In the last year or so, we’ve typically only had two or three orders a month. We’ve probably sold somewhere in the region of 100,000 copies to date. Photograph: The Print Collector/Alamy Stock Photo View image in fullscreen Carry On, 1941, by Cecil Beaton … a rare wartime sighting of the poster. When I’m asked why it was so popular, I always say the same thing: it’s cheaper than antidepressants. But the actual basic message has helped a lot of people, I think. Lots of people jumped on the bandwagon and, frankly, some of the parodies I got sick to the teeth of. It’s probably fair to say that by the end of 2006, when I was down in London and saw a Keep Calm mug with “Made in China” on the bottom, that it had gone international. Then people started copying it, ridiculing it and doing all sorts of things with it. And that’s really when the phenomenon began. It was in December, so a perfect Christmas present. That wasn’t until 2005 when a reporter called Susie Steiner from the Guardian did a little one-page feature, showing the Keep Calm poster as one of her favourite things. For the next two years it was a huge local and regional hit, but not a national hit. She’s a very practical person, and from then on we started making more. I suggested we make copies but Mary said: “No, it’ll spoil the purity.” She went away for a week’s holiday, so I secretly got 500 copies made. The next thing we found was that customers wanted to buy it. I liked it straight away and showed it to my wife Mary – she had it framed and put up in the shop. I first found the poster in 2000, folded up at the bottom of a box of books we had bought at an auction. This is but one example of the rich material being unearthed by our new project.View image in fullscreen An earlier poster in the series, from 1939. The findings of this study prove just how important it is to examine the workings of the Ministry of Information between 19 from the point of view of the history of communication. ‘Public relations is much about getting the message's tone and timing right, and the poster's immediate fate and its subsequent rediscovery are a vivid confirmation of this fact. The history of 'Keep Calm and Carry On' is peculiar and complicated and, like so many examples of the best history (and the best science), doesn't quite confirm our settled notions or convenient assumptions," said Professor Simon Eliot, the project’s principal investigator. It is run in collaboration with the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London and the National Archives at Kew. The project, Make Do and Mend: a publishing and communication history of the Ministry of Information, 1939-45, is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. As we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the ‘Keep Calm’ slogan, the Institute of English Studies, a member institute of the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, is undertaking a £782,410 four-year research project to reveal its secret history. Relatively little was known about the Ministry of Information, which was located in the University of London’s headquarters at Senate House, but that is now changing. It wasn’t until a copy was discovered in a bookshop in Northumberland in 2000, and reproductions of it began to be sold a year later, that its fame was established. The ‘Keep Calm’ design was never officially issued and only a very small number of originals have survived to the present day.Ģ.45 million posters displaying it were printed, only to be pulped and recycled in 1940 to help the British government deal with a serious paper shortage. It was one of a series of three posters that would be issued in the event of war (the others read ‘Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory’ and ‘Freedom is in Peril Defend it with all Your Might’). The now-ubiquitous ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ phrase was chosen for its clear message of ‘sober restraint’ and was coined by the shadow Ministry of Information at some point between 27 June and 6 July 1939. ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ was one of three key messages created by Britain’s wartime propaganda department, the Ministry of Information, made famous as the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s novel, 1984. It’s hard to believe that a wartime slogan from 1939, which was never seen by the public, has re-emerged 75 years later and is being used to sell everything from mugs to flight bags and baby clothes.
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