The purple poppy was launched by the charity Animal Ad in 2006 and sold up until 2016, when it was replaced by enamel purple paw badges. The plastic-free poppy is created from bespoke red and green paper manufactured by specialist papermaker James Cropper. The poppy's status as a recognisable symbol of Remembrance and its use as a fundraising tool began after the war and this was primarily driven by the work of two different women.

As a sign of this faith, and a remembrance of the sacrifices of Flanders Field, Michael vowed to always wear a red poppy; she found an initial batch of fabric blooms for herself and her colleagues at a department store. After the war ended, she returned to the university town of Athens and came up with the idea of making and selling red silk poppies to raise money to support returning veterans. And being first generation born here, I used to be told to go home, people used to tell me to go home. Animal Aid director at the time Andrew Tyler explained: “When we at Animal Aid launched our purple poppy initiative… our aim was to make it clear that animals used in warfare are indeed victims, not heroes.The red poppy has since become a ubiquitous symbol of respect and gratitude shown towards the sacrifices of British military personnel in the Great War and all the conflicts that followed. The historian said: "The poppy already has a job. And my job is not to do what the poppy does, my job is to do something that the poppy cannot do." In 2014, 800,000 ceramic copies designed by Paul Cummings and Tom Piper went on display at the Tower of London. Two parts of this installation later went on tour around the UK to 19 different locations before ending up at IWM London in 2018. Michael’s campaign to create a national symbol for remembrance—a poppy in the colors of the Allied nations’ flags entwined around a victory torch—didn’t get very far at first. But in mid-1920, she managed to get Georgia’s branch of the American Legion, a veteran’s group, to adopt the poppy (minus the torch) as its symbol. Soon after that, the National American Legion voted to use the poppy as the official U.S. national emblem of remembrance when its members convened in Cleveland in September 1920. Many of these women had lost family and friends in the First World War and wanted to hold on to the key message of Remembrance Day, ‘never again’.

The remembrance poppy has become the defining symbol of reverence for the millions of soldiers who lost their lives in conflict. In the present day the ‘poppy appeal’, organised by The Royal British Legion, takes place in the weeks leading up to Remembrance Sunday, which occurs on the Sunday nearest to Armistice Day. The poppy appeal raises money for those who have served or are currently serving in the armed forces and have subsequently been affected physically, mentally or economically by war. The history of the poppy as a symbol of respect for the war dead is now almost one hundred years old. Since the appeal’s inception in 1921, the poppy has become an international symbol of remembrance for those who have given their lives defending their respective countries.In 1920, there were numerous acts of Remembrance across Britain, such as two-minute silence, the burial of the unknown warrior and the unveiling of the Cenotaph in London. But at this point we can see that the poppy was not yet the flower of Remembrance that we think of it as today. Historically, it has not only been people who have lost their lives in war but also animals such as horses, dogs and pigeons. Laura Clouting: “It has now come to symbolise the sacrifice and the efforts of the armed forces in more recent conflicts but because these more recent conflicts have become more complex and perhaps less morally ambiguous to some people, and therefore not as well supported as broadly the world wars were, the poppy has become a more contentious symbol. This primarily manifests itself in alternative poppies, for example, the white poppy is the most familiar, a symbol of peace, anti-war set up by the Peace Pledge Union in the 1930s to challenge militarism. It's also seen in controversies over the red poppy being appropriated by, for example, far-right organisations and the objection that some people have to wearing it because they see it as being connected to the actions of Britain’s army, for example, in Northern Ireland during the Troubles which they find very difficult. But in conclusion, the poppy is still worn by millions of people every Remembrance Day and into the November season when we see poppies all around us, on people's lapels, in wreaths, at War Memorials, and over 100 years later it has also inspired artwork like that which we saw at the Tower of London in 2014. Its literal and symbolic scenes were rooted in the First World War’s turbulent landscape and it's really interesting to remember the poppy then as a symbol of hope, of a morale boost, as a burst of colour in very bleak landscapes during the First World War.” Their rebellion lives on. Just... Given today's austerity it must made be clear that nobody in parliament or elsewhere can hand these hard-won institutions to private capital and still claim to be a friend of soldiers.

The white poppy is a pacifist symbol of remembrance and has been worn in the run-up to Remembrance Day for 90 years. After the Napoleonic Wars, military veterans were involved in democratic upsurges in the face of oppression such as at the ill-fated Peterloo Demonstration of 1819 where a young Waterloo veteran was murdered by the state for the crime of activism. Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a Canadian who served as a brigade surgeon for an Allied artillery unit, spotted a cluster of poppies that spring, shortly after the Second Battle of Ypres. McCrae tended to the wounded and got a firsthand look at the carnage of that clash, in which the Germans unleashed lethal chlorine gas for the first time in the war. Some 87,000 Allied soldiers were killed, wounded or went missing in the battle (as well as 37,000 on the German side); a friend of McCrae’s, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was among the dead. They were first produced in 1933, after the First World War, by members of the Co-operative Women’s Guild.

According to the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), the body which distributes them today, white poppies represent three things: remembrance for all victims of war, commitment to peace and a challenge to the glamorisation of conflict. When Britain was an empire, it benefited from the colonies which were part of it. I am a result of those contributions. I started this project five years ago, as I felt that in the country I call home, the history that represents me is missing. It is estimated that 8,000,000 donkeys and horses were killed during the First World War. Comparatively, the war took the lives of 9.7 million military personnel. Nearly 10 million people saw this display in total. This year the poppy sculptures are being installed at IWM North. These evocative displays demonstrate the resounding popularity of the poppy over 100 years since the end of the First World War. So, what is it about the poppy that captured the public imagination so profoundly? Why do some people see the poppy as a controversial symbol? And how was the poppy chosen in the first place?

During WW2 soldiers rebelled again. The most famous democratic – and therefore technically illegal – gathering was the Cairo Forces Parliament in Egypt in 1944. Those gathered voted for full nationalisation of mines, banks and more besides.

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They commemorate all victims of all wars, both military and civilians of all nationalities, and seek to bring to an end “the exclusion of civilians from mainstream Remembrance events”. These were soldiers who came to the cause of justice and were later betrayed, outmanoeuvred and crushed by their generals. From 1914 to 1918, World War I took a greater human toll than any previous conflict, with some 8.5 million soldiers dead of battlefield injuries or disease. The Great War, as it was then known, also ravaged the landscape of Western Europe, where most of the fiercest fighting took place. From the devastated landscape of the battlefields, the red poppy would grow and, thanks to a famous poem, become a powerful symbol of remembrance. The reactionary Churchill was rejected for a progressive government which in turn laid the foundations of the NHS and welfare state. Laura Clouting: “One of those women was an American academic called Mona Michael. She had been inspired by John McCrae's poem, just before the armistice, and she described in her memoirs reading the poem and having a very intense kind of spiritual experience and she was moved to buy artificial flowers to distribute them for wearing as on people's lapels as a symbol of Remembrance. There was also another woman called Anna Guerin. She was had very well established in the sense of setting up a network of French war widows who made artificial flowers made from silk to raise funds for various causes.”