Stuart Cosgrove: Remembrance is not about poppies but the simple act of reflection

Remembrance, it’s such a solemn and beautiful experience it baffles me how ­easily it has been contaminated by bad faith and colonised by low-level fanatics.

On Wednesday last, the repulsive right wing agitator Nigel Farage wheeled up with GB News crew at a stall near London, to endorse the work of the British Legion. It was the kind of grandstanding you would expect of Farage, rude, presumptuous, and igniting passions that lead us to lord knows where.

Each year when the poppy season comes round, I groan about what’s to come, the ­enthusiasm of the far-right, fake ­controversy about a politician’s coat at the Cenotaph, online fights between ­Scottish football fans and unimageable tat being flogged by conmen and worse still by charities.

READ MORE: 'I don't know why I did that': Douglas Ross on failing to declare £28,000

Remembrance has become its own contradiction: the sacrifices of the past stained by the tribal obsessions of the ­present.

There are many tasteful and moving demonstrations of remembrance such as the Lighting Up Red project which has turned Scottish landmarks into a deep and haunting crimson. Other ­social ­history projects like Heart of ­Midlothian’s, ­remembrance of the now famous McCrae’s Battalion that took the club’s footballers to death in the First World War remind us that football can sometimes be a force for good.

But what of the humble poppy? Faced with the shutdowns of Covid, this year the main poppy charities are hoping to reassert their status. Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory on Edinburgh’s Logie Green Road is offering a pop-up wreath shop in their newly refurbished Warriston ­factory where up to 35 disabled veterans ­assemble the traditional Scottish poppy.

But elsewhere aon our beleaguered high streets the poppy is struggling to reclaim its status among a frenzy of gifts and ­insignia from a range of suppliers many not in any way connected to the Royal British Legion or Poppy Scotland.

There is a pressing need to re-dignify the poppy and distance it from the sheer ­calumny doing the rounds online – the easily broken fake diamante brooches, the Lest We Forget panty-thongs, the maudlin lone soldier’s empty boots, the Keep the Faith northern soul poppy badges, and the Remembrance Day answer to the

half-and-half scarf, a poppy with your football club’s insignia.

Worse still there is crass exploitation by politicians. An online photoshop posted by Tory MP Ben Bradley shows a poppy, the Union flag and an American marine where the old British Tommy should be. He clearly cared more about rushing up a reaction rather than checking its validity.

I have long been a quiet cynic about the poppy festival because the bogus fuss it generates in some quarters is like an annual pantomime, so predictable you ­already know the script, the tropes, and the central cartoon characters.

Over the next few days, you will meet football fans who will use the poppy as an axe to grind out old rivalries. So, look out for enforced fealty to the crown and a love of Britain in its darkest hours. ­Prepare yourself for low level poppy ­fascism. You will meet the serially appalled who are disgusted you are not wearing a poppy and you may even be challenged by some tone-deaf clown who knows nothing of your life, your family, and your ­experiences of grief.

It may be that you may have lost a grandparent to Covid, a husband to ­cancer or a baby in childbirth, but that will mean nothing if you don’t have a piece of red rice paper on your lapel.

Let me share a barely concealed secret well-known to anyone who has worked in broadcast television.

If you cross the threshold of the BBC, STV, ITV or Channel 4. this week you will be offered a poppy at reception, or if you are on the studio floor, waiting to go live, a production assistant will be tasked with ensuring all guests are wearing a poppy. Strangely, if you are in a studio to do a voice-over or appear as a guest on a radio show there is no such policy.

This neatly captures the poppy ­predicament in one simple example – the anxiety is not about wearing a poppy it about “being seen” to wear a poppy and that is the desperately sad thing: we have allowed appearance to overwhelm ­remembrance.

AS someone with mixed views about poppies I have built up my own personal resilience. If I’m in a shop with charity tin I will happily buy a poppy, but it often stays on one jacket whilst I’m wearing another or disappears in a pocket crumpled up with a hankie. I feel no urge to change the happenstance of life, in part because I cannot always remember whether I’m wearing a poppy or not.

This is a time to remember rather than act out tiny social rituals, so on ­remembrance Sunday I nominate ­someone from my past life that I have lost and spend quiet time reflecting on their life and values, whether in war time or not. Sometimes it is my dearly departed friend Donald McDonald who left Perth with me to deep dive into the soul scene and died prematurely of a drug overdose.

Often, it’s my mum working in a war armaments factory in Whitehaven in ­Cumbria, where she met my dad, a ­recently recruited radar operative with the RAF.

This year was special. I recently learnt about my Uncle Jimmy, my father’s older brother. He was a man I barely knew who I was told returned from the war a virtual invalid, and then emigrated to Canada soon after the war and lived out most of his life in Uranium City, Saskatchewan.

We only met once, and I have no formed or lasting memories of the man.

Last week changed all that. After years of fruitless searching online, I received an update about his savage experiences ­during the war. He was one of the 10,000 or more British troops, most of them Scots, that were forced to surrender to General Rommel’s panzer divisions in the 51st Highland Division’s catastrophic ­retreat from St Valery.

Jimmy Cosgrove was captured in a roadside village near St Valéry-en-Caux and forced at gunpoint to make the long journey mostly by foot to Stalag XIID a Prisoner of War Camp, in the Rhineland town of Trier near the Luxemburg ­border with southern Germany, where he ­became known as Prisoner 15745. It was a camp populated by boys from Perth, Dundee, Dunfermline and the Lothians.

READ MORE: Tories lose to Labour in polls as most voters consider party 'very sleazy'

Why Scots bore the brunt of the ­fatalities and mass imprisonment is a matter of military controversy to this day. It was one of a thousand reasons why ­returning war veterans turned so decisively against Winston Churchill’s Conservative Party in the historic 1945 general election.

When Jimmy finally returned home, he was so emaciated and calloused that he was unrecognisable to his own ­mother. I can only guess at the horrendous ­conditions and the forced labour he endured.

But at least I know where he was on Christmas Eve 1940 when the Camp’s most famous prisoner, the French ­Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre staged a ­radical nativity play for an audience of 2000 fellow prisoners.

Lord knows what my Uncle Jimmy made of the French philosopher’s ­sophistry. He had not been reared in the subtleties of French existentialism.

But his story gives me resounding hope and a reason to smile this Sunday.

He survived the war and he kent Sartre.

Rest in Peace Jimmy.