Planting Poppies – Tower of London Remembers
Yesterday I spent the day in London. I had volunteered to spend part of the day “planting” poppies at the Tower of London for their First World War memorial. It is now one hundred years ago and is easy to start to forget because there are very few people alive now that lived through this era. My Great Grandfather was killed in the First World War, one of the 888,246 British military fatalities. It is very hard to comprehend this scale of loss of life and it was quite moving at times when you were planting the poppies to think that every single one not only represented one persons life but the impact that loss would have had on their family. It meant my Grandad grew up not knowing his father (he was very young at the time of the First World War) and his Mother would have found life very difficult; we didn’t have the welfare state that we do now.
The scale of it is amazing; at the moment about 400,000 poppies have been planted and the rest should be in place by the 11th November, at the moment the poppies are being planted as fast as they can be produced in Derby (and now Stoke on Trent !). You can read more about the project here.
I had my Sony camera with me and when we had finished our shift we were encouraged to walk round and take photographs…
One thing I loved about the poppies was they way that they all sway in the wind. Each one is different in the same way that each person that died was different.