Our first dismembering of a myth, along with Uncle Sam and why a pointing person will always get your attention and the rise and fall of Kitchener’s always controversial reputation. As will often turn out to be the case, False Memory Syndrome applies to posters – quite literally in this case as returning servicemen swore blind that this poster caused them to enlist. In fact, it may not even have existed as a recruitment poster at all, and owes its fame to being the cover of the London Opinion magazine. It certainly wasn’t popular – no picture of it on display has ever been found. Or so we like to believe now, but in fact, it almost none of this is true. His is the single most famous poster of World War One, the poster that caused millions of men to sign up to fight in the trenches. And why feminism means that it is almost impossible for us to read this poster as it was originally intended. This particular one was highly successful but later not only reviled by George Orwell but disowned by its originator, despite the fact that designing it caused him to sign up for the army. Unfortunately they were mostly produced by a potent combination of brass hats and jobbing printers, leading to questionable design decisions which would have very long lasting influences – including on Adolf Hitler. World War One saw the first general use of the propaganda poster and they were seen as the key way to get soldiers to enlist before conscription was introduced in 1916. World War One What did posters do in the war, Daddy? And, not for the last time, we meet Frank Pick, the Lorenzo Medici of the Underground. The artist, Armfield was a modern man who trained in Paris, married to a modern wife who wrote novels about being a suffragette – so just what did modern feel like as World War One came into view? Also, why you want pictures of the countryside underground, not simply to get people to use obscure bits of the network but also perhaps to stop people panicking from claustrophobia. But right from the start, the British have a very ambivalent relationship with modern city life, as this poster shows. In part this is to do with the association of hoardings with massive redevelopments in both Paris and London. You can’t have posters without the city, not least because you need a mass of people to see them in order for them to work, so in the early days they are very excitingly modern. Bateman amongst others, died penniless in 1948. Sadly, however, it failed to provide for Hassall who, despite setting up the first ever school for poster designers and teaching Bert Thomas and H.M. Why railway companies were such enthusiastic adopters of posters and what they thought they were doing with them, along with the story of how this particular poster has literally run and run, being parodied and altered right up until the present day. But it was designed in 1908, as poster artists were still very much finding their feet. Hassell’s jolly fisherman is of the most successful posters ever, being reused right up until the 1950s. Every single British person has this image on file somewhere in their brain despite the poster being over 100 years old. One of the strange things about the poster is that designers got it right so quickly. #Psst look over here plusAlso, how a good poster works on visual inference – and why in this case we don’t understand any of them any more, leading therefore to an explanation of both mustard baths (a long lost British tradition that dates back to the Romans) and the Klondyke Gold Rush, plus how Dorothy L Sayers ended up writing recipes and why mustard is always the (masculine) signifier of Great British Food. Why posters are inextricably linked to the great explosion of national brands in the 1880s, and what this shows about how the British became one nation. Or they were an oil painting, doctored to advertise soap. In which we consider some candidates for the first ever poster, and why they don’t count – for example, because they were so obscure as to need a newspaper campaign to explain them. But is that what actually happened over here? The first ever poster: A poster, in fact, as done by the French. It turns out that when people say poster they don’t just mean a piece of shouty text with a dozen different typefaces on but something with a large lithographed picture on, preferably of a saucy lady. Generally, posters are believed to emerge just before the turn of the century, although this does rather beg the question as to why British cities were already covered in advertising hoardings by about 1860. The origins of the poster are confused (some understatement here) and obviously depend how you define a poster in the first place.
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