The villagers of Walsham-le-Willows took up the call to knit or crochet 40 poppies to commemorate the 40 fallen from the village in the two World Wars but ended up making more than five thousand!

Jan Hall, who led the project with the village British Legion representative Fiona, told Premier’s News Hour that she hopes the poppies will have an impact.

She said: “We have a village school in our village and they are going to church on Friday and hopefully they will ask questions, ‘why do we have so many poppies?’ and then we’ll be able to answer those questions.”

The poppies were knitted and crocheted by more than 75 individuals to mark Armistice Day and raise funds for the British Legion Poppy Appeal.

Hall told Premier she “absolutely” did not expect such a big response to help achieve her goal.

She added: “A friend and I were just going to do the 40. Because we live in a small village, we expected… just to have the 40 with the two crosses because we have two porch gates on our church.

Hall said she was grateful to the Vicar Philip Merry and the Church Council for allowing the poppy display.

The poppies will adorn the church for the next two weeks leading up to the Remembrance weekend.

Listen to Jan Hall speaking with Premier’s Paul Hagger:

Lord David Blunkett addressed the issue at a reception at the House of Lords on Wednesday, which he hosted on behalf of Christian overseas disability charity CBM.

He underlined the need to improve access to mental health support for people in the poorest places of the world and shared how he had witnessed first-hand, some of the challenges faced by children with disabilities on a trip to East Africa.

He said: “I was struck by the challenge of getting a child to school, let alone to healthcare, let alone medical treatment or to overcome some of the challenges around disability.

“As well as the normal challenge of those in developing world to raise a family and earn a living – add to that isolation and attitudinal barriers that exclude blind and disabled people. It’s not surprising that mental health is an issue challenging all of us around the world”.

While he praised the work of campaigners like Norman Lamb MP on mental health in the UK, he said the scale of the global challenge is huge.

He added: “If we know that mental health is a massive issue here in the UK, imagine the scale of the problem in developing countries…”

The reception brought together parliamentarians, CBM supporters and international development sector leaders to raise awareness of the exclusion faced by people with disabilities and in particular, those living with psychosocial disabilities – which are caused by mental health…

The pontiff has requested a debate over allowing married men in the Amazon region of Brazil to be ordained if they are men of great faith.

The pope made the decision following a request made by Cardinal Claudio Hummes, the president of the Episcopal Commission for the Amazon, Il Messaggero newspaper reported a Vatican source as revealing.

However, Brenden Thompson from Catholic Voices UK told Premier the story is being “sensationalised”.

Speaking during News Hour, he added: “The pope is a pope. He’s Catholic – you don’t need to worry about that.

“The Pope has already himself said that he is in favour of celibacy and that celibacy has really, really, beautiful reasons practically and spiritually – why it’s a gift to the Church, but he is responding to the needs that have been said in Brazil.”

Cardinal Hummes reportedly asked Pope Francis to consider ordaining married men to tackle the issue of many remote communities in the Amazon where there is a shortage of priests.

Thompson said he wasn’t surprised by the Pope wanting the topic to be debated.

 
 
He told Premier: “We’ve become used to Pope Fracncis changing the way that we associate the Vatican and how it interacts with the churches around the world.

“So rather than starting the debate himself, actually it’s grassroots…because of the very specific situation in Brazil, have requested the Pope, and the Pope is a pope of dialogue and is saying, ‘yeah, let’s talk…