Tower of London poppy memorial designer Tom Piper: 'The only suffering I’d experienced was vicariously through my father'

Seeing red: blood is a recurring theme in Tom Piper’s work
Matt Writtle
Katie Law @jkatielaw22 August 2019

Tom Piper says that if it hadn’t been for the US dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, there’s a good chance he would never have been born.

The theatre designer, best known for Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red — to give the 2014 poppies memorial at the Tower of London its proper name — is talking about the fate of his father, David Piper, who nearly died as a Japanese prisoner of war. “My father was interned at the Shirakawa camp in Taiwan from 1942-45, but if the war had carried on, he probably would have died. The irony is that thanks to the appalling destruction that helped bring it to an end, he actually survived.”

David Piper not only survived but went on to become both a writer and, as director of several art institutions including the National Portrait Gallery and the Ashmolean Museum, an eminent art historian. Few people have heard of him today — fewer still his war novel Trial By Battle — but in a bold move, the Imperial War Museums are reissuing the book next month as part of their first Wartime Classics series, to mark the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War.

Originally published in 1959, and written under the pseudonym Peter Towry, Trial By Battle tells the story of a well-educated and privileged but naive 21-year-old who is sent to join a regiment in India and fights the Japanese in the jungles of Malaya. It paints an authentic picture of the chaos of the Malayan campaign, with British soldiers ill-equipped to deal with jungle warfare and being overrun by the Japanese in spite of being numerically superior. Acclaimed at the time, V S Naipaul praised it as “one of the most absorbing and painful books about jungle warfare that I have read”.

Like many of his generation, David Piper never spoke of his war experiences and was only able to express his feelings by writing fiction under an assumed name. “It was his way of dealing with it,” says his son. And while, in the novel, the young soldier escapes through the jungle — no spoilers for how it ends — in reality, while Piper’s father did escape and found safety with some villagers, he was “sold” back to the Japanese in exchange for a packet of cigarettes. “So he always had this extraordinary sense of the value of a life being equivalent to a packet of cigarettes.”

The Tower of London poppy display - in pictures

1/28

When Piper, now 54, was asked to design the poppies memorial five years ago, he was initially hesitant. “The only suffering I’d experienced was vicariously through my father. Also, especially as a teenager, I’d always been mistrustful of the poppy as the symbol of a rather imperialistic version of Britain.” But he changed his mind after the project began.

While artist Paul Cummins had the original idea of planting 888,246 ceramic poppies in the moat of the Tower — one for each British and Commonwealth soldier who died during the First World War — the idea for the dramatic “weeping window” was Piper’s. Planting so many poppies in such a short space of time meant that volunteers were needed to help. “So it became a performance piece with the people planting becoming part of the performance, applauded by the visitors above,” says Piper.

After Princes Harry and William came to visit, the poppies took off as a must-see spectacle. “This sense of pilgrimage that can happen sometimes with the British public happened here. People felt they needed to go to the Tower.” Piper was overwhelmed, and recalls feeling mortified at a Help for Heroes award dinner when he and Cummins were applauded by veterans who had suffered the most appalling and disfiguring injuries and burns. “I was like, ‘But I’m just an artist, you’re the ones who were being shot at or burned.’ It took me a while to think we had the authority to be able to comment.”

He was also worried that the installation might be appropriated by the “wrong” people. “I didn’t want this artwork to be misused as a jingoistic thing, which can happen when you see people espousing particularly racist or far-Right views with pictures of poppies on their online profiles.” And while the royal visitors brought the media in droves, it also risked turning the memorial into what Piper calls “a great royal British flag waving event”.

The Duchess of Cambridge, Prince William and Prince Harry visit Tom Piper's memorial in 2014
John Stillwell/WPA Pool/Getty Images

Then there were the critics, one of whom accused it of being “a deeply aestheticised, prettified and toothless war memorial”. But overall Piper was happy. “It was a simple but effective metaphor — populist in the best sense of the word, in that everyone could understand the dual metaphor of individual poppies as lives and multiple poppies as blood.”

Blood flows through Piper’s work like a lifeline. “I look back at my theatre work and say, ‘Oh yes, great red sweeping curtains in certain shows, or poppies coming through the floor once in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; twisted flowers in red and white in the RSC Histories cycle.’ It’s all part of a body of work, and everything influences everything else.”

Among his many current projects is a new play, The King of Hell’s Palace, by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, opening next month at Hampstead Theatre. It’s about the Aids crisis in China after farmers discovered they could make more money donating blood than planting crops. “My initial response was to create an entire installation with hundreds and hundreds of blood bags with long tubes hanging down, but [director] Michael Boyd said it might be a bit too much.”

Then there is Piers Torday’s feminist reimagining of Scrooge, opening at Wilton’s in November; an installation with artist Lisa Wright about “the fragility of our relationship with nature” at Thetford Forest, for the Forestry Commission’s 100th anniversary; and the major Alice in Wonderland exhibition opening next June at the V&A. There’s an exhibition at the Natural History Museum he’s not allowed to talk about yet, a project at The Story Museum in Oxford, and a list of other operas and plays. “It’s very stimulating working in so many different mediums,” he concludes thoughtfully, “and I like working with a range of people with such different disciplines.”

Being a father to five daughters, in what he admits is a “fairly woke household”, definitely helps. “It enables me to be more collaborative and a better listener.”

Trial By Battle by David Piper, £8.99, is published by Imperial War Museums as part of their new Wartime Classics series

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in

MORE ABOUT