FLOWER OF THE FALLEN THE FALLEN
Scots will proudly sport an amazing 5m poppies in our lapels this year... and every single one of them will have been crafted with love in just one room
THE lad on guard at the gate of Edinburgh’s Redford Barracks is still in his teens. His gaze is steady, like his grip on the assuredly loaded SA80 rifle. The NCOs inside the gatepost are older, watchful, with heavily tattooed arms.
These are men who have served in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere; men who think far behind their eyes, recalling what they cannot forget. A call is made, my invitation confirmed, and a sergeant takes me through the campus, turning this way and that. A massed band is playing Highland Cathedral. As if by instinct, we walk in step to the beat, till he leaves me by a certain porch and I can announce my presence.
In the next few weeks Scots will buy five million commemorative lapel poppies. Some 30,000 long-stemmed poppies will be sold; the mourning will purchase 450,000 poppy crosses and dignitaries, here and there, will between them lay 26,000 poppy wreaths. And every one of them will have been made in this building – temporary home to Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory – by 35 people, mostly men, all disabled veterans of our Armed Forces.
It’s a sort of hangar, spare, almost bleak; they work quietly around assorted tables, with the occasional chuckle. Like David Adamson, well into his 60s, who ushers me around this morning as proudly as if it were the family business and whose 29 years as a sniper with the Royal Highland Fusiliers saw him in Northern Ireland, Belize, West Germany and elsewhere.
As if reading my mind – no stick, no missing limbs – he carols: ‘Asthma, out, osteoarthritis, and my shoulder’s out. Too many nights lying on wet ground, waiting for some Provo to visit his mum. If you think pushing 60 is hard, wait till you start dragging it.’
The poppy as a symbol for the fallen was, of course, born in the Great War. ‘Young folk struggle with the sheer scale of it – I tell them to imagine the entire population of Scotland killed twice,’ he says.
‘It was a Canadian surgeon, John McCrae, who made the poppy emblematic in his poem. He treated the wounded at “Essex Farm” during the Second Battle of Ypres; 40,000 wounded, 10,000 Canadian dead in the first seven days, one of them his friend, Alex Hamill, a young lieutenant. And amid grief and mud McCrae suddenly noticed these bits of colour.’
Thus the flower became emblematic, though folk first began to wear it not in Britain, but in France and – later – the United States. Soon after the war the Royal British Legion adopted it, south of the Border, but in Scotland the poppy has always been sold under other auspices, those of the Earl Haig Fund.
Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s wife Dorothy opened the first Scottish Poppy Factory in Whiteford House, at the foot of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, in 1926. ‘Then in 1965 it moved to old printworks at Logie Green Road,’ says David. ‘It’s being done up now, but we still use a lot of the equipment they left behind. Most of it’s here.’
EVERY single poppy is handmade, the vast majority for our jackets, and in two types – green-stemmed or stick-on. ‘We stopped making them with pins several years ago – it was getting too expensive.’
Nor, unlike England, has the Scottish poppy (which Lady Haig personally designed) ever come with a green leaf – it is not botanically correct and it would cost an extra £15,000, money that would support our veterans.
Many think sales only benefit our rapidly dwindling band of heroes from the Second World War. But the money raised supports everyone in Scotland’s Armed Forces community, including serving soldiers and their families – and every penny raised in Scotland is spent in Scotland.
Last year it was about £2.9million. ‘Ladies buy far more than men,’ chuckles David. ‘They change clothes more often. Now, don’t be surprised if there’s some lads we don’t speak to – they have post-traumatic stress disorder, and we’ll no’ bother them.’
We meet Stuart, who is ‘doing poppy crosses’. Robert, who is doing stick-ons, and Jamie, who is also making crosses.
‘Robert was on nuclear submarines,’ joshes David. ‘He’d spend six months at a time under the polar ice cap, so we cannae shut him up.’
Robert, poised, trim, gives the wan but affectionate smile of one who hears this joke about ten times a day. It is evidently a big week for crosses, for Mitch, Jimmy and Stuart are all making them.
Still another ‘lad’, Tony – they are all so dubbed, even within hailing distance of 70 – is snapping the central black button onto green stems. He says he can do 2,000 a day, no bother. Who is the oldest here? David and Tony think quickly. ‘Tam’s 70-odd,’ says David. ‘He’s no’ in the day. And Kenny, who retired last year, was 84.’
They all sport informal but elegant uniform: dark trousers and a navy polo shirt with the Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory logo. The youngest, Graham – early 30s – is filling a tray with completed poppies at what would be an impressive speed even if he still had both his hands.
And some of the kit on the great table where they make the boxes looks older than this building.
‘Aye, that’s 150 years old,’ says David, petting a guillotine whose daunting blade is longer than my
arm. ‘All we have added is this wee padlock so that kids don’t go away with bits missing. And this creaser is 150 years old too.’
He takes a sheet of cardboard and, in a few smooth mechanical moves, has creased it perfectly for folding into a box. ‘They never fail,’ he says, flicking his head at some electronic plant, ‘unlike they two computerised ones.’
At 98 years old, the tall stapler is positively youthful, ‘though there’s a few lads have to leave the space when we’re using it. Bang, bang, bang, like automatic rifle fire – it “triggers” them...’
In a workplace full of the invisibly wounded, two important personalities are canine. Gizmo, an endearing fluffball of a shih tzu, sits tenderly by one table. I am flashed a photo of him ‘just after his haircut’. A sort of collie-spaniel, Biggles sits at a far table all day staring adoringly at his human pet.
Debbie, forty-something, is a pool of still authority. She is stockpiling green pads for the stick-on poppies popular with ladies, whose garments rarely sport a buttonhole.
‘I normally make 2,000 poppies in the morning,’ she advises, ‘then green pads for the rest of the day.’ ‘2,000?’ She pouts. ‘Oh, that’s me slow...’
STEWART is the other way round: he has done his rostered green pads and is now making poppies. At the wreath-making table I meet Davie and the worshipful Biggles. He’s due a walk.
It takes Davie eight minutes to make each wreath, he calculates, and the poppies are subtly different. They are stamped out from sheets of synthetic scarlet silk on an adapted, venerable printing press, and with three petals, not four. Four is too ‘busy’, says Davie, ‘for a wreath’.
‘What I like about our Scottish poppy,’ says David, ‘is that it’s three-dimensional. It curls out at you, off the jacket – really clever.’
We watch Davie putting aside the wreath he has just completed, embarking upon another. His fingers move quickly: wire frame, foam, Sellotape, green tape, poppies pouring from his hands. Finally, an adhesive card, ‘ON BEHALF OF THE PEOPLE AND THE GOVERNMENT OF NEW ZEALAND’.
David steers me into what feels like a cathedral of boxed, stored wreaths, crosses, long-stems and the little poppies shortly speeding to that street vendor or the check-outs at your local supermarket – columns and columns, stacked high.
In modern acknowledgement, too, of the diversity that now exists, he shows me variants on the cross – a plain pale stake for Humanists, the crescent symbol for Muslims and the Star of David for Jews.
‘This isn’t our usual base, of course,’ he says, ‘so we have to store everything wherever we can find a bit of space.’
The collection tins are assembled here too, each with its individual serial number – though John, George and Willie, who are normally on that assignment, are right now peeling petals instead.
It’s a strange, tender working environment. There is much banter but evident and deep mutual affection. No one ever shouts; they cross the floor (and there is a lot of floor) to communicate or inquire.
They have the mutual bond of past service to Her Majesty, of course – service practically all of them entered as schoolboys, and put in for decades. And they have done things, endured things, seen things not readily forgotten; things far behind their eyes, the things that come out at night.
‘Belfast was bad,’ says David. ‘I remember one bomber, a lad on a moped, who accidentally blew himself up. All that was left was his boots, I mind – and his ankles still in the boots.’ You swallow hard. ‘But even that didn’t compare to Lockerbie,’ says David – December 1988, scant days from Christmas, when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Dumfriesshire with 259 people aboard.
‘We were called to search for bodies, hundreds of us, mostly very young Jocks. I remember the first night, the night we arrived, there was great crack; they were happy to be doing something. A change in routine, you know.’
HE pauses. ‘Well, next day – bodies in trees, bodies that had plunged through roofs. A lass I saw – well, the top half of her, I don’t know if they ever found the rest. A 50-yearold, still strapped in his seat; only his suit was holding the bits together. People lying in gardens.
‘Anyway, we had to find them, find them all, and we had to take them in. The second night was very different. The boys were so quiet, pale. I think some were crying.’
And that is David’s story – just one of them – and everyone in this building has their stories and for the most part and in detail unspeakable, from the Bogside to the Falklands to the First Gulf War and to other entanglements, too, at the whim of our politicians – making history, no doubt, but, as at Lockerbie, sometimes merely following up behind it with a mop and bucket, many at an age when peers were sitting their Highers.
And every poppy you see this autumn was fashioned in this hall, framed by the fingers of someone with a story – most mindful of a mate or more who did not come back, whose sleep is eternal, whose tale will never be told, and mindful of those who serve still, that we might all be safe and free.