InYourArea News

St Tudy celebrates 100 years of Royal British Legion with 1,000 knitted poppies display

The display has been in the making for several months

Olivier Vergnault

By Olivier Vergnault

One North Cornwall village is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Royal British Legion in style with a special display of more than 1,000 knitted poppies.

St Tudy, Cornwall, is currently adorned with the crochet and knitted poppies after a call out to the village knitters in the summer saw everyone dust off their knitting needles.

Now the town has its own display to commemorate 100 years of the RBL complete with history boards made ahead of the Remembrance weekend and in commemoration of those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country during the First and Second World Wars.

The history boards installed in the village cover ‘Remembrance’, ‘Hellfire Corner’ and ‘The Forgotten Casualties of War’.

Rita Westlake, secretary of the St Tudy Historical Society, who called the villagers to arms this summer to knit a poppy for the town’s display, said: “Hellfire Corner is particularly important to us in the village because we have a chestnut tree that came from a conker collected at Hellfire Corner near Ypres.

“Sadly it became diseased but we are replacing with a young tree grown from a seed of the original tree next spring.

“Our history board gives details of Hellfire Corner and the Captain who collected and brought home the conker. We have used the railings of the tree for our Poppy Waterfall.”

Rita said that members of the Women’s Institute and ‘Knit and Natter’ groups plus other individuals took her up on the poppy knitting challenge and made more than 1,000 for the poppy waterfall display.

Poppies from old wreaths have been cleaned and reused for the carpet that ‘The Unknown Tommy’ stands on while various groups in the village fundraised for its purchase and others cut out the pigeon, dog and mule.

The Army Surplus store in Wadebridge even loaned the kit bags as saddle bags.

Rita added: “We took just over three hours to get everything in place but research and getting it all together took months.”

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