Campaigner's appeal for 2,500 plastic bottles to create a poignant tribute to Hartlepool's fallen war heroes

Jaime Horton wants to create a beautiful display of poppies on Remembrance Day in 2021.

After a Covid-hit 2020 meant the annual display was scaled down, Jaime is determined to make next year’s tribute to the heroes even more special.

"I served in the Army myself and my granddad fought. I think we should remember them. They gave their day so that we could have ours,” she said.

"It is a pleasure to stand and march and remember.”

Jaime is planning to create two fields of poppies in Victory Square as part of the annual ‘The Hartlepool Field of Remembrance’ campaign and more details can be found on the charity’s Facebook page.

To contribute to the display, people are asked to donate plastic bottles of any kind so that the tops and bottoms can be converted into poppies and stands.

Once made, they will form a display next to crosses which will each carry the name of a Hartlepool hero in a display which will honour almost 4,000 people.

The 2021 field of remembrance will be the fourth consecutive year that Jaime and her team of supporters will have put together a remembrance display.

Jaime is part of the Hartlepool Army Forces Veterans Breakfast Club which has around 140 members.

She said the 2021 display would have two fields of poppies – one for the First World War and the other for the Second World War.

To find out more, visit The Hartlepool Field of Remembrance page on Facebook.

On the page it explains how the tradition of planting a Field of Remembrance started in 1928 when The Poppy Factory took a group of disabled veterans, a tray of poppies and a collecting tin to the grounds of St Margaret’s church, in Westminster.

The men gathered around an original wooden cross planted there, taken from the battlefield grave of an unknown soldier.

Some of the men began to push poppies into the ground. Passers-by stopped to ask questions and began buying and planting poppies of their own – creating the very first Field of Remembrance.

This continued until 1931, when one of team came up with the idea of selling small wooden crosses with a poppy at the centre of each.

That became the little Remembrance cross that is still planted to this day.

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