Act of Remembrance observed at St Matthew's Primary School
The First World War ended in 1918, bringing to an end a period of conflict which had begun in 1914. The declaration of peace — known as the Armistice — was signed in France by representatives of the two sides at 11am on November 11th, 2018. Fighting stopped at exactly that time.
An Act of Remembrance has taken place every year in towns and cities across Britain since November 11th, 1919, and the red poppy was introduced as a symbol of remembrance in 1921.
To mark the one hundredth anniversary of the start of World War 1, in 1914, Historic Royal Palaces commissioned a special project called Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red. The project saw 888,246 ceramic poppies installed in the moat around the Tower of London. The clay poppies were designed by artist Paul Cummins. Each one was hand-crafted by hundreds of workers in a pottery in Derbyshire so they were all slightly different in some way. Many were fired in the kilns with the potters’ fingerprints pressed into the poppy petals. The poppies were then transported to London and installed at the Tower. Hundreds of community groups volunteered to help with the planting. The first one was pushed into the ground on 17th July 2014 and the display was completed on 4th August 2014. The late Queen Elizabeth II and Duke of Edinburgh, as well as Prince William and Princess Catherine, and Prince Harry, were among more than five million people who visited the Tower between August and November to view the poppies.
A few weeks ago, we asked families to bring in old plastic drink bottles. In the past few weeks, groups of children have been working hard in their lunch breaks to turn these bottles into poppies for our own Garden of Remembrance display.
You can see the result of all their hard work at the front of the school this week with all the poppies that were made having been planted in the ground around our iconic London Plane tree by the front gates on Havelock Road.
This was a focal point of our own traditional Act of Remembrance on Monday 11th November.