Legion Experience Museum

The Remembrance Poppy

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The idea for the Remembrance Poppy was imagined by Madame Anna Guérin of France (left). She was inspired by John McCrae's poem “In Flanders Fields” (below). Anna had originally founded a charity to help rebuild regions of France after the First World War, and created poppies made of fabric to raise funds.

Soldier, physician and poet McCrae was born on November 30, 1872, in Guelph, Ontario. When he was sixteen, he graduated from the Guelph Collegiate Institute and won a scholarship to the University of Toronto, where he studied medicine for three years. He graduated with his bachelor’s degree in 1898. As the first shots of World War I were fired in the summer of 1914, Canada, as a member of the British Empire, became involved in the fight as well. McCrae was appointed brigade-surgeon to the First Brigade of the Canadian Field Artillery. McCrae's friend and former militia member, Lt. Alexis Helmer, was killed in the battle, and his burial inspired the poem, ''In Flanders Fields", which was written on May 3, 1915. It first appeared anonymously in Punch on December 8, 1915. McCrae died of pneumonia near the end of the war.