Jon Henley @ The Guardian draws our attention to the Keep Calm And Carry On poster that seems to have gone viral and is being spotted in homes, pubs and government offices. Apparently the poster was created in the spring of 1939, by an anonymous civil servant who was entrusted with finding the slogan for a propaganda poster.
According to Henley:
This was the third in a series. The first, designed to stiffen public resolve ahead of likely gas attacks and bombing raids, was printed in a run of more than a million and read: Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory. The second, identically styled, stated: Freedom Is In Peril.
Apparently the poster was held back for a single event: a German invasion – although I find it hard to imagine how (on hearing the news that German paratroopers were being dropped across Norfolk and the West Midlands for example) the Home Guard and others could have been mobilised quick enough to stick the poster up on billboards, and across towns and villages as the troops landed. Today the poster can be found in numerous places:
From homes to pubs to government offices. The Lord Chamberlain’s Office at Buckingham Palace, the prime minister’s strategy unit at No 10, the Serious Fraud Office, the US embassy in Belgium, the vice chancellor of Cambridge University, the Emergency Planning Office at Nottingham council and the officers’ mess in Basra have all ordered posters. Even David Beckham has the T-shirt.
According to Alain Samson, a social psychologist at the London School of Economics:
“people are brought together by looking for common values or purposes, symbolised by the crown and the message of resilience. The words are also particularly positive, reassuring, in a period of uncertainty, anxiety, even perhaps of cynicism.”
Dr Lesley Prince at Birmingham University, is blunt: “It is a quiet, calm, authoritative, no-bullshit voice of reason,” he says. “It’s not about British stiff upper lip, really. The point is that people have been sold a lie since the 1970s. They were promised the earth and now they’re worried about everything – their jobs, their homes, their bank, their money, their pension. This is saying, look, somebody out there knows what’s going on, and it’ll be all right”.
