With Remembrance Day approaching, the 100 Mile House & District Stamp Club is excited to spotlight stamps featuring veterans.
Canada Post memorialized John McCrae with a stamp in 1968. The stamp featured his face and the first two lines of his poem In Flanders Fields.
Since then, many other Remembrance Day stamps have been released.
A Lest We Forget stamp was released in 2009, features a close-up photograph of the National War Memorial in Ottawa
A panel of five stamps was released in 2015, showing a zoomed in picture of the National War Memorial, in Ottawa.
These are just three examples of Remembrance Day stamps. The list goes on.
Although John McCrae’s stamps may not be valuable in the monetary sense, according to the local stamp club, they are essential pieces in any Canadian stamp enthusiast’s collection.
McCrae wrote his famous poem In Flanders Fields in April 1915, after one of his close friends was killed in the Second Battle of Ypres, in Flanders, Belgium.
McCrae noticed wild poppies beginning to bloom between the makeshift graves marked with simple wooden crosses that soldiers were being buried in. He was a surgeon in the Canadian Army Medical Corps in World War I. McCrae ended up dying of pneumonia and meningitis on Jan. 28, 1918, near the end of the war.
He was buried in the Commonwealth War Graves section of Wimereux Cemetery in France with full military honours.
Some of the bloodiest fightings of WWI took place in Flanders. The poppy was the only thing which grew in the aftermath of complete devastation.
The Royal Canadian Legion was founded on Nov. 25, 1925, to give WWI veterans a voice.
An Act of Parliament gave the Legion responsibility to safeguard the poppy as a sacred symbol of “Remembrance by the people of Canada” in 1948.
Millions of Canadians wear a poppy on Remembrance Day, a visual pledge to never forget the Canadians who made the ultimate sacrifice to protect our freedom.
The Canadian War Museum (CWM) showed “Fighting in Flanders - Gas, Mud, Memory” in 2014 and 2015 in its Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae Gallery. The exhibition highlighted the famous poem In Flanders Fields.
The Royal Philatelic Society of Canada, Canada’s national society for studying stamps and postal history, holds an annual convention and exhibition.
In 2015, its theme was Remembering In Flanders Fields.
The Montreal Canadiens’ dressing room at the forum is considered the most inspirational room in hockey.
A line from McCrae’s poem - “to you from failing hands we throw the torch, be yours to hold it high” - has been boldly displayed on the wall of the Montreal Canadiens’ dressing room for the past 66 years, high above portraits of players who’ve been inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.
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