A million pins for Poppy Day
RSA bosses have been run off their feet distributing more than 1 million pins around the country ahead of the annual Poppy Day appeal.
Volunteers from Christchurch Memorial RSA will be stationed with buckets at stalls across the city today – the official Remembrance Day – with up to 90,000 pins ready to be handed out, president Pete Dawson said.
The pins will be used again for Wednesday’s Anzac commemorations as a mark of honour and respect to fallen soldiers. Dawson said the pins, which were crafted by a group of volunteers at a factory in Belfast, were made year-round in anticipation of the annual collection day.
A machine ‘‘spits out’’ a new pin every four seconds and they are then packaged up and distributed to RSAs around the country. A stockpile of up to 250,000 pins were always kept on hand in case of a major event, such as a military funeral, Dawson said.
He said the week leading up to Poppy Day had been a ‘‘blur’’ of activity. Cadet forces, Navy groups and troops from Burnham Military Camp were lined up to help with distribution, ‘‘maintaining the link between those still here and those gone before’’.
Comrades killed in battle were honoured by Christchurch’s oldest veteran, Sergeant Bill Mitchell, who paused to remember absent friends at celebrations for his 105th birthday at Christchurch Memorial RSA this week.
Mitchell, who has been driving since his mother showed him the ropes when he was 11, drove himself to the party and cut his cake with a bayonet. Despite the fuss, the great-grandfather and former Royal New Zealand Air Force engineer said his birthday on Tuesday was ‘‘just another day.’’
Dawson said donations to the poppy appeal were ‘‘equally as important today than they were back then’’.
The first Poppy Day in New Zealand was held on April 24, 1922.
‘‘More and more we’re noticing the nature of deployment of forces has changed . . . it used to be a front-line war where soldiers knew who the enemy was and who they were fighting.
‘‘Now it’s a different kind of conflict, which is putting a lot of stress and strain on soldiers who don’t know who the enemy is . . . many wounds don’t bleed.’’
Meanwhile, the New Zealand Defence Force contingent in Gallipoli has honoured the 11 men buried at the Chanak Consular Cemetery in Canakkale, Turkey, with a wreath-laying service this week.
In 1918, the Canterbury Mounted Rifles Regiment returned to the 1915 battlefields to tend to the graves of New Zealanders who died in the 1915 campaign. During that time they suffered
11 deaths, all but one from influenza, due to bitter winter conditions without any shelter.
Sergeant Rory Lorimer, who gave a reading at the service, said he was ‘‘very honoured and humbled to not only go to Gallipoli but to honour a relative, among the others of the regiment’’.
His great-uncle, Trooper James Ramsay Lorimer, was one of those to return to Gallipoli in 1918.
‘‘James was born in 1882, I was born in 1982. James returned to Gallipoli in
1918 to bury dead and administer the armistice, I will go to honour the fallen in
2018.’’
A field of remembrance has also been established in Christchurch’s Cranmer Square, made up of more than 4000 crosses bearing the names of Cantabrians who died during active service.