Journal of Social History

Bartlett,, Emily

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shz111pmid: N/A

Abstract This article explores popular understandings of disability, work, and gender in the context of charitable employment schemes for disabled ex-servicemen after the First World War. It offers a case study of the British Legion–funded poppy factories in Richmond and Edinburgh, which employed war-disabled men to manufacture artificial flowers from 1922 onward. In so doing, this article demonstrates that press reports and charitable publications surrounding the schemes rhetorically incorporated the factories into wider twentieth-century understandings of Taylorist/Fordist productivity and manufacturing and reimagined the sites as sprawling production lines that churned out millions of flowers per year. This discourse positioned flower making as a highly skilled, masculine occupation, and relatedly constructed war-disabled flower makers as successful, productive, and physically capable workers. As one of the most publicly visible employment schemes—which catered to the most severely disabled ex-servicemen—the factories symbolized the potential of all war-disabled men for employment and went some way to challenge widespread perceptions of disabled people as idle, dependent, and useless. Moreover, this discourse represented modern, scientific methods of manufacturing as a way to make disabled bodies efficient and useful. Charitable reports positioned Taylorist/Fordist production as a solution to the problem of mass disability and ultimately countered widespread British discontent with American manufacturing ideals. On November 11, 1927, the British Legion released its first “official film” to the British public.1 The film was entitled Remembrance and featured appearances from the Prince of Wales and former commander-in-chief of the British army Earl Douglas Haig, as well as actor and First World War veteran Rex Davies.2 Despite somewhat mixed reviews, it was promoted as “an absorbing drama of real human interest” and lauded by the popular press as “[t]he most successful of all war pictures.”3Remembrance told the story of “three pals” who enlisted together on the outbreak of the First World War and made “a pact to stand by each other through thick and thin.”4 Although the emotional strain of war and the “terrible ordeal” of a raid upon enemy trenches drove the companions apart, they were eventually reunited when “all three [found] harbourage” as employees at the British Legion Poppy Factory in the aftermath of the conflict.5 While the characters featured in Remembrance were fictional, the trio represented two hundred war-disabled men employed at the British Legion Poppy Factory in Richmond at the time.6 The Poppy Factory was originally established by the Disabled Society in July 1922 to “ameliorate the circumstances” of severely disabled ex-servicemen by employing them to manufacture artificial flowers to sell to the public, including red Flanders poppies for sale on the anniversary of the Armistice each year (with which the release of Remembrance consciously coincided).7 The origins of the Poppy Factory have been well-documented: as Nicholas Saunders has determined, by 1922, the red Flanders poppy had been widely reimagined as a pervasive symbol of commemoration for the war dead.8 This was in no small part due to the efforts of American humanitarian Moina Belle Michael, who was inspired by John McCrae’s 1915 poem, “In Flanders Fields”—which described the graves of the war-dead engulfed by red poppies—and subsequently campaigned to promote the blossom as an emblem of remembrance for fallen soldiers.9 In 1921, the newly formed British Legion further adopted artificial poppies as fundraising objects and began to sell French-made silk poppies at the behest of French philanthropist Anna Guérin, who employed destitute women and children “in the devastated areas in France” to create the commemorative blooms.10 The objective of sales was “two-fold”: selling artificial poppies both assisted French war-widows and supported “the ex-servicemen of the British Legion,” to whom the profits from “Poppy Day” were donated under the auspices of the “Earl Haig Fund.”11 According to organizational reports, the undertaking was an immediate success; the Legion raised over £106,000 in November 1921 alone, so that the following year, the chair of the Disabled Society, Major George Howson, approached the British Legion and suggested that war-disabled men manufacture commemorative poppies as a way to return these deserving individuals to the workforce.12 The Legion consequently funded the Poppy Factory with a two-thousand-pound donation from its Unity Relief Fund, and Howson hired forty severely disabled employees to manufacture “Haig Poppies” in a small workroom on the Old Kent Road in southeast London.13 The scheme continued to grow throughout the 1920s; by 1925, “no less than 190 disabled men were employed at the . . . factory,” and the enterprise was relocated to a larger site in Richmond that ultimately featured as the subject of the Legion’s 1927 film.14 Remembrance was an innovative attempt to extract both money and support for the factory from the British public. A portion of the proceeds from the production were dedicated to assisting ex-servicemen, and, most significantly, the film acted as a powerful publicity tool for the Poppy Factory that both encouraged consumption of Haig Poppies and additionally promoted flower making as a transformative occupation for disabled ex-servicemen. Remembrance portrayed flower making as a way to reverse the material effects of the conflict and reintegrate disabled ex-servicemen into British society through comradeship, financial security, and physical recovery. One reviewer revealed that although the three men had initially “drifted hopelessly” upon their return to Britain, they were “[r]e-united in friendship” at the factory, where, with “their future assured,” they found “solace from their wounds, both physical and mental.”15 The British Legion’s cinematic debut was among countless press reports, charitable publications, and advertising paraphernalia that likewise conceptualized artificial flower making as a way to rebuild disabled ex-servicemen’s lives in the aftermath of the First World War. Indeed, although it was the best-publicized flower-making scheme for disabled soldiers, the Richmond Poppy Factory was by no means the only such initiative; demand for disabled-made poppies was so great that supplies from London regularly failed to reach Scottish consumers, and in March 1926, the Legion set up a separate enterprise named “Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory” in an old wood-chopping factory in Edinburgh, where war-disabled employees created yet more (albeit materially different) artificial poppies.16 Nor were artificial poppies the only floral objects created by disabled ex-servicemen during this period: flower makers at the Richmond factory also produced commemorative wreaths, decorative sprays, and blue cornflowers for sale on the anniversary of the First Battle of Ypres (October 31), known as Ypres Day, while employees at the Edinburgh site additionally made floral wreaths and beadwork flowers.17 Despite the clear importance—and transformative influence—of the flower-making process itself, historical interpretations of the poppy factories have tended to focus on changing cultural understandings of red Flanders poppies in connection to death, memory, and public commemoration.18 Saunders, for example, has traced the interconnected and converging historical uses and symbolic meanings of red corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas) and “pinkish-white” opium poppies (Papaver somniferum) as symbols of remembrance and forgetfulness, to demonstrate the ways that these flowers have been figuratively and materially reshaped by human conflict.19 Adrian Gregory has likewise concentrated on the establishment and proliferation of the poppy campaign as one aspect of public commemoration after the First World War in Britain.20 Although disabled-made poppies were (and are) undoubtedly important cultural symbols of grief, commemoration, and memory, popular understandings of these items were not solely connected to the dead nor limited to complete poppies. As Gregory has determined, “upon establishment of the Poppy Factory” in 1922, “buying a poppy” was also instituted as “an act of support for those who were suffering in the aftermath of the war,” “the strongest” component of which was the “the desire to do something practical to assist those who had been maimed” by the conflict.21 Further still, as this introduction has established, the processes involved in creating these objects served as a significant form of social reintegration for war-disabled men. Indeed, the variety of blossoms produced at the factories further suggests that charitable flower-making schemes were not solely motivated by a desire to commemorate the war and financially assist the living; the process of floral manufacturing was itself considered as significant as the various floral objects that resulted from it. This article therefore views manufacturing as an important “stage” in both the “social life” of flowers and that of war-disabled flower makers and more closely examines the various ways that popular understandings of flower making altered perceptions of disability within the context of the British Legion poppy factories.22 Although a variety of scholars, including Julie Anderson, Joanna Bourke, Ana Carden-Coyne, Deborah Cohen, and Meaghan Kowalsky, have explored the physical and social reconstruction of disabled ex-servicemen within the context of medical care, charitable assistance, and employment retraining in the aftermath of the First World War, these accounts have typically focused on the broad economic and social implications of work provisions for war-disabled men.23 This article extends this analysis to focus more specifically on the fluctuating meanings of the specific trades offered to war-disabled men in the 1920s. It situates flower making within broader twentieth-century understandings of industrial manufacturing and draws particular attention to the myriad ways that floral assembly tangibly located and figuratively conceptualized war-disabled bodies in relation to dominant notions of employment and modern methods of production. In so doing, this article demonstrates that, in the 1920s, publicity material consciously reconceptualized flower making and disabled ex-servicemen in relation to one another. Popular discourse and charitable publications reshaped the supposedly feminine art of flower crafting into a physical manufacturing process that required bodily strength, skill, and efficiency and rhetorically incorporated the poppy factories into wider twentieth-century understandings of productivity and manufacturing. This discourse reimagined the factory sites as sprawling production lines that churned out millions of flowers per year, and simultaneously constructed war-disabled flower makers as efficient, productive, and physically capable workers, who, like the trio depicted in Remembrance, were successfully reintegrated into British society through manufacturing work. Although this discourse specifically focused on the physical capacity of poppy factory employees, it also implicitly symbolized the potential of all physically disabled soldiers for employment and represented modern, scientific, industrial methods as a way to make disabled bodies efficient and thus optimize “human resources” and minimize “human waste” for the purposes of national reconstruction. This countered widespread discontent with assembly-line production; charitable reports positioned scientific methods of manufacturing as a broader mechanism for social reconstruction and “National Efficiency” in the aftermath of the first global war. Poppy factory discourse distinguished disabled ex-servicemen from supposedly useless, sedentary cripples and elevated them according to what Anderson has termed a “hierarchy of disablement” that constructed war-disabled men as more socially prestigious than their civilian counterparts.24 Locating Disabled Flower Makers: “Delicate” Girls and “Indolent” Bodies Before 1914, disabled people were typically accorded a low social status: disabled civilians were considered weak, enfeebled, and physically incapable of full-time occupation.25 During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, disabled bodies “apotheosized stasis” and “epitomiz[ed] inertia,” and many poor disabled people existed among the apparently “unemployable” social “residuum” who were largely excluded from the workforce.26 A significant number of disabled civilians were reliant on poor relief, public sympathy, or item-by-item sales for financial subsistence: they begged; sold small, inexpensive, handmade objects such as woven baskets, mats, bootlaces, and brooms; or busked for money to acquire a meager and unstable income.27 Disability was of particular interest to social reformers, who viewed disabled people as corporeal evidence of British physical and social deterioration and the resultant industrial and economic “inefficiency” of the nation: from the mid-nineteenth century onward, a variety of charitable schemes and sheltered workshops offered various forms of training to disabled civilians that sought to “reabsorb” them into employment, reduce their reliance on charity, and “make them useful in society.”28 The poppy factories were by no means the first flower-making schemes established for the benefit of disabled people. Flower making was among numerous manual trades provided for disabled civilians during this period. From 1879 onward, “John Groom’s Watercress and Flower Girl’s Christian Mission” trained impoverished crippled girls “from all over the kingdom” in flower making at a site known as “John Groom’s Crippleage” in Farringdon, London.29 Groom was reportedly inspired by his evangelical missionary work with the Ragged Schools Union, as well as by his encounters with “maimed, crippled, and blind” flower sellers, and thus established the “Crippleage” to deliver spiritual education and instruction in flower making to disabled girls, including “the blind, partly paralysed, [those] without legs, or only one hand.”30 During the 1890s, the Aberdeen Institute for the Deaf and Dumb likewise instructed pupils in “basket-weaving,” “fancy bead work,” and “paper flower making,” among a number of other crafts. In the early twentieth century, the Lisburn Road Institution in Belfast, and St. John’s Institution for the Deaf and Dumb in Boston Spa similarly taught working-class deaf and dumb girls to create paper flowers as part of their occupational therapy.31 Despite charitable suggestions that flower making offered a “means of livelihood for the girls who t[ook] it up,” this form of training nevertheless restricted disabled children to the bottom end of the labor market.32 Neither the Crippleage nor St. John’s, for example, offered permanent occupation but simply trained girls to undertake flower making as a home trade or seek casual, poorly paid work in one of the country’s increasing number of “flower factories.”33 Furthermore, flower making in these contexts did not provide year-round employment: demand for artificial blooms was seasonal, and sales relied heavily on London’s social calendar and the associated whims of fashionable ladies, who only required decorative flowers at certain times of the year.34 Flower factories in London therefore hired employees on a casual basis, and self-employed flower makers similarly went unpaid in the “off-seasons” (April–August and December–February), when demand for artificial flowers decreased.35 Far from providing self-reliance and regular earnings, charities such as St. John’s and the Crippleage therefore actually reinforced the impoverished status of these children and underpinned a “cycle of poverty.”36 Charitable instruction in flower making not only sustained poverty among disabled civilians but also reflected and reinforced wider conceptualizations of disabled bodies as weak, enfeebled, and incapable of skilled work. During this period, flower making was considered a particularly unskilled form of employment. The flower-making process was typically separated into three phases: the cutting of components, the dyeing of material, and the assembly of the final product.37 Although the cutting stage was increasingly mechanized—and thus considered increasingly skilled—by the turn of the twentieth century, this aspect of production was rarely mentioned within popular discourse, which, rather, drew attention to the final manual assembly of floral items and gave the impression that flower making constituted the creation of single, complete products by individual women.38 Flower making was consequently conceptualized as an inactive, sedentary activity that required little physical exertion or skill. Charitable flower-making schemes reinforced this rhetoric through publicity accounts that emphasized the physically undemanding gestures required to make materially flimsy artificial flowers. According to charitable discourse, synthetic blossoms—which were comprised of soft fabrics such as muslin and “thin silk wafers”—necessitated (and even stimulated) “gentle” gestures that could only be completed by similarly “delica[te]” crippled girls and nondisabled female flower makers, whose weakened physicality, innate “creative” qualities, and eye for fashion and beauty prepared them for the trade and allowed them to create blossoms that were “absolute[ly] lifelike” in “form and colour.”39 Indeed, a number of reports took this rhetoric one step further and not only emphasized the delicate gestures required to create artificial blooms but also conspicuously imputed the dainty, fragile attributes of artificial blossoms onto the enfeebled, and seemingly ephemeral, bodies of crippled, female flower makers. This was particularly apparent in charitable material(s) for John Groom’s, which self-consciously adopted floral pseudonyms such as “Daisy,” “Dot,” and “Rose” for disabled flower makers and described them as delicate flowers. According to appeal leaflets, “Groom’s Girls” were “rosebuds set with little willful thorns,” who, “without assistance,” would (like flowers) “drift, droop and die,” while when “answered they bec[a]me bright, [and] useful.”40 Although this rhetoric was arguably intended to align impoverished and degraded crippled children with prevalent notions of acceptable femininity, it nevertheless intertwined the frail materiality of blossoms with the cripples who made them and consequently highlighted disabled children’s physical weakness. This language further reinforced the notion that disabled civilians were enfeebled and useless individuals. By describing Groom’s Girls as flowers who, “without assistance” would “droop” and “die,” publicity material suggested that crippled children, like natural flowers, were frail, breakable, and ephemeral things. It is thus clear that, prior to the First World War, flower making not only relegated crippled flower makers to a poorly paid, unskilled trade but also reinforced wider conceptualizations of disability as an “idle” and inactive state. As a light and feminine craft, flower making was purportedly suited to disabled girls’ weakened, floral bodies. By the 1920s, however, British Legion publications and press reports painted another picture: while artificial flower making at the Richmond and Edinburgh poppy factories was implicitly shaped by these earlier schemes and the interrelated notions of disability and physical incapacity that inspired them, publicity material surrounding the sites nevertheless reshaped flower making according to the social and cultural needs of heroic, masculine disabled ex-servicemen and a country recovering from mass upheaval. The Reconceptualization of Charitable Employment: “An Adequate Livelihood” From the advent of the First World War, charitable organizations dramatically adapted and accelerated various forms of existing assistance to cater to the thousands of ex-servicemen returning to Britain with permanent disabilities. Countless new initiatives were established both throughout the war and into the early 1920s to satisfy the employment needs of the huge influx of disabled soldiers into Britain, including both state and voluntary schemes, workshops, technical schools, and government training facilities.41 It is clear that charitable training initiatives were, in part, motivated by prevailing perceptions of disability and idleness: from 1914 onward, social commentators expressed anxieties about maimed soldiers’ alleged inability to return to work and hazarded that without assistance, heroic disabled ex-servicemen would be doomed to suffer the “hardships of poverty” “as a result of their services.”42 It was feared that if employment were not provided, disabled ex-servicemen would be reduced to the indolent and degraded status of crippled street sellers and blind beggars; one British Legion report explicitly warned that, without assistance, heroic disabled soldiers would become “an army of men begging at street corners.”43 These concerns were further compounded by the occurrence of mass unemployment in the postwar period. Although the state provided disability pensions for disabled ex-servicemen from 1916 onward, this income was not expected to fulfill men’s financial needs but was, rather, only intended to supplement earnings.44 In a postwar economy, many war-disabled men had difficulty finding work to augment their pensions; throughout the 1920s, over 10 percent of the insured working population was unemployed, and for many disabled ex-servicemen, this situation was aggravated by a lack of experience and skills or, in many cases, “severe physical impairment” that “made return to their former occupation impossible.”45 Indeed, preconceived notions of disability and disabled bodies arguably deterred many employers from hiring war-disabled men and further exacerbated these difficulties. In the immediate aftermath of the war, over a hundred thousand physically disabled ex-servicemen consequently faced unemployment.46 For these men, who had sacrificed parts of their bodies during the conflict, a life of destitution and poverty was unacceptable; disabled ex-servicemen deserved employment in return for their corporeal sacrifices.47 As Anderson has outlined, for a “society that had been through the horrors of war . . . the pathetic remains of ex-servicemen . . . begging on the street [was] a horrific and embarrassing sight.”48 Much like prewar charitable efforts for disabled civilians, occupational therapy and employment were considered effective ways to counter indolence and begging among war-disabled men and to make them useful, economically independent members of society, while contributing to their emotional and physical rehabilitation. Robert Jones (the Royal Army Medical Corps surgeon appointed to organize the medical care of disabled soldiers during the war) asserted that curative workshops and regular skilled work “foster[ed] a habit of diligence and self-respect, and convert[ed] indolent and often discontented patients into happy men who soon felt they were becoming useful members of society and not mere derelicts.”49 Howson, too, ventured that “enforced idleness [resulting from disability] naturally did not improve [a disabled ex-serviceman’s] mental or physical condition, and made it harder for him to work when the opportunity arrived.”50 Although these commentators considered “pensions and monetary aids . . . all very well,” charitable handouts were not considered a suitable answer to the “problem of disability”; according to Howson, “[o]ccupation and the sense of usefulness” elicited through work were the only way to counter the misery and dereliction caused by corporeal losses and reduce the risk of begging and pauperism among disabled ex-servicemen.51 Despite public and philanthropic desires to distinguish disabled soldiers from idle disabled civilians, it is clear that early twentieth-century understandings of disability prevailed within a variety of charitable training schemes: numerous charitable efforts for disabled ex-servicemen incorporated elements of handicrafts and unskilled, casual feminine work into employment training and physical recovery, and disabled ex-servicemen also undertook a variety of inactive handicrafts during their convalescence.52 Notably, a number of these activities involved flowers in some way: men often drew flowers as gifts for nurses, embroidered laurels as signs of peace and victory, and sewed red Flanders poppies into khaki fabric as symbols of commemoration.53 Institutions such as St. Dunstan’s Hostel for Blinded Soldiers and Sailors and the Star and Garter Home also commonly instructed war-disabled men in sedentary manual activities, many of which were provided for disabled civilians prior to the war, including basket weaving, crochet, rug making, and embroidery.54 Although these ventures differed very little from prewar workshops for disabled civilians and crippled children, charitable publicity and popular discourse actively demarcated handicrafts from negative conceptualizations of physically undemanding, unskilled work. Feminine activities practiced during convalescence, for example, were not characterized as training or employment but were, rather, defined as a form of recreation and recovery: as Carden-Coyne has asserted, crafts undertaken during convalescence were associated with an acceptable period of feminine transition in soldiers’ lives and did not, therefore, carry the degraded connotations of unskilled casual work but were, rather, intended to “alleviate . . . boredom,” facilitate “psychological recovery,” and “rebuild fine motor skills, particularly in men suffering injuries to their hands.”55 Former Liberal politician and philanthropist Lord Charnwood affirmed this distinction in an address on “Technical Training for Disabled Soldiers” at the Royal Society of the Arts in 1917, when he declined to comment on “those surprising forms of apparently feminine fancy work which afford solace in many hospitals among strong men on their backs; for [according to Charnwood] those belong[ed] to recreation, which [was] an adjunct of cure, and not at all to training.”56 A number of schemes took this division a step further and redefined notions of employment training and charitable action altogether. Several charities not only offered disabled ex-servicemen instruction in handicrafts (whether for physical health or employment training) but also provided full-time, permanent, waged occupation for disabled ex-servicemen. These initiatives most notably included: the Lord Roberts Memorial Workshops (LRMW), where men were employed in a number of capacities, including as toy makers, cabinetmakers, and woodworkers; Ashstead Potteries, where men made ceramics; the Painted Fabrics Factory in Sheffield, where men made tablecloths and curtains; the Silver Badge Valet Service in Manchester, where men were employed “on renovatory work and boot repairing”; and a diamond cutting factory in Wrexham, where disabled ex-servicemen were paid to cut and polish diamonds.57 While a number of these occupations (such as woodworking and cabinetmaking) were typically categorized as skilled, masculine work, others—including shoemaking, boot-making, and embroidery—were among the casual, unskilled, feminine handicrafts commonly practiced by disabled civilians and impoverished women before the war. However, within the context of employment for heroic war-disabled men, popular discourse and charitable appeals actively reshaped a number of these trades as suitable, masculine occupations. For example, Jason McBrinn has demonstrated that charitable employment in embroidery did not align war-disabled workers with the typically feminine associations of this trade but, conversely, reconstructed veteran’s masculine identities by reinforcing their renewed social status as breadwinners and family men.58 Flower making was among these various forms of recharacterized, feminine employment. To a certain extent, the British Legion factories were inspired by earlier charitable efforts to assist impoverished women and crippled girls and were most notably motivated by Guérin’s initiative to employ desperate women and their dependents in France. While flower making remained women’s work throughout the interwar period (and the Crippleage notably continued to operate for the benefit of crippled girls), for heroic disabled ex-servicemen, employment within a physically undemanding, low-status, feminine trade (and its implicit associations of fragility and physical weakness) was unacceptable. Both practical arrangements at the factories and charitable discourse surrounding the schemes consequently reshaped flower making for the benefit of these men and simultaneously enacted a broader shift within popular understandings of disability and corporeal difference in relation to work. When associated with war-disabled heroes, flower making was separated from any potentially degrading or emasculating assumptions and reconceptualized as a well-paid, physically demanding, and highly skilled job for deserving disabled ex-servicemen. Much like the LRMW, Ashstead Potteries, and the Painted Fabrics Factory (among others), the poppy factories did not leave war-disabled flower makers reliant on item-by-item sales, but employed disabled ex-servicemen on a full-time, waged basis. British Legion publicity regularly highlighted this practice, and reassured members of the nondisabled public that, “by making poppies” factory workers were “able to earn an adequate livelihood.”59 The provision of waged work distinguished war-disabled flower makers from impoverished disabled civilians, and also reshaped flower making as a full-time remunerative trade. Charitable discourse, for example, drew particular attention to the comparatively high wages that war-disabled men earned in comparison to female flower makers, and thus distinguished the schemes from conceptions of flower making as cheap, poorly paid, feminine labor.60 According to various Legion appeals, “the cost of . . . male labour [was] greater than the Trade Board rate of wages for female workers in the artificial flower trade”: war-disabled flower makers earned £2 10s a week, while impoverished women flower makers received a meagre 3–6s.61 Unlike casual employment and instruction in handicrafts, the poppy factories also hired disabled ex-servicemen on a permanent basis: promotional reports regularly emphasized that flower making at the factories was “an all-the-year round occupation . . . instead of only a seasonal one before Poppy Day.”62 This arrangement (and its associated discourse) explicitly distinguished flower making at the factories from the various other casual trades offered to disabled civilians and also reassured the benevolent public that disabled ex-servicemen were not (like women flower makers) subject to seasonal shifts in floral demand. Significantly, this arrangement also contributed to a broader reconceptualization of charitable action: while the proceeds from flower sales were reportedly allocated to “cases [of ex-servicemen] where circumstances of distress due to unemployment [were] acute,” charitable discourse both rhetorically and physically separated war-disabled flower makers from these donations. Unlike “distressed,” unemployed ex-servicemen, war-disabled flower makers did not receive hand-outs but, rather, worked for their wages.63 British Legion appeal booklets especially highlighted this point and went so far as to distinguish factory workers from destitute ex-servicemen who were the recipients of charitable relief. According to one 1923 booklet, although local branches of the British Legion administered and distributed Poppy Day funds to so-called “cases where circumstances of distress due to unemployment are acute”—such as, an “ex-service man, single, unemployed . . . fainted from lack of nourishment,” “an ex-soldier forced to take his family into the workhouse,” and an “[u]nemployed ex-service man with family, sleeping in an old shed during November”—“by making poppies,” factory workers were “able to earn an adequate livelihood” and supplement their pensions year-round without reliance on charity.64 The various methods through which flowers were sold also distinguished war-disabled men from negative conceptions of both disabled mendicants and impoverished women flower-sellers. While many impoverished women homeworkers relied on item-by-item sales of flowers, and countless crippled street-sellers likewise sold handcrafted items (such as bootlaces and brooms) to the public for a meager subsistence income, war-disabled men did not sell artificial flowers themselves. As Gregory has outlined, Armistice Day poppy sales were a “female prerogative” and remained so until after the Second World War; disabled poppy makers were physically separated from floral transactions and were not involved with the potentially demeaning act of asking for money on the streets.65 Indeed, many of the items created by war-disabled flower makers were sold through British Legion catalogues or advertisements in the British Legion Journal (BLJ) that further categorized floral purchases as a commercial sale and distinguished these transactions from charitable donations altogether.66 By reconstituting flower making as a full-time, waged form of employment, the Poppy Factory ultimately shifted conceptions of both floral production and disabled ex-servicemen. The factories successfully recharacterized flower making from a casual, seasonal, feminine handicraft into a well-paid and reliable source of income that both offered disabled ex-servicemen secure, year-round employment and distinguished them from beggarly disabled civilians. The financial practices and commercial transactions surrounding floral sales, in particular, delimited deserving disabled ex-servicemen from degraded conceptions of casual feminine labor, item-by-item street sales, and charitable handouts and, rather, positioned the nation’s maimed heroes as respectably employed, financially solvent breadwinners. Financial arrangements, however, were by no means the only transformative aspect of flower making at the factories; British Legion practice and discourse further extended this logistical and rhetorical recharacterization to include the physical aspects of the flower-making process itself. The “Taylorization” of Flower Making: “A Highly Specialized Industry” Alongside shifting financial provisions, poppy factory discourse also inserted both the Richmond and Edinburgh factories into widespread popular practices and discussions surrounding industrial manufacturing. Charitable discourse transformed floral assembly from a light, gentle, and primarily manual trade into a large-scale form of skilled, physically demanding, mechanized production. Most significantly, charitable publicity utilized growing interest in bodily efficiency and “scientific management”—or Taylorism—to dispel prevailing understandings of both disability and flower making and position disabled ex-servicemen, and the poppy factories, at the forefront of British industry. In the years immediately preceding the war, Frederick W. Taylor’s theory of scientific management increasingly pervaded British manufacturing ideals and popular discourse.67 Taylorism was developed from a series of “motion studies” completed by Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who recorded the individual gestures undertaken by industrial workers and examined and reworked each movement in order to maximize the physiological efficiency of employees.68 Scientific management was based on a late nineteenth-century belief that the body was a human motor with limited energy to be expended during work; it sought to optimize the productive output of each worker and decrease idleness and fatigue to make each body useful and industrious.69 Taylorism fragmented the production process into a series of distinct tasks, and each task into a discrete physical movement that could be timed and managed to increase the productive capacity of each individual employee.70 Taylor and the Gilbreths’ methods were immediately popular and, by the late 1910s, were further adopted and adapted by American industrialist Henry Ford, who applied these theories to the production of cars within giant American factories and additionally reorganized the separate stages of industrial production around machinery in an assembly-line process.71 Although Taylorist-Fordist methods were developed in America, and elicited some resistance from British workers and social commentators, by the early twentieth century there was widespread enthusiasm for the implementation of the principles of scientific management in British (and indeed, European) industry.72 Taylorist methods particularly appealed to pervasive ideals of national efficiency in this period that sought to optimize British resources and manpower and increase international prestige in the face of ever-growing US and German technological and military strength.73 By claiming to increase productive output and render workers’ bodies efficient, scientific management seemingly offered a solution to growing alarm over physical deterioration and bodily inefficiency sparked by the poor health of Boer War recruits, and provided a way to increase British industrial power by regimenting both workers’ bodies and manufacturing processes for greater efficiency.74 By the outbreak of the First World War, Taylorist-Fordist practice increasingly informed British industrial methods: in October 1911, Ford opened its first European assembly plant in Manchester, using an assembly line to bring cheap, mass-produced cars to the British market; by 1914, Ford’s “Model T” was the best-selling car in Britain.75 Taylorist-Fordist practice continued to grow in usage during the conflict, as British factories applied the principles of scientific management to munitions production with the “primary aim of maximizing efficiency” and “maintaining control of labour” in “turbulent” conditions.76 In December 1915, Minister of Munitions David Lloyd George even appointed a Health of Munitions Workers Committee “to consider and advise on questions of industrial fatigue, hours of labour, and other matters effecting . . . the physical efficiency of workers in munitions factories and workshops.”77 Scientific manufacturing ultimately made the war itself materially possible: Taylorist-Fordist principles created what Saunders has called “the defining objects of the First World War”—the “millions of artillery shells made in munitions factories . . . and fired particularly along the western front.”78 Despite growing state and industrial enthusiasm for Taylorist-Fordist methods and mechanization, the spread of scientific management and assembly-line production was not without resistance: during the war years, for example, munitions workers staged a number of protests to increased managerial control under Taylorist conditions, including marches and mass absenteeism.79 Nevertheless, it is clear that, by the 1920s, Taylorism-Fordism was a recognized and recognizable trope within both British industrial practice and popular rhetoric. British popular discourse, art, and literature exhibited widespread fascination with mass production, and press reports regularly described the step-by-step movements and stages involved in various manufacturing trades.80 Fordism, in particular, was considered a symbol of modernity and was lauded by many observers and business owners as the most effective way to produce cheap consumer products, decrease waste, and ultimately increase profits.81 The poppy factories took advantage of the triumph of Taylorism to socially and physically reconstruct disabled ex-servicemen. Notably, wage practices at the Richmond factory were partly inspired by Fordist methods of management. Alongside the £2 10s a week paid to Poppy Factory workers, the Richmond factory was also “managed on the American ideal [that] the more you work the more you earn,” and war-disabled flower makers were further incentivized through wage bonuses, which offered an extra income based on productivity.82 According to Fordist discourse, this method of payment further separated disabled ex-servicemen from the degradation attached to charitable handouts: Ford’s 1922 autobiography, My Life and Work, specifically noted that wage bonuses were “[t]he best way . . . by which” blind and crippled workers could “be put on a productive par with able-bodied men”; this method did not reward men on the basis of pity but, rather, reflected disabled workers’ capacity for productivity.83 Indeed, Ford revealed that, in using this method, there was “little occasion for charity” for blind and physically disabled workers.84 Most importantly, unlike the meager incomes provided to prewar flower makers, these bonuses were not the sole payment provided to Poppy Factory employees; they acted as a supplement to full-time weekly wages. Taylorist-Fordist methods in the factories were not limited to financial incentives: alongside so-called American methods of payment, the British Legion factories also conspicuously rejected the dainty feminine associations of both flowers and manual floral assembly and instead inscribed flower making within contemporary Taylorist work practices that rendered disabled bodies capable of highly skilled, physically demanding, industrial employment. Both poppy factories fragmented the floral production process into distinct phases according to scientific methods, and countless British Legion appeals and press reports specifically recounted the various steps involved in floral assembly. Upon the opening of the Richmond factory in 1922, for example, the BLJ described “How the Poppies [were] Made,” First of all the lawn is cut into the shape of the petals in lots of 36. In the same room are three veining machines . . . [e]ach of the lots of 36 is sorted out into fours, which are placed in a receptacle in the machines and a slight turn of the handle impresses the veins on the leaves. In the adjacent assembly room . . . [e]ach of the shapes in separated . . ., the metal disc and stalk are passed through, the base is fastened with some adhesive material and a small tab, showing, as does the metal centre, that the poppies are for “Haig’s Fund” for ex-service men, is attached to the stem. The poppy is then complete.85 Press reports, too, corroborated official British Legion accounts: Hull Daily Mail, for example, described the “intricate” business of step-by-step flower making, which involved the separate cutting of steel and the “cutting of leaves” “further along the assembly bench.”86 By breaking tasks down into isolated gestures, poppy factory methods ensured that employees were only required to perform one distinct movement, or set of movements, and it was not, therefore, essential for these workers to have whole bodies.87 Within a fragmented assembly-line process, men could undertake actions with the functioning (or remaining) parts of their bodies and were thus integrated to the same level as nondisabled workers. This method of production was particularly significant within the poppy factories, which primarily employed limbless ex-servicemen.88 In fact, all forty war-disabled men initially employed at the Richmond factory on its establishment in 1922 had lost at least one limb in the war.89 These men were considered to be among the most severely disabled soldiers and were also viewed as especially incapable of physical work as a result of their corporeal losses: while many blind ex-servicemen with whole bodies, for example, were able to perform physical, tactile tasks in much the same way as nondisabled employees, soldiers with fragmented corporeal forms were especially excluded from activities and locations primarily set up for nondisabled workers.90 Indeed, in his address on “Technical Training for Disabled Soldiers,” Lord Charnwood urged that special consideration for employment should be given to limbless ex-servicemen and especially to those who had lost an arm, as “the loss of an arm is generally a far worse handicap than the loss of a leg.”91 Howson, too, confirmed that the loss of an arm was a more significant barrier to employment than the loss of one (or even both) legs.92 Both Ford and the Gilbreths suggested that segmented manufacturing was the most effective way to incorporate limbless individuals into industrial employment. In 1920, the Gilbreths published an entire book on the subject entitled Motion Study for the Handicapped, which advocated the use of “motion picture apparatus” to study the distinct movements of workers and develop techniques for “functionalizing” the bodies of “handicapped” employees.93 According to the book, by this method, it was possible to determine which limbs were necessary for certain types of work and thus adapt certain tasks to suit disabled bodies.94 In his biography, Ford likewise noted that “if the work is sufficiently subdivided disabled men could perform just as much work . . . as a wholly able-bodied man.”95 Although both accounts were American in origin, they were each published in Britain in the 1920s, and the Gilbreths’ work was recommended by Howson himself in the Handbook for the Limbless.96 Although it is difficult to trace, it is thus quite possible that this study was a major motivation behind the manufacturing processes implemented at the Poppy Factory. The use of scientific principles at the Poppy Factory successfully integrated severely disabled men into manufacturing work. Unlike the charitable provision of light, unskilled handicrafts (including manual methods of flower making), fragmented Taylorist methods did not exclude disabled ex-servicemen from modern, industrial work. Instead, these techniques adapted floral production to suit (similarly) fractured bodies. Charitable reports detailing the discrete stages of production drew particular attention to the physical capacity of limbless employees for this type of work: by focusing on workers’ individual bodily movements and tangible encounters with machinery, innumerable accounts publicly accentuated limbless employees’ physical dexterity and ability to overcome the most severe, debilitating disabilities to mass-produce items. BLJ accounts, in particular, recounted the physicality and strength in men’s remaining arms and legs: Poppy Factory workers were described “cutting, twisting, wiring and pasting millions of poppies for sale on Armistice Day.”97 One ex-serviceman at the Richmond site, who was “formerly [employed as] a motor mechanic,” cut “the lawn . . . into the shape of petals in lots of 36 . . . with a strong right arm” that drove a heavy mallet, and was praised as an expert at his work.98 Another employee at Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory was allegedly able to twist wire around a “table studded with nails” “into any shape you wish” to make floral wreaths.99 Descriptions of men driving mallets and bending metal both countered perceptions of limblessness as an idle and unemployable condition and further separated war-disabled flower makers from both prewar understandings of disability and gentle methods of manual flower manufacturing. A number of reports took this narrative one step further and not only constructed disabled ex-servicemen as physically capable workers but also aligned these men with whole, nondisabled employees. This was particularly evident within rhetorical and visual depictions of poppy factory workers, which drew attention to the discrete physical gestures that war-disabled flower makers performed during step-by-step production. By focusing on the movements performed by distinct parts of disabled ex-servicemen’s bodies—such as men’s “strong right arm[s]”—charitable discourse obfuscated, and even erased altogether, the absent parts of men’s bodies.100 While scholars have contended that assembly-line manufacturing had the effect of alienating workers from the production process by essentially rendering the rest of their bodies redundant, accounts of limbless ex-servicemen completing these physical tasks had the opposite effect of highlighting the strength in their remaining limbs and overlooking the “broken” parts of their bodies.101 Official British Legion photographs took this visual rhetoric one step further and literally effaced ex-servicemen’s corporeal differences to construct their bodies as whole. Images of disabled workers at the Poppy Factory concealed men’s absent limbs, which were arranged away from the camera, under the workbench at which they sat, or, in some cases, out of the frame altogether.102 Figure 1: Open in new tabDownload slide “Disabled Men at Work in the Factory in South-East London” was just one of multiple images featured within the British Legion Journal that obscured disabled ex-servicemen’s corporeal “differences.” Figure 1: Open in new tabDownload slide “Disabled Men at Work in the Factory in South-East London” was just one of multiple images featured within the British Legion Journal that obscured disabled ex-servicemen’s corporeal “differences.” By hiding (or failing to mention) the absent limbs of the nation’s most severely disabled ex-servicemen, charitable publications literally hid the effects that war had wrought on men’s bodies and visually normalized flower makers as whole, physically capable, nondisabled workers. Concealing the visible evidence of ex-servicemen’s disabilities implicitly distinguished these men from enfeebled crippled civilians and children, and simultaneously obscured potentially upsetting evidence of physical pain and trauma from the eyes of the public in what Seth Koven has called an “erasure of bodily pain” that accelerated the process of “forgetting” the war.103 It is notable that these photographs instead drew attention to floral emblems, which were positioned in the center of photographs as the tangible outcome of men’s productivity.104 At the same time, aligning the poppy factories with modern methods of factory management distinguished the sites from delicate, unskilled conceptions of flower making and, rather, established floral assembly as a “highly specialised industry.”105 War-Disabled Automata: “The Whirr of the Machinery” Taylorist-Fordist tropes within charitable publicity not only highlighted the physical strength of war-disabled flower makers but additionally incorporated disabled ex-servicemen into an imagined modern, mechanized process that not only evidenced men’s bodily capacity for work but also represented war-disabled men as efficient and useful productive resources. As in giant Fordian factories, promotional material suggested that technology in the poppy factories dominated and dictated the course of the otherwise manual assembly process, around which war-disabled workers were arranged as part of an overall productive plan that was “driven by the movement of machines.”106 Although much of the work undertaken by war-disabled flower makers was completed by hand (as in the early years of the century) British Legion descriptions drew particular attention to the machinery in the factory. The BLJ, for example, highlighted the use of “three veining machines”—the only machinery—at the Richmond factory, which were “operated by men who were formerly an accountant, an engineer’s fitter, and a mill hand,” but did not describe the remaining thirty-seven men who assembled the poppies by hand individually or in any detail.107 During the later years of the 1920s, newspaper reports similarly relished in detailing the increasingly technological production of floral products at the factories, which included “the most up to date appliances,” such as machinery to cut the centers of poppies from “huge sheets of steel” and “laboratories where laurel and other leaves” were cured to be fashioned into long-lasting floral wreaths.108 Whereas late nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourse seemingly erased the machines within flower factories, poppy factory publicity conversely highlighted the modern, technological aspects of flower manufacturing and presented flower making as a technologically driven, efficient form of mechanized mass-production. Numerous accounts took this machine-dominated narrative one step further and portrayed war-disabled flower makers themselves as productive, efficient machines. Popular discourse that focused on technology as the primary method of flower making gave the impression that these small, hand-operated machines (and the men who controlled them) dominated production, and disabled workers were subordinated to the needs of production as a homogenous productive automata.109 Charitable publications imagined rows of workers as a kind of fluid military machine that churned out thousands of products each day: BLJ reports, for example, detailed the “stacks and stacks of boxes, all filled with poppies, all made by rows and rows of men.”110 Their “voices blend[ed] in harmony,” as their bodies seamlessly moved together as one to assemble products.111 At Lady Haig’s factory, the “silence” of workers was allegedly “broken only by the whirr of the machinery,” and flower assembly apparently skipped from machine to machine with few (or no) manual stages in-between.112 This rhetoric mimicked prevalent Taylorist-Fordist discourse in this period that “reveled in the tight coordination of workers” and “seem[ed] to announce a new stage in the relationship between man and mechanical creations.”113 Accounts that detailed “rows and rows of workers” seemingly compounded all poppy factory employees as one productive amalgam, which repetitively churned out masses of poppies in a unified production line and incorporated disabled bodies into a mechanized process with the sole purpose of maximizing the productive output of the factory. Numerous descriptions failed to demarcate war-disabled workers from machinery and simply referred to the productive output of “the factory.” Many newspaper reports described seemingly disembodied machinery, which operated alone to produce millions of poppies without the help of men.114 One description of the Edinburgh site, for example, reported, “further along the assembly bench,” “another set of machines are busy cutting the poppy leaves,” and consequently erased ex-servicemen’s distinct corporeality altogether and ideated a fusion of man and machine working together to cut poppy leaves.115 Another description of the Edinburgh factory similarly recounted, it is fascinating watching the poppies developing. They are first cut out . . . then veined one by one in a metal stamping machine, while buttons and stems are simultaneously prepared at another table, and the familiar little red flower at length emerges.116 This report suggested that artificial flowers developed of their own accord and emerged from industrial machinery without any intervention from factory employees whatsoever. Although scholars such as Bernard Doray have asserted that Taylorism made individual workers redundant and positioned them as mere interchangeable appendages to machinery, in the context of the factories, these descriptions did not degrade the skilled work of war-disabled employees but, rather, countered popular understandings of disabled people as idle and inefficient and presented disabled ex-servicemen themselves as productive and efficient human-machines.117 This rhetoric blurred the boundaries between workers and machinery and envisaged the war-disabled body as a human motor—“a productive force capable of transforming universal natural energy into mechanical work and integrating the human organism into highly specialized and technical work processes”—and consequently implied that disabled ex-servicemen were not “broken” but, rather, ran as a well-oiled assemblage.118 By linking poppy factory workers with their physical productive output, popular rhetoric objectified the bodies of disabled ex-servicemen as a means of production. Although this arguably erased workers’ individual identities, it also heralded the success of the poppy factory employment scheme and reincorporated disabled ex-servicemen within contemporary ideals surrounding work and bodily efficiency. Much like accounts of the fragmented floral assembly process, charitable discourse suggested that mechanized Taylorist-Fordist production was the most successful way to render fractured bodies industrially efficient. Countless reports explicitly adopted Taylorist-Fordist linguistic tropes to describe the efficient mass production undertaken by war-disabled flower makers, who never seemed to tire and worked “under high pressure” “for nearly 300 days a year” to churn out millions of artificial flowers.119 According to popular discourse, men at the factories reached a “high standard of efficiency” despite their disabilities and were able to work “at the same speed day in day out throughout the year.”120 The bodily efficiency of war-disabled workers was further evidenced through the very creation, and existence, of millions of artificial flowers. Innumerable press reports and charitable appeals pointed to poppies as tangible evidence of disabled ex-servicemen’s bodily productivity and efficiency: according to the BLJ, highly skilled poppy factory employees effortlessly produced a quota of a thousand artificial flowers per man per day with mechanical precision and required only a reminder from the factory manager to maintain productiveness if they were thought to be falling behind their target.121 War-disabled workers were additionally credited with limiting the amount of material wasted and thus contributing to the economic efficiency of the factory according to wider Taylorist-Fordist aims: the former mechanic who cut out petals was likewise reported to create thirty-six thousand petals in a short period of four-and-a-half hours with “scarcely any wastage of material.”122 Indeed, the vast numbers of artificial flowers manufactured by disabled workers seemed to grow exponentially each year; articles describing poppy factory employees were preceded by headlines such as “Disabled Men Make Millions of Poppies for Armistice Day.”123 By 1928, commentators related that both factories were producing the gargantuan sum of “32 million poppies.”124 Fordist rhetoric was not limited to descriptions of war-disabled bodies but also pervaded charitable representations of artificial flowers, which were constructed as the mechanical outputs of assembly-line production. Unlike the beautiful, artistic blossoms patiently handcrafted by women in late nineteenth and early twentieth century flower factories, Haig Poppies were increasingly prized for both their identical material characteristics and their synthetic appearance. Much like the standardized, identical cars produced within Ford factories, artificial poppies were each almost identical in form: every artificial poppy created by war-disabled employees featured a steel center stamped with the words “Haig’s Fund.” This stamp served as a mark of authenticity that deterred the public from purchasing so-called fraudulent remembrance poppies sold by “unscrupulous people bent on private profit” and also further connected the factories to Fordist production.125 These identical stamps tangibly evidenced the “social lives” of poppies—as products created through repetitive, mechanical, assembly-line production—and also evoked a connection between artificial flowers and a range of similarly identical consumer durables created by Fordist methods in this period, including, most notably, the popular Model T. Further still, modern technological advances at the factories also yielded an increasingly extravagant range of floral commodities, including “cured” and “preserved” “laurel and other leaves” for use in “long-lasting floral wreaths.”126 By the 1930s, disabled ex-servicemen created huge flowers that were larger than men—the largest of which was made in October 1933 and measured “five feet in diameter and sixteen feet in circumference”—and the Edinburgh factory sold mounted poppies that fastened onto the radiator cap of a car with a clip.127 These flowers dramatically differed from the allegedly lifelike, flimsy blossoms created by crippled girls, women flower makers, and destitute French women and were, rather, prized for their ostentatious appearance. Most significantly, the increasing artificiality of these products acted as further evidence of war-disabled flower makers’ physical skill and bodily strength. According to reports, gigantic poppies were evidence of the “elaborate” skill of war-disabled men, who created “the most absurdly fantastical” items. Poppy factory workers did not delicately paint miniscule details onto flimsy fabric but, rather, bent metal, stamped out petals from thick cotton lawn, and manipulated “huge sheets of steel” into the metal centers of poppies. 128 Whereas artificial flowers created by, and sold for, crippled girls materially reflected and reinforced notions of disabled bodies as enfeebled, delicate, and flimsy things, the tangible characteristics and rhetorical construction of poppy factory products actively countered understandings of weak disabled bodies and, conversely, represented limbless soldiers as resilient, physically capable machines. Conclusion: “An Inspiration to All” This article has shown that, in the aftermath of the First World War, the British Legion Poppy Factories adopted floral assembly and transformed it from a casual, feminine handicraft into a full-time, permanent, and modern form of waged work. Popular discourse surrounding the factories consciously utilized growing interest in scientific management and assembly-line production to insert the poppy factories into prevalent Taylorist-Fordist tropes. Descriptions of mechanized, machine-driven manufacturing particularly contrasted understandings of Edwardian flower making as a physically gentle, manual trade and presented charitable flower making as a physically demanding, highly skilled occupation. To a certain extent, Taylorist-Fordist manufacturing in the factories also remodeled artificial flowers themselves from gentle, flimsy, and feminine products into increasingly artificial, technological objects produced by both modern mechanical processes and physically strong war-disabled bodies. The identical material characteristics of poppy factory flowers highlighted their origins as outputs of a Taylorist-Fordist assembly-line process and arguably elevated these objects above flimsy civilian-made blossoms. Charitable discourse not only reshaped flower making but also went some way toward altering popular understandings of disability in relation to war-disabled men. By rhetorically restructuring flower making into a physically demanding, mechanized process, charitable schemes concurrently shaped war-disabled flower makers themselves as strong, masculine, and physically capable of full-time manufacturing work, and thus distinguished war-disabled men from enfeebled disabled civilians (who were seemingly incapable of employment). This rhetoric ultimately elevated war-disabled men upon a “hierarchy of disablement” that positioned them as physically and socially superior to their degraded civilian counterparts. As Kowalsky has revealed, the British Legion ultimately acted as a disability movement that went some way to “reeducate the public about disability and promote the skills and capabilities of disabled ex-servicemen as a way to alter widespread perceptions of disability.”129 Perhaps most significantly, the factories represented a significant departure from handicrafts instruction and not only culturally elevated flowers, flower making, and disabled ex-servicemen within the wider British social imagination but also significantly altered the role of charity in the postwar period. Popular accounts of the factories both inserted disabled people into full-time waged employment and suggested that Taylorist-Fordist methods of production were the most successful way to maximize the productive potential of fractured war-disabled bodies and render them efficient, productive things. By breaking floral assembly into a series of distinct tasks that could be performed by the functional or remaining parts of men’s bodies, poppy factory discourse demonstrated the potential of scientific management to incorporate disabled people into work and thus maximize British manpower for the purpose of industrial productivity. To some extent, this narrative countered prevailing discontent with assembly-line production and also positioned scientific methods as a broader mechanism for social reconstruction in the aftermath of the first global war. Countless reports implied that disabled ex-servicemen and the poppy factories were at the forefront of modern industrialization and British economic and manufacturing power: according to one press account, the Richmond factory was “a monument to British Enterprise.”130 The BLJ even suggested that the Richmond factory was “an inspiration to all others who, being disabled, may become depressed when they think of their own handicap,” and thus presented the site as a model for future charitable employment schemes and British industry in general.131 Despite these efforts, it is clear that British Legion attempts to reconceptualize disability and flower making were, nevertheless, fraught with tensions. Although charitable publicity rhetorically reshaped conceptions of disability and corporeal difference, the very fact of men’s employment within a segregated factory suggested that disabled ex-servicemen were incapable of returning to the nondisabled workforce. Moreover, although charitable publicity rhetorically reshaped flower making, disabled ex-servicemen were ultimately offered the same sedentary and feminine work that was reserved for indolent disabled civilians in the late nineteenth century. Nor was British Legion discourse without irony: while charitable reports suggested that Taylorist-Fordist production had the capacity to reconstruct war-disabled men and render their bodies industrially efficient, these fragmented methods of production were, essentially, the same techniques that enabled the production of technological weapons (such as shells) during the war and, consequently, tore apart soldiers’ bodies in the first place. Scientific management both created destructive weapons designed to fracture human bodies and, allegedly, offered the potential to physically and symbolically reassemble disabled identities. Footnotes With thanks to Dr. Julie Anderson, who provided insight and expertise throughout the course of this research. Thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers, whose perceptive feedback and detailed comments improved this article, and my wider research, in no small measure. This research was generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). 1 “The Picture House,” Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, November 15, 1927, 5. Unfortunately, all copies of Remembrance have been destroyed. For an in-depth discussion of the film, see “Remembrance and the Ambivalent Gaze: Reveille (George Pearson, 1924) and Remembrance (Bert Wynne, 1927),” in The Great War in Popular Cinema of the 1920s: Beyond Journey’s End, ed. Lawrence Napper (New York, 2015), 146–52. 2 “British Legion Film,” Leeds Mercury, September 10, 1927, 5. 3 “British Legion Film,” 5; Advertisement, Kirkinfillock Herald, April 11, 1928, 4. 4 Michael Orme, “At the Sign of the Cinema,” Sketch, November 9, 1927, 74. 5 Orme, “At the Sign,” 74. 6 “The Poppy Factory,” Shields Daily News, August 16, 1927, 4. 7 “Poppy Day,” British Legion Journal [hereafter BLJ], July 1922, 16. 8 Nicholas J. Saunders, The Poppy: A Cultural History from Ancient Egypt to Flanders Fields to Afghanistan (London, 2013), 95–125; Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1914–1946 (Oxford, 1994), 93–117. 9 Saunders, The Poppy, 96–103; Gregory, Silence, 99. “In Flanders Fields” was first published anonymously by Punch on December 8, 1915, although the index of the publication for that year listed McCrae as its author. The poem found immediate popularity, was used in myriad ways to further the war effort, and was also published extensively in the United States. John F. Prescott, In Flanders Fields: The Story of John McCrae (Ontario, 1985), 105–6; [John McCrae], “In Flanders Fields,” Punch, December 8, 1915, 468. 10 “Poppy Day in Dundee,” Dundee Courier, November 8, 1921, 4. The British Legion was established in May 1921 to amalgamate four political veteran’s associations into a unified nonpartisan organization and assist British ex-servicemen and their dependents. These associations were: The Comrades of the Great War, The National Association of Discharged Soldiers and Sailors, The National Federation of Discharged and Demobilized Sailors and Soldiers, and the Officers’ Association. According to their “national objects,” the Legion was primarily concerned with pensions provision, training, and maintenance, and employment for ex-servicemen was “the Legion’s main preoccupation,” especially in relation to disabled ex-servicemen. Graham Wootton, The Official History of the British Legion (London, 1956), 44–46, 48; For an in-depth discussion of British Legion aims and objectives, including the political influence of the organization, see Niall Barr, The Lion and the Poppy: British Veterans, Politics, and Society, 1921–1939 (London, 2005). 11 “Notice: Earl Haig’s Fund,” Driffield Times, November 5, 1921, 2; “Poppy Day in Dundee,” 4. The “Haig Fund” acted as a welfare fund for ex-servicemen, to which the proceeds from Poppy Day were allocated. John A. Lister, The History of the Royal British Legion Scotland (Edinburgh, 1982), 66. 12 Saunders, The Poppy, 95–108. The Disabled Society was founded in the aftermath of the First World War to provide support to disabled ex-servicemen who had lost one or more limbs during the conflict. The society particularly promoted employment opportunities for amputees. George Howson, Handbook for the Limbless (London, 1922), ii, x–xi. 13 “Poppy Day,” BLJ, July 1922, 16. The British Legion Unity Relief Fund was established in January 1921 to provide financial relief for all matters relating to unemployment, including donations to poverty-stricken ex-servicemen and small loans for men to start their own businesses. Brian Harding, Keeping Faith: The History of The Royal British Legion (Barnsley, 2001), 69–75. 14 “Poppy Day,” BLJ, July 1922, 16; “The Great Work of Benevolence,” BLJ, July 1925, 4. In 1933, the Poppy Factory was once again relocated to a purpose-built site in Richmond, where it is still located today. Saunders, The Poppy, 132. 15 Orme, “At the Sign,” 74. 16 “Factory History: The Start,” Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory, accessed August 17, 2018, https://www.ladyhaigspoppyfactory.org.uk/factory-history/the-start/; “Our History,” Poppy Scotland, accessed August 17, 2018, https://www.poppyscotland.org.uk/about-us/our-history/; “Flanders Poppies,” Pall Mall Gazette, November 10, 1921, 2; “Poppy Day in Dundee,” 4. 17 “The Disabled Society,” Ypres Times, July 1923, 236; “Two Poppy Factories: Richmond and Edinburgh,” Wells Journal, August 9, 1929, 7. 18 A number of scholars have relatedly discussed the meaning of poppies (and a variety of other flowers) for fighting men and soldier-poets. See especially, Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 2000), 231–69 and John Lewis-Stempell, Where Poppies Blow: The British Soldier, Nature and the Great War (London, 2016), 206–37. 19 Saunders, The Poppy, 1–7. 20 Saunders, The Poppy; Gregory, Silence. 21 Gregory, Silence, 103, 108. 22 For detailed discussion of the “social life of things,” see Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge, 1986), 3–63 and Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in Appadurai, The Social Life of Things, 64–94. 23 Julie Anderson, War, Disability and Rehabilitation in Britain: Soul of a Nation (Manchester, UK, 2011); Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London, 1996); Ana Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First World (Oxford, 2009); Ana Carden-Coyne, The Politics of Wounds: Military Patients and Medical Power in the First World War (Oxford, 2014); Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (London, 2001); Meaghan Kowalsky, Enabling the Great War: Ex-servicemen, the Mixed Economy of Welfare and the Social Construction of Disability, 1899–1930 (PhD diss., University of Leeds, 2007); Meaghan Kowalsky, “‘This Honorable Obligation’: The King’s National Roll Scheme for Disabled Ex-servicemen, 1915–1944,” European Review of History 14, no. 4 (2007): 567–84. 24 Anderson, War, 42. 25 Maria Fawley, Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth Century Britain (London, 2004), 43. 26 Fawley, Invalidism, 12–13; John Welshman, Underclass: A History of the Excluded (London, 2006), 21–26. The reasons for this exclusion are complex and included a mixture of social stigma, discrimination, and the physical inability to work within a material environment that was primarily constructed for nondisabled people. For further discussion of disability and unemployment, see especially Harlan Hahn, “Advertising the Acceptably Employable Image: Disability and Capitalism,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (London, 1997), 172–86 and Michael Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (London, 1990), 25–42. 27 Gordon Philips, The Blind in British Society: Charity, State and Community c. 1780–1930 (Farnham, UK, 2004), 333–37. 28 Anderson, War, 18; Kowalsky, Enabling, 26. For discussion of the Edwardian rhetoric of “efficiency” and the alleged physical and social degeneration of the British population, see Jonathan Rose, The Edwardian Temperament, 1895–1919 (London, 1986), 177–22 and G. R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899–1914 (Oxford, 1971). 29 “Death of Mr John Groom,” Cheltenham Chronicle, January 2, 1920, 2. 30 “Death of Mr John Groom,” 2; “Floral Exhibition at Chichester,” Bognor Regis Observer, May 28, 1913, 7. Notably, from 1912 onward, the Crippleage provided flowers for sale to raise money for London Hospitals on Alexandra Rose Day each year and thus prefigured (and arguably inspired) the legion’s later introduction of Armistice poppy sales. 31 “Aberdeen Institute for the Deaf and Dumb,” Aberdeen Press and Journal, January 13, 1899, 4; “Education of the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind,” Belfast Newsletter, June 26, 1908, 5; Carmen M. Mangion, “‘The Business of Life’: Educating Catholic Deaf Children in Late-Nineteenth Century England,” History of Education, 41, no. 5 (2012): 575–94, 587. Flower making at St. Johns, like that at the Crippleage, was, notably, also accompanied by spiritual teaching (this time of a Catholic nature). Indeed, flower making for disabled children at these spiritual missions likely adhered to a widespread charitable belief in the healing qualities of flowers themselves. During this period, Christian periodicals suggested that both growing and gifting “natural” flowers were sources of healing for the sick and needy, who reportedly gained inspiration from these emblems and were “brought to know Christ” by interacting with tangible floral specimens of “God’s power in the natural world.” Beverly Seaton, The Language of Flowers: A History (London, 1995), 13–14. 32 “The Diary of St John’s 1892–1914,” August 7, 1900, 2–11 and “Annual Report,” Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, August 27, 1885, 11, both in Mangion, “Business,” 587; John Groom’s Watercress and Flower Girl’s Mission [hereafter John Groom’s], “Crippled Dot,” c.1896–1914, John Groom’s Association for Disabled People Collection [hereafter JGA], London Metropolitan Archive, London [hereafter LMA], 4305/6/18. 33 “Death of Mr John Groom,” 2; Mangion, “Business,” 587, 582, 589; “Crippled Girls’ Floral Exhibition,” Evening Star, May 10, 1899, 1. 34 Andrew August, Poor Women’s Lives: Gender, Work and Poverty in Late-Victorian London (London, 1999), 64. 35 August, Poor, 75; “Artificial Flower Making,” Leeds Mercury, October 3, 1865, 7. 36 Mangion, “Business,” 589; August, Poor, 88. 37 August, Poor, 88. 38 See, for example, Marguerite, “Artificial Flower Making,” Dundee Evening Telegraph, October 4, 1906, 6. 39 “Artificial Flowers in Favour,” Walsall Advertiser, May 11, 1901, 3; “Artificial Flowers,” Paisley & Renfrewshire Gazette, December 25, 1897, 2; “Making Artificial Flowers in Silk,” Dundee Evening Telegraph, February 3, 1909, 6; “Artificial Flowers,” Manchester Courier and Lancashire General, April 19, 1905, 15; “Artificial Flower Making,” Burnley Gazette, July 22, 1876, 8; Marguerite, “Artificial,” 6. This discourse was especially driven by an existing association between femininity, feminine bodies, and flowers. As Seaton and Kristina Hunealt have outlined, during this period, popular discourse, art, and literature regularly intertwined the aesthetic and material characteristics of women and flowers: in Britain, flowers connoted love and fertility, and were thus held to be “the female part of nature”; women, in turn, were regularly depicted in relation to the flowers they encountered, and were variously described as “dainty” and “fresh,” or were physically metamorphosed with images of blossoms. Seaton, Language, 2, 7; Kristina Hunealt, “Flower Girls and Fictions: Selling on the Streets,” Canadian Art Review 23, no. 1/2 (1996): 52–70, 57. 40 “Rose Day in Cheltenham,” Gloucestershire Echo, June 21, 1916, 3; John Groom’s, John Groom’s Crippleage and Flower Girl’s Mission (leaflet), c.1920s, JGA, LMA, 4305/6/19; John Groom’s, WhatIs Being Done for the Crippled Girls? (leaflet), 1903, JGA, LMA, 4305/6/18. 41 Kowalsky, “This Honourable Obligation”, 567–84, 570. As Peter Grant has outlined, this was a common trend within wartime charitable action: from 1914, numerous charities adapted their existing aims to suit the needs of a nation undergoing war on a mass-scale, and a further plethora of schemes were established for wartime purposes. The emergence of new “wartime” schemes continued well into the 1920s. Peter Grant, Philanthropy and Voluntary Action in the First World War: Mobilizing Charity (Abingdon, UK, 2014), 133. 42 “The One Day of the Year,” BLJ, October 1922, 82. 43 “Hull’s Great Day: The Case of Compulsion,” BLJ, February 1925, 253. 44 Gregory, Silence, 97. 45 Howson, Handbook for the Limbless, 68; Kowalsky, Enabling, 96. For wider discussion of unemployment in Britain during the 1920s, see especially Keith Laybourn, Britain on the Breadline: A Social and Political History of Britain Between the Wars (Gloucester, UK, 1990). 46 Wootton, Official History, 48. 47 Bourke, Dismembering, 59. 48 Anderson, War, 43. 49 Robert Jones, Notes on Military Orthopaedics (London, 1927), viii, in Seth Koven, “Remembering and Dismemberment: Crippled Children, Wounded Soldiers, and the Great War in Great Britain,” The American Historical Review 99, no. 4 (1994): 1167–202, 1188. 50 Howson, Handbook for the Limbless, 68. 51 Howson, Handbook for the Limbless, 71. 52 Carden-Coyne, Politics of Wounds, 265–66. 53 Carden-Coyne, Politics of Wounds, 266. 54 St. Dunstan’s’ Regent’s Park Hostel, for example, included departments dedicated to basket-making, mat-making, rug-making, and netting. St Dunstan’s Review 75, no. 6, July 1921, 8. Disabled ex-servicemen at the Star and Garter Home also made cane baskets, trays, “trinkets,” “delicate feather-work,” “raffia work,” and rugs. “Star and Garter: Successful Sale of Work,” Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgate and Cheriton Herald, November 30, 1929, 8. 55 Carden-Coyne, Politics of Wounds, 266. 56 Lord Charnwood, “Technical Training for Disabled Soldiers and Sailors,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 3396, no. 66 (1917): 67–78, 71. Anxieties surrounding disabled ex-servicemen undertaking effeminate forms of labor were further exacerbated by the increased presence of women in the workforce during the war. Koven, “Remembering and Dismemberment,” 1167–202, 1192. 57 Cohen, War Come Home, 113, 123; “The Ashstead Potters,” BLJ, August 1925, 41; “A Plea for Employment,” BLJ, October 1924, 125; “Work for Disabled Soldiers: Diamond Cutting Factory at Wrexham,” Lancashire Evening Post, October 20, 1917, 4. 58 Joseph McBrinn, “‘The Work of Masculine Fingers’: The Disabled Soldiers’ Embroidery Industry, 1918–1955,” Journal of Design History 31, no. 1 (2016): 1–23. 59 British Legion Appeals Department, “Poppy Day 1923 Report,” 1923, Records created or inherited by HM Treasury [hereafter HMTC], The National Archives, Kew, UK [hereafter TNA], T199/13, 13. 60 British Legion, “Poppy Day 1923 Report,” HMTC, TNA, 13. 61 “Poppy Day,” Todmorden Advertiser and Hebden Bridge Newsletter, October 21, 1924, 6; “A Happy Family of Forty-One,” BLJ, August 1922, 33; British Legion, “Poppy Day 1923 Report,” HMTC, TNA, 13; “Artificial Flower Making,” Dundee Evening Telegraph, October 4, 1906, 6. 62 “At Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory,” Scotsman, December 13, 1929, 5; Lady Spencer Churchill, “Women and Poppy Day: How to Help,” BLJ, November 1924, 159. 63 British Legion, “Poppy Day 1923 Report,” HMTC, TNA, 11–12. 64 British Legion, “Poppy Day 1923 Report,” HMTC, TNA, 11–13. 65 Gregory, Silence, 101. 66 British Legion Poppy Factory, Richmond, Illustrated Catalogue, c. 1925, JGA, LMA, 4305/06/070; “Poppy Day 1925,” BLJ, November 1925, 137. 67 For a detailed account of the “ancestry” and “genealogy” of Taylorism, see Bernard Doray, From Taylorism to Fordism: A Rational Madness, trans. by David Macey (London, 1988). 68 Frank B. Gilbreth and Lillian Miller Gilbreth, Motion Study for the Handicapped (London, 1920). 69 See Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkley, CA, 1992). 70 Carol Walkowitz, Bodies at Work (London, 2006), 58. 71 Walkowitz, Bodies, 58. There has been much debate surrounding the differences between Taylorist and Fordist (or Fordian) methods of production, and some scholars have determined that, although Ford developed his assembly-line techniques from Taylorism, his method was a critique of Taylor’s model. Michel Freyssenet, “Developing Analytical Tools to Identify the ‘Fordian Model’ in Europe,” in Ford 1903–2003: A European History, Volume I, ed. Huburt Bonin, Yannick Lung, and Steven Tolliday (Paris, 2003), 95–118, 111, 112. While the distinctions between Taylorism and Fordism remain somewhat ambiguous, this article refers more generally to Taylorist-Fordist discourse within British press reports, which notably merged the two within the same rhetorical framework and often simply referred to “American” manufacturing ideals. 72 Harm G. Schröter, “Economic Culture and its Transfer: An Overview of the Americanisation of the European Economy, 1900–2005,” European Review of History 15, no. 4 (2008): 331–44, 333. For a comprehensive overview of the spread of Fordist/Fordian production and the Ford company in Europe see especially Steven Tolliday, “The Origins of Ford of Europe: From Multidomestic to Transnational Corporation, 1903–1976,” in Bonin, Lung, and Tolliday, Ford 1903–2003, Volume I, 153–242. 73 Searle, The Quest, 8; Rose, Edwardian Temperament, 177. 74 Searle, The Quest, 12; Rose, Edwardian Temperament, 177–22. 75 Schröter, “Economic Culture,” 331–44, 333. Mira Wilkins, “Ford among Multinational Companies,” in Bonin, Lung, and Tolliday, Ford 1903–2003 Volume I, 71–94, 71, 73; Steven Tolliday, “The Rise of Ford in Britain: From Sales Agency to Market Leader, 1904–1980,” in Ford 1903–2003: The European History Volume II, ed. Hubert Bonin, Yannick Lung, and Steven Tolliday (Paris, 2003), 7–72, 8. 76 Angela Woollacott, On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (London, 1994), 72. 77 “Report of the Welfare and Health Section for the Year Ending 1917,” in Woollacott, On Her Their Lives, 71. 78 Woollacott, On Her Their Lives, 67; Nicholas J. Saunders, “The Ironic Culture of Shells in the Great War and Beyond,” in Matériel Culture: The Archaeology of Twentieth Century Conflict, ed. John Schofield, William Gray Johnson, and Colleen M. Beck (London, 2002), 22–40, 22. See also, Nicholas J. Saunders, “Bodies of Metal, Shells of Memory: ‘Trench Art’ and the Great War Re-cycled,” Journal of Material Culture 5, no. 1 (2000): 43–67. 79 Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge, 2014), 70–111; Kevin Whitson, “Worker Resistance and Taylorism in Britain,” International Review of Social History 42, no. 1 (1997): 1–24. There has been much debate over the level of protest to scientific management in Britain during this period. Scholars have most recently shown that the impact of worker resistance has been largely exaggerated and did not, in reality, effect the spread of Taylorism. See Whitson, “Worker Resistance,” 1–24, 3–4. 80 Joshua B. Freeman, “Giant Factories,” Labour/Le Travail 72 (2013): 177–203. See also Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (London, 2018). 81 Freeman, “Giant Factories,” 177–203. For an example of contemporary interest among British business owners, see in particular Edward A. Filene, The Way Out: A Business-Man Looks at the World (London, 1925). 82 “Work for Disabled Ex-Servicemen: Unique Factory,” Hull Daily Mail, November 8, 1930, 4. This was not limited to the Poppy Factory: state factory-schemes organized under the Ministry of Labour similarly offered an “efficiency bonus” to disabled ex-servicemen who successfully completed training programs, “provided that the trainee’s attendance and efficiency” were satisfactory. Howson, Handbook for the Limbless, 83. 83 Henry Ford, My Life and Work, 4th ed. (Sydney, 1924), 107. 84 Ford, My Life and Work, 107. 85 “How the Emblems are Made,” BLJ, August 1922, 33. 86 “Unique Factory,” 4. 87 Daniel Black, Embodiment and Mechanisation: Reciprocal Understandings of Body and Machine from the Renaissance to Present (Ashgate, UK, 2014), 87. 88 Whilst the term ‘limbless’ seemingly indicates the loss (or lack) of all limbs, during this period it was a common term for war-amputees who lost one or more limbs in the First World War. See, for example, Howson, Handbook for the Limbless. 89 “A Happy Family of Forty One,” 6. 90 Joanna Bourke has demonstrated that the state placed specific financial values on disabled ex-servicemen’s corporeal losses, which accorded an assumed loss of earnings to each body part. Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 64–67. Every ex-serviceman employed at the Richmond factory received a pension of at least 75 percent, thus further indicating that these men were viewed as the most incapable of employment and the most incapacitated by their injuries. “Unique Factory,” 4. 91 Charnwood, “Technical Training,” 67–78, 69, 71. 92 Howson, Handbook for the Limbless, 71, 82. 93 Gilbreth and Gilbreth, Motion Study, xii. 94 Gilbreth and Gilbreth, Motion Study, 36. 95 Ford, My Life and Work, 108–9. Ford himself hired American war-disabled soldiers to work in his factories and, in 1918, released a film entitled Veterans Working in Industry that featured disabled men working alongside “able-bodied” employees. John M. Kinder, Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran (Chicago, 2015), 140. 96 Howson, Handbook for the Limbless, 220. The Red Cross also adopted motion studies methods to assist disabled ex-servicemen in the United States during this period. Gilbreth and Gilbreth, Motion Study, xiv. J. M. Gotcher has suggested the Gilbreths’ work in European nations in the 1920s assisted over 13 million disabled ex-servicemen. J. M. Gotcher, “Assisting the Handicapped: The Pioneering Efforts of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth,” Journal of Management 18, no. 1 (1992): 5–13, 9–10. 97 Freeman, “Giant Factories,” 177–203, 189; “32,000,000 Poppies for Armistice Day,” Derby Daily Telegraph, October 27, 1928, 8. 98 “How the Emblems are Made,” 33. 99 “At Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory,” 5. 100 “How the Emblems are Made,” 33. 101 See Doray, From Taylorism, 116–26 and Black, Embodiment, 87. 102 “Disabled Men at Work in South-East London,” BLJ, December 1924, 144. 103 Koven, “Remembering and Dismemberment,” 1167–202, 1182. 104 “Poppy Day, 1924,” BLJ, November 1924, 144. 105 “Work for Disabled Ex-Servicemen: Unique Factory,” 4. 106 Doray, From Taylorism, 58. 107 “How the Emblems are Made,” 33. 108 “Unique Factory,” 4. 109 Doray, From Taylorism, 63. 110 “The Cheeriest Workshop in London,” BLJ, August 1922, 33. 111 “The Cheeriest Workshop in London,” 33. 112 “At Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory,” 5. 113 Freeman, “Giant Factories,” 177–203, 189. 114 Ford, in particular, aimed to eradicate the manual handling of material altogether and make all operations automatic. Ford, My Life and Work, 90. 115 “Unique Factory,” 4. 116 “At Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory,” 5. 117 Doray, From Taylorism, 59; Black, Embodiment, 5. The concept of the body as a machine had its roots in ancient Greece and was popularized in Rene Descartes's 1664 Treatise on Man, which imagined human bodies as machines controlled by human souls. For scholarly debates on the human-machine relationship and Cartesian Dualism, see especially Black, Embodiment; Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London, 1991), 149–82; Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago, 1990); Rabinbach, The Human Motor; and Aram Vartanian, LaMettrie’s L’Homme Machine: A Study in the Origins of an Idea (Princeton, NJ, 1960). 118 Rabinbach, Human Motor, 289. 119 “Unique Factory,” 4. 120 “Unique Factory,” 4; “In Honour of Heroes,” Coventry Evening Telegraph, November 4, 1929, 3; “The Men Who Make the Poppies,” Dundee Evening Telegraph, October 28, 1929, 2. 121 “A Happy Family of Forty-One,” 33; “How the Emblems Are Made,” 33. 122 “How the Emblems Are Made,” 33. 123 “The Cheeriest Workshop in London,” 33. 124 “32,000,000 Poppies for Armistice Day,” 8. 125 “Watch Your Poppies,” Daily Mail, November 5, 1926, 6. This also represented a wider shift in conceptions of authenticity in this period, which prioritized the various methods (and manufacturers) through which commodities were created, rather than their visual and physical likeness to nature. Celeste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (London, 1999), 82. 126 “Unique Factory,” 4. 127 “‘Bill’ Williams Factory Foreman, 1922–1947, For Remembrance Day, Making Poppies for Armistice Day, in the British Legion Factory at Richmond, Surrey: The Largest Poppy Ever Made at the Factory,” photograph, October 27, 1933, Poppy Factory Archives, Richmond, Unnamed collection; “The Men Who Make the Poppies,” 2. 128 “At Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory,” 5; “Unique Factory,” 4. 129 Kowalsky, Enabling, 192. 130 “Unique Factory,” 4. 131 “A Happy Family of Forty-One,” 33. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. 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