“At the going down of the Sun and in the morning, We will remember them.“
Every year, a local group gets asked to arrange and lead the local Remembrance day parade service. Pioneer Scout Troop and Mountford Troop were asked to lead this year’s service at St Andrew’s Church, Frimley. It has been quite a few years since we were last asked to lead the local service and we wanted to focus on a slightly different view of Remembrance.
At the heart of our service was The Royal British Legion, the charity that makes and distributes the Poppies for the Poppy Appeal every year, as well as being our national symbol for Remembrance. We decided we should use this year’s service to highlight their work and heighten awareness of this incredibly hardworking charity.
Before we could write a service about the charity, we wanted to make sure we understood their work fully and allow us to highlight some of the lesser known facts. After contacting them about the service they arranged for them to spend an evening with the Scouts, this would include a representative to talk about how the charity operates today as well as a veteran that has been helped by them. Unfortunately, due to time restraints we had to delay this visit until after our service. However, the charity sent us a full information pack about them and were happy to answer any questions we had at any time.
During our first discussion about the service we wanted the other groups attending to take part, as the charity we were discussing is very active then we thought we should at least draw a parallel in the way we conducted our service!
Therefore, we designed a giant Poppy!
Above was our Poppy, the defining red Poppy leaves have been detached. On the back of each Poppy leaf we wrote two lines of the poem In Flander’s Field.
Our idea behind this was that we handed these out to members of the Scouting congregation to bring up and read during the service. After reading their part of the poem they could then attach their leaf to the giant Poppy that would be placed in front of the choir stands.
This was our complete Poppy pictured at the front of the choir stands. As planned, each leaf was attached during the service by a member of the congregation after reading out the small passage on the back.
We hope everybody enjoyed our service and left knowing a lot more about The Royal British Legion.