Army top brass salute Mail campaign to keep the Tower poppies blooming

MILITARY top brass yesterday backed calls to keep the Tower of London’s poppies beyond Armistice Day.

Former senior Army figures and a decorated war hero added their support to a Daily Mail campaign to extend the poignant tribute to Britain’s First World War dead.

Field Marshal Lord Bramall, a former Chief of the Defence staff, said he would welcome a decision to keep the poppies until the end of the year, in line with commemorative events.

He told the Mail: ‘It has been a wonderful focal point for remembering the fallen, I’m all in favour of it. If it … did stay until the end of 2014, that would be marvellous.’

Lord Bramall’s views were echoed by Major General Patrick Cordingley, the commander of the Desert Rats in the 1991 Gulf War.

He said: ‘They should be there for as long as possible because it is a magnificent site and remembers the sacrifice of the 888,246 who died fighting for the country.’

Adding his weight to the calls, Major Charles Heyman, a senior defence analyst and editor of Armed Forces of the UK, said: ‘Anybody who has had chance to see the poppies has been struck by them. I would like to see them there for a longer time.’

Lance Corporal Matthew Croucher, who was awarded the George Cross for throwing himself on a Taliban hand grenade in Afghanistan to save his comrades, said: ‘The poppies have been a huge success, attracted millions of visitors and raised millions of pounds. I understand people wishing to keep the pop- pies for longer… I would have to agree.’

An online petition calling for the display to be kept at the Tower for a year has already attracted more than 23,000 signatures.

On Thursday all four main political parties threw their weight behind calls to keep the poppies for at least another week.

But last night Tower officials remained adamant that the lengthy job of taking away all the flowers would begin on Wednesday – the day after Armistice Day. They did however announce that the poppies will be floodlit for an extra two and a half hours each day to allow more to view the installation. They will be illuminated from 4.30am until dawn and then from dusk to midnight.

And today David Cameron will announce that part of the display is to go on a four-year tour of the country before going on permanent display at the Imperial War Museum.

More than four million people have already viewed the sea of red ceramic flowers.

Historic Royal Palaces, the charity which operates the landmark, says 11,000 volunteers will take about two weeks to remove the flowers and post them to their new owners. All 888,246 poppies – one for each British and colonial death during the war – have been sold at £25 each, with part of the estimated £15million proceeds shared between six service charities.

A spokesman said: ‘The transience of the installation is key to the artistic concept, with the dispersal of the poppies into hundreds of thousands of homes marking the final phase of this evolving installation.’ A deeply humbling monument

The last time a crowd this huge stood here in total silence, they had come to see the Jacobite rebel, Lord Lovat, lose his head. There were no stewards in hi-viz jackets back in 1747. In fact, 20 spectators died when a grandstand collapsed ahead of what would be the last public execution on Tower hill.

The atmosphere’s entirely different today but there is unquestionably the same sense of history, the same formidable symbol of Crown authority, the sombre multitude staring intently, the sea of red . . .

For what started out as an eccentric artistic exercise just three months ago, is now something truly historic. It’s not just that millions of people from all around the world have turned up to marvel at a work of modern art which can reduce grown men to tears, or that the leaders of all the main parties are in agreement about something — they all want next week’s scheduled poppy harvest to be postponed.

The Tower of London’s 2014 poppy installation is no longer just a tribute to each one of the 888,246 British and colonial troops who died in the Great War.

It’s become a monument to the way the British view themselves: dutiful, patient, original, compassionate and mindful of the past without being rooted in it.

And whatever happens to these poppies, an important public space which has sat empty since the days of William the Conqueror is now destined to be a national commemorative focal point for the foreseeable future.

This dazzling ceramic display has become the perfect riposte to today’s vapid, tokenistic, ‘me, me, me’ mindset, typified by those fatuous feminist T- shirts which public figures must wear for fear of being labelled sexist.

Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, has not yet found time to visit the poppies, but he has felt obliged to pose for the cameras in a T- shirt saying: ‘ This is what a feminist looks like’, and also gormlessly chop carrots on a day-time TV cookery slot.

No one is obliging anyone to visit the Tower of London. And there is no snappy catchphrase attached to these poppies.

But their unspoken message hits you like a sledgehammer the moment you clap eyes on the vermilion tide: ‘This is what a lost generation looks like.’

It was little more than a year ago that the ceramic artist, Paul Cummins, had the idea of crafting a clay poppy for every fallen soldier, planting the whole lot at the Tower of London and then selling them for charity.

he called it Blood Swept Lands And Seas Of Red, words written on the will of a soldier from his native Derbyshire who died in Flanders. But, first, he had to convince the Tower.

Some public organisations would probably still be holding committee meetings one year later, chewing over the health and safety implications. But the Tower authorities — a purposeful mix of distinguished old soldiers and hard-headed tourism experts — quickly grasped the idea.

The award-winning theatrical designer, Tom Piper, was recruited to bring the vision to life. A factory was set up in Derby and 50 unemployed locals hired to make the poppies, while two specialist potteries, in Warwickshire and Stoke, were also invited to help.

REBUFFED in his attempts to raise any support from Government and the usual arts bodies (how silly they look now), Paul Cummins had to take out a £1 million high-interest loan just to bring his idea to life.

he has certainly suffered for his art. early on, he lost a middle finger rolling out a new batch of poppies.

Neither he nor anyone else envisaged quite how this would turn out when the first poppy was planted last July by Yeoman Sergeant Crawford Butler.

The number of spectators has now soared past that muchquoted original estimate of four million. historic Royal Palaces, the charity which runs the Tower (without a bean from the taxpayer), has already spent £120,000 on stewards and safety hoardings to manage the thousands who keep pouring forth from Tower hill underground station.

But it is not just the crowds along the walls which have been remarkable. There is an equally impressive human story in the moat.

For this project has now attracted some 30,000 volunteers. That is almost half the number for the entire 2012 London Olympics. And they are vital because it has required a citizen army to plant nearly a million poppies in a matter of weeks. Another one will be needed in the weeks ahead to uproot them all and send the same poppies on their way to the people who have paid £25 for each one.

I turn up to find an afternoon shift of 200 volunteers putting on red bibs for a three-hour stint in a corner of the eastern moat, the last area of grass still untouched.

Some are pensioners, some students. Ten chaps have taken a day off from the Food Standards Agency. here, too, are half a dozen bikers in hell’s Angels leather waistcoats.

They turn out to be members of the Royal British Legion Riders Branch and have done several shifts.

‘The hardest thing is getting the bits on the rods,’ explains former Private Claire Thompson, 41, from uxbridge. ‘Last time, I had blisters for weeks!’

For these poppies do not come ready-made. As every person who has bought one is about to discover, they actually come in six pieces — a hand- crafted, scarlet-glazed head (made of two folds of clay), a 440mm steel rod, two rubber washers and two plastic ‘spacers’ which protect the clay from the steel and hold the head in place.

The poppy must then be gently hammered in to the grass. When the display comes down, each one will be dismantled for safe delivery. The new owners must then reassemble them ( an instruction manual is included with the certificate of authenticity).

‘It’s funny to think that just three months ago we were thinking about advertising this,’ says Colonel John Brown, the Deputy Governor of the Tower. The main man on the ground, he spent his military career in the Royal Logistic Corps, appropriately enough.

In between briefing the volunteers, he has to handle the growing numbers of VIPs wanting a tour of the site. ‘We’ve adopted what we call an “informal visit” strategy,’ he explains.

Staff are simply too busy to arrange VIP cordons and red carpets. Just this week, requests from two overseas royal families were politely turned down because there was no way of getting their motorcades through the crowds. Among those who has made her own way down here this afternoon is the actress Joan Collins.

I drop in at poppy-planting HQ, a set of windowless store rooms beneath Tower Bridge. There’s a large map of the world on the wall. New volunteers are asked to stick a red dot on their home town, and they come from every continent. Some are from Germany. Many are from the united States.

‘We had some American Vietnam veterans who were very moved by it all,’ says Col Brown. That sniffy Guardian critic who dismissed this project as an inward-looking ‘ukip- style memorial’ really did get it wrong.

ELSEWHERE, the historic Royal Palaces staff are arranging this evening’s Roll Call, another major operation in itself. every day since this display began, a Beefeater and a bugler appear at dusk and march out to a little mound in the middle of the poppies. They escort a guest who will read out 180 names from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s register of the dead.

Anyone can propose a name online. But each one must be checked against the Commission’s database to ensure that they are bona fide and that they have not already been included.

Then an email is despatched to the person who sent in the nomination, alerting them to the date