Social History In 50 Objects Number 5. - Glasgow Corporation Peace Medal/White Poppy

 


The other day I wrote about my Granda's Pacific Star medal from the war and how he struggled to find work after WWII.

By way of contrast, today's object is a Glasgow Corporation Peace Medal from 1919, to mark the ending of hostlities, set into a white poppy.

These brass peace medals were issued by nearly every town and local authority across Britain to commemorate the Versailles Treaty and given out to children as part of the Peace Day public holiday of 19 July 1919.

It is perhaps helpful for us to remember just how unhappy the British public were about the various military parades and extravagant victory celebrations which took place immediately after WWI.

Especially when so many ex-servicemen were now unemployed, ex-soldiers suffered greatly after the war and also during the 1921 economic slump.

In Manchester, demobilised soldiers marched with banners proclaiming ‘Honour the dead - remember the living’, and ‘work not charity’.

Just like their forbearers before them, facing the same hardshp on returning from the Napoleonic wars, protesting at St Peter's Field. These soldiers also insisted  that the money would be better spent supporting returning servicemen who had suffered physical and mental injuries.

The men of the Royal Artillery stationed at Le Havre even burnt down several depots in a riot and on the 3rd of January 1919. While frustrated soldiers mutinied at Folkestone. Later that same month, there was another mutiny at Calais involving around 20,000 men.

However, the issuing of peace medals to the public by civic authorities, alongside the white poppy, represented an alternative to the unpopular militaristic and jingoistic victory celebrations, more in keeping with the feelings of working class people, following the end of the war.

The White Poppy tradition is very old and rooted in some of the noblest institutions and finest individuals Britain has ever produced, including fine Christian Socialists such as George Lansbury, Dick Sheppard, Donald Soper, Vera Brittain who all belonged to the Peace Pledge Union which established the White Poppy after the war, pictured below.


The idea that White Poppies are a modern invention created by 'woke,' liberals for who hate Britain is nonsense. The great Dick Sheppard was the Dean of Canterbury and a respected establishment figure, who felt called to peacemaking following his experiences in WWI.

White Poppies dont exist to insult or judge those who choose to wear red poppies and the PPU does not celebrate or honour the 'enemies of Britain'.

Indeed, it was the PPU founder Dick Sheppard who established the festival of remembrance but he and others sought to make remembrance about ending ALL war FOREVER, today white poppys symbolise three things...

1. Remembrance for all victims of war.
2. A commitment to peace.
3. A challenge to attempts to glamourise or celebrate war.

Popular posts from this blog

Have Gourock’s Catholics Brought The Bands To Town?

Image
  It’s probably worth stating from the outset that I am not actually opposed to Orange Walks and I didn’t submit an objection to the upcoming parade through Gourock. This is because, like many people on the west of Scotland, my own identity, religious heritage and ethnicity is a rich mix of Scottish Free Church Presbyterian, Irish Catholic and German Lutheran, alongside Episcopalian, Welsh, Ulster Scots and Highland Gael on my wife’s side.  As such, I can generally see things from both perspectives and I often suspect that much of the tension which surrounds marching season, is rooted in suspicion, rather than reality. For instance, a significant number of Scottish Catholics feel that those banging the big Lambeg drum outside the chapel each summer, are the descendants of the very same ‘Peep-o'-Day Boys‘, who once carried out the mass wrecking of Catholic cottages and burned their Irish forefathers out their homes, centuries ago. For some within the Catholic community, these se
Read more

Social History In 50 Objects Number 1. - Pioneers Of Total Abstinence

Image
  This beautiful little pin of the Sacred Heart came down to me from my Mum's Haggerty and McGarry side of the family, it once belonged to a Great Aunt who had been a member of the 'Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart'. PTAA members were known as pioneers and they had a special devotion to the Sacred Heart, pioneers wore a lapel pin just like this one. Abstinence and temperance have always been a big deal in Greenock, John Dunlop established Britain’s first temperance society in Greenock in in 1829. A few years earlier in 1820, the famous sugar baron Abram Lyle was born in Greenock, in the same year the Scottish radical James Wilson was executed for breaking prisoners out of Greenock jail during the Scottish Radical War. Abram had been the grandson of a weaver and the son of an alcoholic cooper, who left his son in debt and it was Abram's deep Christian faith which drove him to promote sugar and confectionary as an alternative to alcohol. Lyle once
Read more

Of Judges - Scotland, Christians and Labour Zionism

Image
  More than a few of us Scottish Christian Socialists and Scottish Christians on the Left are profoundly influenced by the philosophy of a contemporary political thinker and Labour peer called Maurice Glasman. Maurice is the founder of the political tendency known as Blue Labour, which is in part, inspired by Bundism. The Jewish Labour Bund was a secular Jewish Socialist movement found in Lithuania, Poland and Russia in the 1890's, based on the principles of solidarity, mutualism, autonomy and local democracy. Maurice also often speaks about the politics of his father who was a Labour Zionist and his mother who came from a working class family in Stamford Hill and was a lifelong Labour supporter. Likewise, Christian Socialists with a special interest in civil society cannot think or talk about cooperatives without any reference to the impact of the Jewish Labour Movement. Just as I’ve learned a great deal from Maurice, so too have I been fortunate enough to learn from leade
Read more