Failing The Poppy Test

The world is a big place. There is so much we don’t know about it which, in general, behoves us to hold our tongue.

 I am thinking about the furore that has erupted in the lead-up to this year’s Remembrance Day, a day when the dead of world wars and other conflicts are remembered and commemorated. This time, the whole thing has been torpedoed by remarks made by a celebrity commentator, Don Cherry, whose normal business is to offer commentary on hockey games as they are played. On this occasion, Mr. Cherry felt impelled to comment on the apparent lack of a show of gratitude by new immigrants ('These people’, as he called them) to Canada for the sacrifice made by, presumably exclusively Canada-born veterans, who had sacrificed much, up to and including, in many cases, paying the ultimate price for the glory and survival of the British Empire, the amenities of which 'these people' dare to enjoy in Canada’s welcoming embrace. Their transgression? ‘These people’ did not show sufficient appreciation for the afore-mentioned sacrifices by wearing a poppy emblem on their lapel during the days leading to Remembrance Day.

        Whatever the merits or demerits of wearing or not wearing the emblem on one’s breast, there has to be something eerie in the vision of the 85-year old Cherry peering into the faces of individuals going about their normal business in his bid to administer the 'poppy test' as to who is or is not legit. It is a vision loaded with assumptions and not dissimilar to the Tebbit cricket test that, in Britain of the 1990s was supposed to be the measure of an individual’s patriotism, defined by whether they supported England or another Commonwealth country in a cricket match.

        In the case of Mr. Cherry’s, his mistake was not to have researched the role that immigrants to Canada and their forebears played in defending the Empire against the opposing forces, starting even before the two world wars. If Mr. Cherry had done his homework,  research would have prevented him from making a fool of himself. He would have discovered that the defence of the empire transcended races and regions.  He would have learnt also that the very first shot fired in anger by British forces in WWI was not by some anonymous person, but by one Alhaji Grunshi, a Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) Regimental Serjeant Major serving in Britain’s West African Frontier Force, when he returned fire against German forces in neighbouring ‘German’ Togoland. Grunshi was, and remains, one of the Forgotten Soldiers of Empire, whose descendants, more than a century on, are being disrespected by Don Cherry.

        But there are multiple other corners of the world, in the former British Empire, where what these men did, many dying in the process, is still celebrated and commemorated, including in Sierra Leone, for example, where Remembrance Day was celebrated this past Sunday and where this writer, in primary school, first learnt the opening lines of John McCrae’s “In

Flanders Fields, Where Poppies blow…” 

        Well, by the end of Remembrance Day, the unapologetic Mr. Cherry has been fired from his position and most people would say, “Not before time”. Lessons learnt? Maybe.

Tell Fren Tru