THE POPPY COLLECTOR WHO RAISED MORE THAN £1 MILLION
Vera Parnaby, 82, has raised more than £1 million selling poppies for the Royal British Legion over the past 75 years. Last month, she met the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall and will be a special guest at the Legion’s Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday. Here, she tells her story.
I can’t remember my dad, George Richardson. I was only a small child when he was killed on an Army base in 1942, three months into his deployment as a private with the Royal Army Service Corps.
My mother, Annie, was left with four children aged between 11 years and four months. I was just three.
That Christmas, in 1945, we were invited to a party
by the local branch of the Royal British Legion. It was because of our circumstances, being left without a father – but, sadly, we weren’t the only ones.
The widowed mothers ended up forming a women’s section of the Consett and District branch, and in those days there weren’t any babysitters, so us children went along to the meetings with
them. We started selling poppies the following year – our mother took all four of us together – going door to door in the terraced homes of Leadgate, the old mining village where we lived.
The weather is pretty exposed up here, so we were swaddled up in coats. I have been poppy collecting ever since. Those early years following the war were very difficult. Food was rationed and it was a really big deal if the greengrocers even had something like bananas – queues would quickly form.
I later married an ex-soldier. Alan, a national serviceman who served with the Army Pay Corps. We married in 1961 and have three children (56, 54, 48), two granddaughters and two great grandchildren aged five years old and 16 months. As soon as they were old enough, I took my children and grandchildren poppy collecting as well.
When we used to pick the grandchildren up from school around this time of year they would ask: “Grandma, are we going poppying?”
I have no idea how much I have raised over the years, but I’ve been told it is more than a million.
Even last year during lockdown, our district raised £36,000. It was a risk to us all without any vaccinations, but I thought it was my duty.
Our mother never remarried and never talked about what happened to our father. When she died in 2000, I found little bits of his life that she had kept – a letter of condolence from his regiment and a letter signed by
King George VI, along with his medal. His name is on the war memorial in the nearby village of Annfield Plain, and every year we would go together and place a wreath upon it.
I think of both of them on Armistice Day, and my husband who died nearly seven years ago. And I will continue selling poppies in honour of all of the fallen for as long as I can.