POPPY DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 113, Issue 18926, 21 April 1933, Page 4

POPPY DAY.

ELOQUENT APPEAL.

FOR THOSE WHO SUFFER.

BROADCAST BY MAYOR. “ I am speaking to you to-night as president of the Waikato Returned Soldiers’ Association, an association of the strong to stand by the \veak, said the Mayor of Hamilton (Dr. F. D. Pinfold), in- a-broadcast last evening from Station IZH Hamilton. “ I want to remind you all that to-morrow, throughout our district, we are celebrating Poppy Day, when, by the display and sale of artificial poppies,_ we again ask for your small contributions in the cause of brotherhood for those returned soldiers who have fallen on evil times. “Poppy Day has been in vogue for a number'of years, since the Great War ended; but I would ask you to bestir your memories lest your former kind thoughts and patriotic feelings tend to become dulled by the passage of a period of years, which seems long to you, and yet Is but a page in the volume that is the history of our nation.

"The red poppy to us is an emblem of the Flanders Field, where the wild poppy grew in abundance about the trenches, cheering us in its peace and beauty, and sometimes redder still, with the shed blood of our own boysA Shattered Dream. “To some of Us it conjures up pictures that to you will seem absurd —memories of war, witli pain and discomfort, and death in the offing—but memories, nevertheless, that are priceless and happy, because in those days we lived on the thought of our possible happy return to New Zealand, to our own kin, where discomforts and hardships would be things of the past. “ If you will pardon me, what a delusion, what a mockery, to many of the boys -who in those days were heroes, and still are, that they have lived to see gaunt poverty and naked, staring want in their own homes, in the midst of natural wealth and abundance of God’s gifts; when all they a’sk in return for their sacrifices in the common cause is work, not charity; and both are denied to them. “I am happy to make this 1 appeal to you all; our association does not ask for much, but it does ask you to put in your shilling to the Poppy Day appeal, towards a fund that will be used entirely locally, to bring a little promise of happiness into those homes, which should know nothing of unhappiness—the homes of all returned soldiers who now may be in distress. “In conclusion, may I beg of you to enrich your own selves by sending with your gifts your most generous of good wishes to the recipients of your help, remembering the words, ‘Now abidelh faith, hope and charity, these three, but the greatest of these is charity’”?