Why the new TOWER TRIBUTE will set your heart ablaze
Four years after that profoundly emotional sea of poppies, a fiery new spectacle will mark 100 years since the end of the Great War . . .
THE grass is immaculate, mown in straight lines to a Wimbledon-standard finish. It’s odd to think of this vast tract of lawn — nearly half a mile long and 50 yards wide — as a sea of red. Yet that was the scene which drew the Queen, the Royal Family, politicians, celebrities and five million members of the public to this spot four years ago.
The poppies at the Tower of London proved to be one of the most powerful and popular pieces of contemporary art this country has ever seen when they filled the great moat in 2014 to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War.
So what on earth is the Tower going to do by way of an encore as we approach November 11 and the centenary of the Armistice of 1918?
There is about to be another show in the moat. However, things are going to be very different this time. And let us hope that, on this occasion, the Government, the arts establishment, the Left and the critics rally round this admirable tribute to the fallen, unlike 2014. Back then, they either ignored or mocked the poppies, only embracing them when they belatedly woke up to the depth of public feeling.
I have no doubt the public will be back in great numbers, as contemplative and respectful as before. But next month it will not be poppies at the centre of this vast commemorative exercise but flames.
And, from next Tuesday, Daily Mail readers will have the chance to play a very special part in the proceedings.
It was back in the summer of 2014 that artist Paul Cummins started planting 888,246 ceramic poppies in the moat around our most famous fortress — one for every soldier who died for King and country in World War I. He called the installation Blood Swept Lands And Seas Of Red.
As more poppies appeared, so the crowds grew, too, along with the number of volunteers wanting to help. This stunning depiction of a lost generation struck an instant chord with much of the country.
BYTHE time the last poppy went into the ground on Remembrance Sunday, more than 20,000 volunteers had helped the project’s designer, Tom Piper, to install a display which, for days on end, brought the streets around the Tower to a silent, tearful standstill.
There was also a short twilight ceremony each night as the Last Post was played and a guest speaker stood amid the poppies reciting names from the Roll of Honour. The names — 180 each night — were nominated in advance by the public.
On one evening, an entire village from Derbyshire turned up to hear a list of local lads read out. People flew from Australia and Canada just to be present when a kinsman was being honoured. Everyone wanted to be involved.
One night, the organisers invited Helen Mirren to do the honours. Oscar- winning actress she might be but even her voice cracked at times.
The only sour note was that those bodies charged with supporting the arts — including the National Lottery — failed to see any merit in the idea. The artist had to take out a high-interest loan to underwrite his brilliant idea, while the Tower’s appeals for help
from all our main arts organisations were rejected.
There will be no need for that this time, for generous backers have come forward to support what should be a very fitting conclusion to four years of national commemorations.
During that time, we have seen poignant parades and services right across the World War I battlefront led by the Royal Family, ministers and Royal British Legion standard-bearers.
From Mons to the Somme and Vimy, from the North Sea ceremonies to mark the Battle of Jutland, to a heartbreaking service in memory of the staff and pupils of an East End primary school killed in 1917 during London’s first daylight bombing raid, Britain has faithfully honoured the memory of a noble generation who are no longer with us.
Now comes the final episode in this great commemorative undertaking, with a series of events planned for next month. Historic Royal Palaces, the charity which runs the Tower of London, has once again teamed up with poppies designer Tom Piper to create a fresh work called Beyond The Deepening Shadow: The Tower Remembers.
But whereas the poppies sought to convey monumental loss and sacrifice, this display will be about remembrance — but also forward-looking, too.
ATTHE outbreak of war, the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey grimly declared that ‘the lamps are going out all over Europe’. From November 4, on successive nights until November 11 itself, we will see them slowly come back on.
Unlike the poppies, this is an idea which has evolved from a long series of collective discussions between the Tower staff and their advisers.
Spread throughout the moat
of the Tower, roughly three feet apart and at various heights, will be 10,000 torches. The precise number has no particular significance and will simply be determined by the surface area of the moat.
As with the poppies, no one knows for sure what it will look like until it actually happens.
The power of this piece will be in the creeping wall of flame as it gradually spreads out until the whole moat is ablaze, while a choral tribute plays throughout. It will begin each evening at 5pm as the Tower is cast in to darkness and a lone bugler plays the Last Post. Then comes what Tom Piper calls the ‘ignition’.
This, he explains, is as much a part of the spectacle as the end result. ‘It will have a strong dramatic element,’ says the award- winning theatre designer.
Led by the Yeomen Warders of the Tower in their traditional Tudor ‘ Beefeater’ uniforms, a team of 80
volunteers will move outwards from the walls armed with wand- like zappers and begin lighting the torches one by one.
We are not talking tea lights. Each will produce a deep orange flame up to a foot tall from a canister the size of a small paint pot.
‘One of the things people found most appealing about the poppies was watching the volunteers planting them,’ Tom Piper tells me.
At the same time, the specially commissioned choral work will ring out from loudspeakers stretching the length of the moat. Each torch will have enough (alcohol-based) fuel to last precisely four hours in all weathers, whereupon the flames will cease at around 9pm and the Tower will flick the lights back on.
As in 2014, large crowds are expected. This time, however, a few lucky members of the public can actually immerse themselves in the display.
A limited number of tickets are on sale ( for just £ 5 each), allowing people to enter the moat and walk along a path through this sea of fire from one end to the other — at a safe distance, of course.
‘The health and safety manual for this event is this big!’ exclaims Commander Debra Whittingham, the Deputy Governor of the Tower, stretching her arms wide. A former Royal Navy officer and the first female Deputy Governor in the Tower’s 1,000- year history, Commander Whittingham is in charge of all the practicalities.
Her duties extend to deciding on the clothing the volunteer torch-lighters must wear each night. Thankfully, the commander has already vetoed one inevitable demand. Whatever the health and
safety commissars may say, there will be no hi-viz jackets.
‘We want people dressed appropriately,’ she says, adding that a range of dark, weatherproof, flame-retardant kit is being sorted out.
She is seeking a pool of 300 volunteers to be part of the torch- lighting programme, and a further 300 to help replenish all the torches the following morning. After the poppy experience, there should be a stampede.
As for the Yeomen Warders, they are very much looking forward to taking part.
‘It will be in our own time, so we have asked for volunteers and everyone wants to be part of it,’ says Yeoman Gaoler (second-in-command) Bob Loughlin MBE, 63. He joined the Beefeaters at the Tower after 36 years in the RAF Regiment, and well remembers being on duty here during the poppy saga.
Most of all, he recalls the evening when he was picked to read out the roll of honour. ‘It was just astonishing to hear people in the crowd crying as I was reading out the names,’ he recalls.
I suggest that some people will, inevitably, be concerned for the ravens. Might not the sudden appearance of ten thousand flames be enough to drive these famous residents away — and thus spell doom for the Tower, the Crown and the nation, as legend foretells?
‘Don’t worry, the ravens will all be safely tucked up in bed by then,’ Bob assures me.
There is still much planning to do. Eva Koch- Schulte, creative producer for all the Historic Royal Palaces is presently working out the shape and timings of the torch procession.
‘It is all about light seeping out from the shadows and that sense of shared sacrifice,’ explains Germanborn Eva, who has commissioned composer and artist Mira Calix to create the music.
Like the title of the display, the words of the choral piece will be based on Sonnets To A Soldier by Mary Borden, a war poet and nurse on the Western Front during World War I who went on to run an ambulance service in World War II.
There are going to be major events all over Britain to mark the centenary of the Armistice, including a ‘people’s parade’ at the Cenotaph, and a service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey involving the Royal Family and (almost certainly) the President of Germany.
But the blazing moat at the Tower will surely be among the most memorable tributes. And this display will also be less financially precarious than the 2014 poppy show. It seems astonishing now, but Paul Cummins risked bankruptcy to create that dazzling Blood Swept Lands And Seas Of Red.
The National Lottery, so ready to toss money at any modish tat masquerading as culture, had refused to cough up a bean towards the Tower’s costs. Ditto the Arts Council.
Perhaps, if Cummins had said he wanted to create a sea of white flags or a giant Tracey Emin bed, it might have found some cash. He might even have been nominated for the Turner Prize.
BuTNO. His war-themed work was not worthy of public funding. For good measure, a Guardian columnist weighed in and attacked it as a ‘ukip-style memorial’.
So Cummins had to take out a hefty loan to get it all off the ground and pay for a ceramic production line, using unemployed youngsters in Derby.
Historic Royal Palaces (which runs the Tower without a penny of public money), agreed to foot the bill for crowd control and logistics. Yet when the time came to take the display down, there was an outcry. The public wanted ‘their’ poppies to stay. So, a compromise was found.
To recoup his costs, Cummins
sold the poppies for £25 each, with any profit going to charity. Such was the demand that they generated a whopping £9.5 million for good causes.
A group of philanthropists also bought the two most dramatic aspects of his display — ‘Wave’ and ‘Weeping Window’, the two great arches of poppies — and gave them to the nation in perpetuity.
The then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, produced a further £2 million to take these two displays on tour around the united Kingdom.
They have enjoyed astonishing success, with a further 4.5 million people coming to see them.
Tom Piper has spent much of the past four years touring the country re-erecting the poppies at regional sites, and has been bowled over by the reaction to them.
He was particularly touched when he took them to Caernarfon Castle where his great- uncle, Lieutenant Arthur Griffiths, is among the thousands of gallant Welshmen listed in the Roll of Honour. ‘I felt this very powerful connection,’ he says. ‘It left me very proud and very moved.’
He tells me how Newcastle’s Woodhorn mining museum enjoyed a 1,500 per cent increase in visitors when the poppies went on show there. And so it continues.
This weekend, Weeping Window has gone on display at the Imperial War Museum in London, while Wave is on show at the IWM North in Manchester.
Four years on, Poppy Power is undiminished. The judges of contemporary art’s increasingly ludicrous and tawdry Turner Prize might continue to ignore Cummins.
Yet, it is a measure of the enduring — almost sacred — status of his work that, to this day, you will not find a single one of those 888,246 original ceramic poppies on eBay.
Fortunately, funding for the flames is already in place. The City of London Corporation and the Charles Wolfson Trust will pay for the torches, and the Tower will sort out everything else.
Once the flames have flickered and disappeared for the last time, all the torches will be recycled and the moat will revert to grass again.
‘We very much wanted something ephemeral, which is why we have gone for sound and light,’ says Eva Koch-Schulte.
Amid all our squabbles over Brexit and our 21st- century inter-generational feuds, this will be a moment to pause and reflect on the sacrifice of a generation who never lived to enjoy our freedoms and privileges.
It will be spectacular, appropriate and deeply impressive. Catch it while you can. FOR tickets and volunteering, visit hrp.org.uk-tower-of-london/ explore/the-tower-remembers.