Remembrance Sunday 2025. One hundred and seven years almost to the day since the end of the Great War. For a short moment the UK pauses to remember its fallen in that conflict and the others since. It’s a permanent fixture in the life of our country, and I believe we are all the better for remembering.
As you might expect from an ex-military man, I have attended more than my fair share of Remembrance parades and services in all parts of the world. My first memories, however, are from long before I donned uniform.
In the small village of Carmunnock, just south of Glasgow, my Dad, who had been a subaltern in the Highland Light Infantry just after the Second World War, used to lead the annual Remembrance Sunday parade of ex-servicemen and women.
This doughty band of veterans, their numbers sadly diminishing as the years wore on, used to march from the parish church to the war memorial behind the local pipe band and its Royal British Legion banners. There they paid their respect to the village’s war dead, who included my father’s brother, the uncle I never met, Gunner Thomas Crawford, Royal Artillery, who died on the 9th of July 1944.
the annual Remembrance Sunday parade of ex-servicemen and women.
The most sad and poignant Remembrance service I attended, however, was in sunnier climes. In the divided Mediterranean island of Cyprus, near Nicosia, there is a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in the middle of the Green Line, the UN buffer zone that has separated Greek and Turkish Cypriots since 1974.
The 4th Royal Tank Regiment was on a six month UN tour policing the Green Line, and on 11th November 1989 we held our Remembrance Service amongst the white granite headstones of the war dead. On either side Greek and Turkish soldiers watched intently through their binoculars. As our piper played “Floo’ers o’ the Forest” and walked away into the distance not everyone had dry eyes. That memory will stay with me forever.
The most visible outward sign of our national respect for the dead is, of course, the wearing of the poppy. Even this simple, non-offensive public gesture is not without controversy. I don’t normally bang out “disgusted of Haddington” letters to editors, because such missives are on the whole, like revenge and Tweets, best served cold.
But I remember once that a correspondent in one of our national newspapers had written to the editor with the ludicrous and preposterous claim that wearing a poppy was, and I quote verbatim, “implicitly legitimis[ing] the continuing use of armed force”. I almost choked on my porridge.
And so I found myself battering out an immediate response on my laptop at some unearthly hour in the morning and despatching it off to the paper tout de suite. Interestingly, a Tweet posted publicising my letter got far more views than any other I have posted recently, and more positive responses via comments and emails than I have ever had before.
No need to rehearse the points made any further here, except to emphasise what should be an obvious point to everybody of sound mind: wearing a poppy does not signify your support for war. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Then there’s the wearing of the white poppy. What’s that all about? Well, it appears that originally it was used a symbol of pacifism, starting way back in the 1930s, worn as an alternative to, or as a complement to, the red one. More recently it may have become associated with a leftist and therefore anti-war political posture.
All fine and well, I hear you say, but as the Royal British Legion points out, those sentiments are already encompassed in the wearing of the red poppy. Most ex-service men and women who have been in conflict are pacifists, because they have seen and done things which they would not wish anyone to have to repeat.
And, paradoxically of course, the very freedoms which white poppy wearers seek to espouse can be exercised in a large part due to the sacrifices of those we commemorate with the red one.
I am pleased to note, however, that interest in Remembrance and the conflicts whose dead it commemorates seems to have increased, particularly among younger generations. This week I was joined in Haddington’s Garden of Remembrance by a number of younger people who sought to remember long gone family members and friends.
So I wore my poppy this past weekend, will be wearing it on Armistice Day, and I hope you will do, whether it be red or white or any other colour you decide. And if you choose not to wear one at all, that’s fine too.
Just remember that such freedom of choice has been dearly won by those who fell in the service of their fellow citizens. If you do that’s good enough for me. Just never forget.
Lt Col Stuart Crawford served with the 4th Royal Tank Regiment (Scotland’s Own)
Stuart Crawford is a political and defence commentator, former SNP member, and retired army officer. Sign up for his podcasts and newsletters at www.DefenceReview.uk
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