epic stillness, hinted strongly at all the blood spilt on those Flanders Fields and at the terrible landscape that another war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, described as “the hell where youth and laughter go.”

I recall quite clearly using that image as a backdrop to my remembrance assembly 7 years ago, and it occurred to me that none of you as pupils in the Senior School today would have been here for that assembly; even though it feels like just the other day, it is a whole school generation ago, and I am reminded that time moves on and that it moves quickly, and as it does so the points of connection between now and then become ever more distant.

As I noted last year, there is nobody alive in the world today who fought in the First World War. There are increasingly few alive who fought in the Second World War. As the years move on, so those who lived through the Second World War will become fewer in number, as that distance in time increases, as we move beyond a century since the end of the First World War and beyond ¾ of a century since the end of the Second World War, as the gap widens between the direct connections between our world today and the memories which draw us together for Remembrance Day, so it is even more important that we do not forget. 

It is estimated that around 50 million poppies are sold in the UK each year. That sounds like a lot, but is probably only around half the number of people who died in the two global wars of the 20th century and a fraction of the number whose lives have been devastated – and continue to be devastated – by conflicts around the world. Those millions include, as many of you know, the 74 Old Edwardians who gave their lives during the First World War and who are remembered in the plaque at the top of the Memorial staircase in Nethersole and at the School’s own memorial which I can see from my study. Each of those 74 has a name, and each of those many tens of millions had a personal story, a personal backdrop, family, friends, colleagues, people who cherished them, people who missed them and who miss them still, people who still look back from the vantage point of 2021 from generations down the line with that sense of loss and wonder of what might have been had they not died. As John McCrae wrote so poignantly over a century ago: “We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved, and now we lie in Flanders Fields.”

In giving voice to those fallen soldiers, in urging us not to “break faith with [those] who die”, McCrae asks us to carry the torch that they pass on, but I like to think that it is no longer so that we can “take up quarrel with the foe”, but so that we can honour their memory, pay tribute to their sacrifice and enable them to sleep peacefully under those poppies in Flanders Fields. To all those who suffered, in many cases almost unimaginably, who gave their lives on others’ behalf and whose sacrifice in conflict ultimately allowed peace and comradeship and humanity to return to our world, we say thank you and we will remember you.

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