Propaganda, Advertising and Promotional Culture

242 Pages·2014·3.65 MB·English

by  Chris Keene

A University of Sussex DPhil thesis 
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Recruitment for the British Armed
Forces and Civil Defences: Organising

and Producing ‘Advertising’, 1913-63

Brendan John Maartens
Candidate for PhD

University of Sussex

September 2013
[1]

Table of Contents
Statement……………………………………………………………………………………........ pg. 2
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………........ pg. 3
List of Abbreviations........................................................................................................... pg. 4

Chapter One
‘Your Country Needs You’: Military Advertising Behind the Image..................................... pg. 5
Chapter Two
Propaganda, Advertising and Promotional Culture: Reviewing the Literature.................. pg. 28
Chapter Three
Researching, Designing and Writing the Thesis: A Methodological Survey..................... pg. 46
Chapter Four
The ‘Rush to the Colours’: The Great War and the Emergence of Modern
Military Advertising, 1913-15............................................................................................ pg. 65
Chapter Five
‘The Irish Problem’: Recruiting, Rebellion and Conscription in a Divided
Country, 1914-19.............................................................................................................. pg. 87
Chapter Six
‘To encourage, inspire and guide’: National Service, the ‘People’s War’
and the Promotion of Civil Defence in Interwar Britain, 1938-39.................................... pg. 106
Chapter Seven
Social Survey and the Rise of ‘Publicity in Reverse’: Military Advertising,
Opinion Polls and the Construction of Public Opinion, 1940-60..................................... pg. 126
Chapter Eight
From Advertising to ‘Information’: Military Recruitment in an Era of
Reform, 1944-51............................................................................................................. pg. 144
Chapter Nine
Civilising the Services: Frederic Hooper, the Termination of Conscription
and the ‘Modernisation’ of the Military, 1957-63............................................................. pg. 165
Chapter Ten
Conclusion: Military Advertising in Perspective.............................................................. pg. 187
Bibliography.................................................................................................................... pg. 203
[2]

Statement

I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be, submitted in whole or in part to
another University for the award of any other degree.

Signature:………………………………………
[3]

University of Sussex
Brendan John Maartens, PhD Candidate

Recruitment for the British Armed Forces and Civil Defences: Organising and Producing
"Advertising", 1913-63
Summary:
The issue of how governments attract men and women to the armed forces has been a
principal concern of historians of propaganda since Harold Lasswell first wrote on the subject
in the 1920s. Yet while a great deal has been written about propaganda texts – posters, films,
newsreels, radio broadcasts, television programmes, and so on – less attention has been
paid to the ways in which these texts were produced and their place within the broader
context of 20th century British history. Through an analysis of key institutions and individuals,
and drawing on a range of primary and secondary source material, this thesis makes a case
for a history of recruitment advertising rooted in the experiences and perspectives of its
practitioners. Exploring a number of recruitment campaigns waged in Britain between 1913
and 1963, it studies the business of recruitment not through the medium of individual
advertisements, but via the organisations, ideologies and discursive practices that
constructed them. Following Liz McFall and Anne Cronin, who argue that advertising can be
understood only in relation to the particular historical circumstances that give rise to it, and
that advertising is at any one point the sum of the discourses that embody and maintain it, it
explores how recruitment campaigns were organised, planned and executed at key moments
in British history. Crucial to this approach is an analysis of archival records such as
memoranda, minutes of meetings, production logs, memoirs and reports. By examining these
records discursively, this thesis encourages a shift from textual readings of recruitment
advertising to studies of how relevant organisations and individuals defined and understood
recruitment practices as promotional devices intended to exhort and persuade. By examining
military advertising through six case studies spanning the wartime, interwar and postwar
periods, it explores how ideas about promotion shifted from one era to the next.
[4]

List of Abbreviations
ARP – Air-Raid Precautions
BL – British Library
BBC – British Broadcasting Corporation
CCOR – Central Committee for the Organisation of Recruitment in Ireland
CNSC – Central National Service Committee
COI – Central Office of Information
DOR – Department of Recruiting
HO – Home Office
IRC – Irish Recruiting Council
IV – Irish Volunteers
IWM – Imperial War Museum
MO – Mass Observation
MOD – Ministry of Defence
MOI – Ministry of Information
MOL – Ministry of Labour
NA – National Archives
NSC – National Service Committee
PRC – Parliamentary Recruiting Committee
PRD – Public Relations Department
PRO – Public Records Office
UVF – Ulster Volunteer Force
WO – War Office
[5]

Chapter One
‘Your Country Needs You’: Military Advertising
Behind the Image
In the history of recruitment advertising, few images have attracted more attention than Alfred
Leete’s ‘Your country needs you’ (see figure one). A partial portrait of Lord Horatio Herbert
Kitchener, a man regarded by many of his contemporaries as Britain’s finest living soldier,1
Leete’s design has captivated historians and social commentators ever since it was first
released as a recruiting poster in the dying days of September 1914. The Great War, the
conflict to which it owes its origins, is often described in terms derived from the advertisement
(as a war fought for ‘King and Country’, for example, or as a war won by the armies Kitchener
himself apparently raised), and the image has also been credited in the popular imagination
with being the British Army’s ‘most famous’ recruitment poster.2 Alongside Savile Lumley’s
‘Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?’ (see figure two), another iconic image of the
period, ‘Your country needs you’ has come to symbolise the use of mass media to persuade
men and women to join the armed forces. Part of a larger recruitment campaign designed to
mobilise the civilian population for war, it was, according to the historian of ephemera Maurice
Rickards, the only British poster worthy of artistic distinction:
Your Country needs YOU is by no means a major work, but its posterly simplicity has
impact far in excess of any of its contemporaries. His lordship’s accusing finger has
haunted Britons since they first saw it. It is the archetype of all wartime father figures,
crib-source for a host of mimics. Like the man himself – brooding, compulsive and
final – it has entered into the mythology of the nation; it has become a trademark
figure for World War I.3
The use of posters to promote recruitment in the armed forces is often regarded as a
peculiarly 20th century phenomenon. Hoisted onto buildings and monuments and displayed
on billboards and hoardings, war posters are, as the editor of one anthology recently
remarked, mechanically reproduced objects with no originals.4 Unlike works of art in the
Benjaminian sense of the term however, their ‘aura’ is derived not from any authorial claim to
originality or greatness, but from the quality and quantity of their reproductions – from their
ability, that is to say, to be seen. Staring ominously into the distance and lifting his right hand
only so far as to point at the viewer, the Kitchener poster epitomises the all-seeing figure
whose gaze catches passersby precisely as the eyes of passersby are drawn to the figure.
[6]

George Orwell introduced a similar character in 1984, a novel that opened with a description
of a ‘black-moustachioed face gaz[ing] down from every commanding corner’,5 and there
have been so many reproductions, imitations and parodies of Leete’s design it is not
surprising that the image of Kitchener has continued to cast a long shadow over British
history, not least because of what it seems to say about the power of the mass media (and of
the medium of posters in particular) to persuade, cajole and wheedle its audiences.6

How that power has been exercised and expressed has been a matter of some debate
amongst historians. According to Cate Haste, author of Keep the Home Fires Burning (1977),
[7]

for example, the Leete poster represented the ‘most successful poster’ of the First World War
because it ‘established Kitchener’s image as the embodiment of the nation’s resolution and
strength’. Kitchener, according to Haste, ‘recalled Britain’s imperial victories’; even
‘government leaders who later doubted his capacity to manage the war paid tribute to the
success his image had in inspiring confidence’ amongst the people.7 That one man could
‘inspire’ so much without actually raising a finger – Kitchener posed for no posters himself –
may seem remarkable, but eyewitness accounts from the 1914-18 period have indicated that
Kitchener’s image did have an appreciable impact on the landscapes and cityscapes of
modern Britain. According to one article published in the Manchester Guardian in 1915, for
example, ‘Your country needs you’ was just one of many recruiting images whose cumulative
effect amounted to a visual ‘blockade’ on pedestrians.
[War posters] grip you everywhere. They assail you from every corner. They take you
in the streets and in the trains. They threaten, persuade, cajole, and frighten. You
look on one hand and you see “If this cap fits, join at once”. You look on the other and
you are asked what the girls and grandchildren will think of you if you hold back.
Ahead of you Lord Kitchener bars the way with a terrible look and a menacing finger:
‘I want you’. The eye is subjected to a ‘blockade’ where everything is contraband but
recruiting appeals.8
Opposition to advertising in public places was not new,9 but the use of it on this scale to
promote the armed forces almost certainly was, and has prompted many historians to draw
the conclusion that the Kitchener poster exerted an unwieldy influence on the wartime home
front.10 Phil Taylor, who until his death in 2010 was one of Britain’s leading propaganda
historians, even claimed that a direct (casual) correlation could be drawn between the
exhibition of Leete’s poster in Britain and the extraordinary rates of enlistment witnessed in
the opening stages of the war. ‘Recruitment stands set up by the War Office throughout the
nation found it difficult to cope with the sheer weight [sic] of volunteers, who rushed forward to
sign up in response to Kitchener’s outstretched index finger inviting them to enlist simply
because “Your King and Country Needs [sic] You”’.11 Carlo Ginzberg, a prominent exponent
of micro-history,12 has also suggested the Leete poster possessed the power to hypnotise
and entrance all those who gazed upon it. Indeed, even though historians today may
never know how many people decided to volunteer under the impulse of Kitchener’s
image...[they] can safely assume that the imperatives conveyed by those posters –
YOUR KING AND COUNTRY NEED YOU, KITCHENER WANTS MORE MEN, and
[8]

so forth – affected many onlookers. The depiction of authority acted like authority
itself. A discharge of social energy took place; a command was introjected [sic] and
turned into a decision which was, literally, a matter of life and death.13
The notion that official ‘imperatives’ possessed an influence far beyond the media that carried
them predated both ‘Your country needs you’ and the First World War. As early as 1901, J. A.
Hobson could write of a ‘knot of men, financiers and politicians’ whose manipulation of the
press and parliament had ‘capture[d] the mind of a nation, arouse[d] its passion, and
impose[d] a policy’.14 Hobson’s critique of the ‘manufacture of jingoism’ was aimed squarely
at Britain’s involvement in the Second Boer War, but it would set the tone for many
subsequent studies of the nature and ‘effects’ of war propaganda. In the interwar years, a
number of academics, liberal commentators and Marxists turned their attention to the use of
propaganda – a term that had recently come into popular usage, and had quickly developed a
pejorative undertone15 – in 1914-18. Using the Committee on Public Information or ‘Creel
Committee’ as a case study, the American sociologist Harold Lasswell published what may
have been the first academic study of the media based on an analysis of ‘significant
symbols’,16 and he was soon joined by key thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School
whose critique of the ‘culture industries’ and the ‘mass society’ they sustained aligned the
propaganda of totalitarian societies to the commercial advertising of capitalist ones.17
Propaganda, however, continues to be regarded as an instrument of state power,18 and it is
perhaps for this reason that ‘Your country needs you’ was until recently treated as a product
of the machinery of government. The Parliamentary Recruiting Committee (PRC), a body
established in late August 1914 to produce recruitment advertising on behalf of the War Office
(WO), was credited with the production of both ‘Your country needs you’ and ‘Daddy, what did
you do in the Great War?’, partly because of references to a ‘Kitchener poster’ in the PRC’s
holdings and partly because Kitchener was himself apparently involved in recruitment
advertising.19 Furthermore, since the PRC was responsible for well over 100 different poster
designs, and for more than 54 million reproductions of posters, leaflets and other printed
ephemera,20 some historians have drawn a connection between its prolific output and the
popularisation of the First World War’s most famous posters. In two classic works on the
political and social history of contemporary Britain, A. J. P. Taylor and Arthur Marwick, for
instance, linked ‘Your country needs you’ to the official recruitment drive, with the latter