Jonathan Tremblay: Employee banned from wearing a poppy: Commemoration and censorship
[Jonathan Tremblay is a Historian and is currently and intern for HNN]
The Bodycare UK chain of British cosmetic stores has banned its employees from wearing a poppy in commemoration of Remembrance or Veteran’s Day. Worn around the English world for up to two weeks before November 11th each year, the plastic or cardboard flower symbolises the fallen soldiers of the First World War (1914-18) in particular and in a more general sense, all of our lost soldiers since. As such, an employee of Bodycare UK was ordered to remove said poppy from her work uniform under penalty of disciplinary measures. After animated protest, she gave up the insignia. Was the store chain justified in insisting for an unaltered uniform or was this decision made by stubborn administrators blind to the greater significance of the historic symbol?
An armistice was signed on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The First World War or the “War to end all Wars” that was supposed to last but a few months in Europe became a four year international armed conflict that claimed the lives of millions. It was not a battle of ideology or a war of emancipation against social Darwinism and fascism; WW1 was simply a remnant of an old system where diplomatic alliances in Europe and the assistance of their colonial empires led to a global conflict for honour, pride and territorial gain. The Germans signed the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, taking full blame for the war (one of the reasons why they later elected the Nazi party) but it was truly a war fuelled by all participants and thus when we remember the fallen of WW1, we can make no difference between the bravely perished family men of the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy or Russia.
This sentiment was echoed in a 1915 poem by John McCrae, a Canadian military physician that fought on the battlefields of Belgium. Seeing the rolling fields separating Canadians and Germans, he perceived at one time a mosaic of bludgeoned and bullet-riddled bodies and at other times the bloody red poppy that naturally grew there. McCrae wrote ‘In Flanders Fields’ describing his fellow soldiers, enemies and his own eventual demise as the flower grew indiscriminately in villages and battlefields, schoolyards and gravesites. The poem, and its eponymous flower have been use ever since in the English Commonwealth to commemorate our, and their, veterans.
Surely every country has a different vision of this poppy and what it may or may not represent. In the British Isles for example, the lapel pin in shunned in Ireland as a representation of British imperialism over the Emerald Esle in the early XXth century. As for Bodycare UK, they claim it is “against company policy” and that “Employees are only allowed to wear their uniform, and charitable pins would not be considered part of the uniform.” Banning charitable pins is strange enough as it is but a veteran-commemorating poppy the British only wear for a few days in November? I mean, it’s not a Nazi commemoration and remembrance fund swastika pin…
The affected employee got her day in the sun as the management never did let her wear the pin but she told her story to the world and we now have a prime example of administrative obtuseness and ignorance of national history and heritage.
We will never forget…or shop at Bodycare UK
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.
— Lt.-Col. John McCrae (1872 – 1918)
Read entire article at The End is Coming (History Blog)
The Bodycare UK chain of British cosmetic stores has banned its employees from wearing a poppy in commemoration of Remembrance or Veteran’s Day. Worn around the English world for up to two weeks before November 11th each year, the plastic or cardboard flower symbolises the fallen soldiers of the First World War (1914-18) in particular and in a more general sense, all of our lost soldiers since. As such, an employee of Bodycare UK was ordered to remove said poppy from her work uniform under penalty of disciplinary measures. After animated protest, she gave up the insignia. Was the store chain justified in insisting for an unaltered uniform or was this decision made by stubborn administrators blind to the greater significance of the historic symbol?
An armistice was signed on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The First World War or the “War to end all Wars” that was supposed to last but a few months in Europe became a four year international armed conflict that claimed the lives of millions. It was not a battle of ideology or a war of emancipation against social Darwinism and fascism; WW1 was simply a remnant of an old system where diplomatic alliances in Europe and the assistance of their colonial empires led to a global conflict for honour, pride and territorial gain. The Germans signed the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, taking full blame for the war (one of the reasons why they later elected the Nazi party) but it was truly a war fuelled by all participants and thus when we remember the fallen of WW1, we can make no difference between the bravely perished family men of the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy or Russia.
This sentiment was echoed in a 1915 poem by John McCrae, a Canadian military physician that fought on the battlefields of Belgium. Seeing the rolling fields separating Canadians and Germans, he perceived at one time a mosaic of bludgeoned and bullet-riddled bodies and at other times the bloody red poppy that naturally grew there. McCrae wrote ‘In Flanders Fields’ describing his fellow soldiers, enemies and his own eventual demise as the flower grew indiscriminately in villages and battlefields, schoolyards and gravesites. The poem, and its eponymous flower have been use ever since in the English Commonwealth to commemorate our, and their, veterans.
Surely every country has a different vision of this poppy and what it may or may not represent. In the British Isles for example, the lapel pin in shunned in Ireland as a representation of British imperialism over the Emerald Esle in the early XXth century. As for Bodycare UK, they claim it is “against company policy” and that “Employees are only allowed to wear their uniform, and charitable pins would not be considered part of the uniform.” Banning charitable pins is strange enough as it is but a veteran-commemorating poppy the British only wear for a few days in November? I mean, it’s not a Nazi commemoration and remembrance fund swastika pin…
The affected employee got her day in the sun as the management never did let her wear the pin but she told her story to the world and we now have a prime example of administrative obtuseness and ignorance of national history and heritage.
We will never forget…or shop at Bodycare UK
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.
— Lt.-Col. John McCrae (1872 – 1918)