In 1915, Canadian doctor Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae wrote his famous war poem, In Flanders Fields, following the devastation he witnessed on battlefields in Ypres, Belgium.
The poem describes the delicate red wildflowers that bloomed where more than a million soldiers died between 1914 and 1918.
Inspired, Anna Guérin, a French teacher turned war effort fundraiser, began selling poppies on designated days from September 1919. She then addressed the American, Canadian and British legions to ask for the poppy to be acknowledged as Remembrance emblem.
In 1921, the Royal British Legion ordered a million poppies from Anna Guérin in France and commissioned a further 8 million to be manufactured in Britain.
They were made from silk, and were sold on 11 November that year in the first ever Poppy Appeal.
The tradition has carried on ever since, though the silk has been consigned to history. In 2023, the legion started making fully recyclable paper poppies.
In 1926 in Scotland, Lady Haig opened Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory, employing former veterans to make the flowers out of tissue. This is the hub that produces the poppies for Poppy Scotland’s poppy appeal.
The Scottish poppy does not feature a green leaf and has four-lobed petals, while England and Wales’s poppy features two.
