November 6, 1996. Copyright, 1996, Graphic News. All rights reserved

POPPY DAY Ð HOW IT ALL BEGAN 
By Julie Mullins

LONDON, November 6, Graphic News- The immortality of the Flanders poppy as the flower of remembrance for the dead of two world wars is due to Colonel John McCrae, a distinguished doctor who served with the Canadian Armed Forces during the First World War. He was so moved by what he saw at the battle of Ypres in 1915 that he expressed his emotion in verse, his lines beginning:
ÔIn FlandersÕ fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on rowÉÕ
The poem was eventually published anonymously in ÔPunchÕ. Colonel McCrae survived the horrors of Ypres but was fatally wounded in January 1918. On his deathbed, he is said to have murmured words from his poem:
ÔTell them this, if ye break faith with us who die,
we shall not sleepÕ
The poem made a deep impression on Moina Michael, an American War Secretary with the YMCA, who decided that wearing a red poppy was a good way to keep faith with all those who had lost their lives. On November 9, 1918, two days before the Armistice was signed, Miss MichaelÕs colleagues presented her with a small gift of money which she used to buy poppies, wearing one herself and selling the others to her friends to raise money for servicemen in need. Her French colleague, a Madame Guerin, developed the idea further, proposing that artificial poppies should be made and sold to help ex-servicemen and their dependents.
The first Poppy Day in Britain was held in 1921Ð the poppies bought from the French organisation who used the profits to help children in war-devastated areas. The following year the newly-formed British Legion opened its own factory in Bermondsey with a staff of five disabled ex-servicemen. This was greatly encouraged by Field Marshall Earl Haig, founder-president of the British Legion, who believed that providing work for disabled ex-servicemen was just as important as raising money.
Today the Royal British Legion employs a staff of 115 ex-servicemen and women at much bigger premises in Richmond, producing some 38 million poppies, 90,000 wreaths and nearly quarter of a million Remembrance crosses each year.
The first Poppy appeal in 1921 raised £106,000. In 1995, mindful, no doubt, of the fiftieth anniversaries of the end of World War II, more than £16 million was collected, which will provide benefits for over 100,000 people.

Source: Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal