In the spring of 1939, an anonymous civil servant was entrusted with finding suitable slogans for propaganda posters intended to comfort, inspire and stiffen public resolve should the massed armies of Nazi Germany ever cross the Channel. Three were designed and two were produced – they read: Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory. The second, identically styled, stated: Freedom is in Peril. This was during the period of heavy bombing and anticipated gas attacks. More than a million were printed from August onwards and both posters began appearing all over the country, on billboards, in shops, on railway platforms.
The third was held back. This one was for the real crisis: invasion. A few may have made their way on to select officials’ walls, but the vast majority of the British public never saw it. This poster enjoined: Keep Calm and Carry On. Now, suddenly, it’s everywhere, 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. It even hangs in my daughter’s new kitchen.
For 60 years, this poster had been forgotten. Then, one day in 2000, Stuart Manley, co-owner with his wife, Mary, of Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, was sifting through a box of hardbacks he had bought at auction when he saw “A big piece of paper folded up at the bottom. “I opened it out, and I thought, wow. That’s quite something. I showed it to Mary, and she agreed. So we framed it and put it up on the bookshop wall. And that’s where it all started.”
Today, you can buy Keep Calm and Carry On mugs, doormats, T-shirts, hoodies, cufflinks, baby clothes and flight bags from any number of retailers. You can use the design as a screensaver for your computer or mobile phone. There are facsimiles of the poster itself, which Barter Books initially reproduced after a rash of customers asked to buy its copy (one offered £1,000). They have sold in their tens of thousands.
Alain Samson, a social psychologist at the London School of Economics, says that in times of difficulty, “people are brought together by looking for common values or purposes, symbolized 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, who lectures in social psychology at Birmingham University, is blunter still. “It is a quiet, calm, authoritative 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.”
There is no doubt that we are living in a morally decaying country, I have probably seen the best of Britain in my lifetime. I passed through the war years of privation as a young child and witnessed victory when I was ten. The forties and fifties were struggling years as people came to terms with peace again; the hunt for post-war jobs, the re-establishment of homes and the consequent baby boom. Many soldiers could not cope with peace, they were traumatized by constant noise and killing; after discharge they had no need to follow orders or face danger and lived in a resultant vacuum of inaction.
Many lives and marriages were wrecked and although the nation eventually recovered economically through the seventies to nineties, I doubt if it will ever recover from the loss of manhood. Some of our finest minds were spread across the unploughed fields of Europe. Succeeding political generations have wilted under global pressure and we are left with a poor imitation of real quality; it has been replaced by greed, lying, spin-doctoring and manipulation. No wonder the populace displays the war-time poster “Keep Calm and Carry On.” What else can they do? There is another war raging that too few notice; it is for truth.
The nation could turn to God as they did in the war years, but even He has now been sidelined as humanism, materialism and atheism has mainly overcome, in public life, basic Christian belief. Those of us who still pray beseech God for His Spirit to send a true revival that reaches into the governing segment of our society. In Israel it was said ““For the leaders of this people cause them to err.”[1] This is true of the last decade where money has replaced the true value of character.
[1] Isa 9:16
