POPPY DAY TO-DAY!

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 90, Issue 85, 12 April 1946, Page 4

POPPY DAY TO-DAY!

TO-DAY IS POPPY DAY! It is stated that the wearing of poppies in 1918 as a memorial to those who lost their lives in the 1914-18 war was originated by Miss Moina Mitchell, who died in America a few years ago at the age of 74. The Poppy Day idea was adopted in America in 19'20, and Britain did so in 1921. Colonel John McCrae, a professor of medicine at McGill University, Montreal, first wrote of the Flanders poppy as the "Flower of Remembrance," in a poem published anonymously in "Punch." In the 1914-18 war he was brought as a stretcher case to the coast of France, and said to the doctor while looking towards the cliffs of Dover : "Tell them this: If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies blow in Flanders fields!" McCrae died! Miss Mitchell wrote a reply to his charge in “We shall keep the faith." She had been so impressed with Colonel McCrae’s poem that it seemed to her a wav of keeping faith to wear a poppy, which she always did. During the first world war she worked for the Y.M.C A. in America. On November 9, 1918, a meeting of overseas war secretaries of the Y.M.C.A. was held in a house in New York, where Miss Mitchell was hostess. Three of the secretaries made her a gift of 10 dollars in appreciation of the homelike atmosphere she had created in the house. She used the 10 dollars to buy 25 red poppies and showed to the secretaries Colonel McCrae s poem and her reply. After tlie conference the secretaries asked her for 25 separate poppies and she claimed that that was the first group-selling of red ponpies. Purpose of to-day's appeal is to raise funds for distressed returned servicemen and women.