Why Aren't YOU in Khaki ?: Methods of Persuasion in British Recruitment Posters, 1914-15

 

In some ways we resemble people from the past: in others, they are utterly alien.  We share many of the same emotions,  but they may be triggered by the equivalent, similar or quite different causes. I want to illustrate this by examining British recruitment posters from World War One. What I believe we shall find is that in most, the emotion they are playing on is recognisable even if the immediate stimulus of it is not: we understand what encouragement and shame (the two most used triggers) are even if we do not feel them from the same sources as our ancestors in the first 15 years of the 20th century. We shall also find that people at that time responded to stimuli almost entirely incomprehensible to us: this is the shock of abruptly realising again that the people from the past are in the past, a different place with different mores, standards and assumptions; a different mental universe.

The image of Lord Kitchener above is so famous it has become unmoored from its origin, endlessly reproduced, imitated and parodied. We might rank it with the following:

I'm not going to name the first painting above: it is superfluous to do so; that's how famous it is. The next are Hokusai's 'The Great Wave': Korda's photograph of Che Guevara; Munch's 'The Scream'; Delacroix' 'Liberty Leading the People'. Almost anyone with the vaguest visual literacy will recognise them, and probably be able to say who made them, where they were made and their title (excepting Che), although they might not know much beyond that, like when they were made and why. That haziness around the specifics - who for instance is Lord Kitchener and what exactly did he do ? - is proof of how famous the images are, not a denial of it.

Conscription was not introduced in the UK until early 1916. To encourage enlistment, the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee produced an extraordinary range of posters in late 1914 and especially 1915. Many of these posters were in my opinion extremely effective because they were simple and clear, and played on two very powerful stimuli, encouragement and shame: sometimes a mixture of the two; surely they are closely allied feelings, each contains an element of the other. The techniques of these posters could be studied with advantage by any modern propagandist, campaigner or advertiser: I'm sure they do; for instance, modern anti-smoking campaigns.

I want to concentrate on 1915, and come back to late 1914 for reasons which will become clear when we do so. The following posters were all issued by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, and the issue numbers underneath are those used by that Committee. I have included the month of issue where I have it. By September 1915, the Committee had distributed the remarkable figure of more than 5 500 000 posters. Here are examples which use encouragement:

PRC no.22

PRC no.122

June, 1915. PRC no. 96

    

February, 1915. PRC no.35. Note how the line of men extends beyond the frame on the left.

PRC no. 87

An element of shame is entering more evidently into that last example. The following very famous poster mixes the two stimuli:

by E. J. Kealey, March, 1915. PRC no. 75

There is a well known song from 1914 which is an aural equivalent to the 'Women of Britain say - "Go !"' poster: it is called 'Your King and Your Country Want You', though you might recognise it from the line "We don't want to lose you, but we think you ought to go." Here is the sheet music:

You can see it is specifically called 'A Woman's Recruiting Song'. 

Here are two versions, the first by Helen Clark:

And the second by Edna Thornton:

There is a minor but interesting point in the first verse, regarding a strategy of persuasion - flattering the target of persuasion that he is in a higher social class than he really is. This technique is still widely used today.

We've watched you playing cricket And every kind of game

At football, golf and polo, You men have made your name,

But now your country calls you To play your part in war,

And no matter what befalls you, We shall love you all the more,

So come and join the forces As your fathers did before.

Oh! we don't want to lose you but we think you ought to go

For your King and your Country both need you so;

We shall want you and miss you but with all our might and main

We shall cheer you, thank you, kiss you When you come back again.

To the average male listener, the idea that they had played polo is flattery and a considerable social promotion. The overwhelming majority of British men would have played cricket, football and rugby: virtually none would have played polo, which was the preserve of army officers and wealthy civilians.

The emphasis in the following posters has shifted and is definitely on shame.

PRC no.125

PRC no. 74

PRC no. 128. Note the Union Jack lettering.

PRC no. 103

PRC no. 65

That last is brutally concise, the essence of what so many of these posters are getting at. This next example has this and other posters in the background, a composite of some of the rest of the campaign.

PRC no.121

This famous next example leans heavily on shame.

PRC no. 79

I once saw Tim O'Brien, one of the great writers about the Vietnam War and a veteran of it, on one the series about that war, probably either PBS' 'Vietnam: A Television History' (which is the best on this topic I've seen) or Ken Burns' 'The Vietnam War'. Unfortunately I cannot find the exact reference for what follows*, I am going to paraphrase Tim O'Brien, and I hope he will forgive me because I believe that this is accurate to what he meant. He said that the principal reason he obeyed the draft when he was drafted was the fear of the disapproval of his fellow townspeople in his home town if he did not: and that, looking back after his experience in the war, it seemed a stupid reason and an insufficient one; if he knew when he was drafted what he knew after serving, he would refuse to go and damn anyone's disapproval. But I think it also goes to show that social shame, the disapproval of one's peers, is an extremely powerful force: one which the posters above are trying to arouse.

This next poster addresses women directly, to overcome concerns and resistance they might have.

PRC no. 69

Point 1 there is referring to German Army atrocities in Belgium, a theme we will pick up later on. Point 3 is the same as 'Women of Britain say - "Go !"'. Point 4 is the same as "Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War ?" We can see how the messages of the posters are reinforcing one another: the whole campaign is coordinated. Note in this regard the relentless slogans of 'Enlist Now', 'Enlist At Once', 'Enlist To-Day' - seeing 'To-Day' hyphenated gave me pause when I first saw it on these posters, it looks odd because we don't do it anymore: a telling orthographic hint that we are dealing with the past.

Now we come to the poster from 1914 which was the starting point for researching this piece, because I could hardly believe it when I first saw it: here one stumbles against the threshold to the past, because the feeling it is trying to summon up seems so entirely alien.

by Lawson Wood. 1914. PRC no. 17

I think that even in 1914, although some would have found this line convincing, many spectators would have reacted negatively to it: I don’t think it is anachronistic to say so. As an ordinary citizen, I am going off to war to get killed or maimed physically perhaps and mentally definitely, 'to maintain the honour and glory of the British Empire' ?

There is a lot to analyse in this poster.

A Scottish soldier stands in a Belgian street. He is from a Highland regiment, though which one in particular I have been unable to identify**. We know it is Belgium because of the bi-lingual sign - 'Jan Mirael Straat/Rue Jean Mirae'. We can compare his uniform and equipment with actual highland soldiers of World War One:

Gordon Highlander, WWI

Gordon Highlander, WWI

Gordon Highlander, WWI, with ceremonial sporran similar to the soldier on the poster.

 I do have to wonder how the proud soldier in the poster is going to get on against shells, barbed-wire, rifle and machine gun fire. For all his pride, he seems a soft target.

Here are real Gordon Highlanders in combat in World War I, with helmets and puttees:

The statement 'A Wee "Scrap o' Paper" Is Britain's Bond' needs explaining. First, the 'scrap of paper' part. This was a very important element in the British Government's justification for entering the war, and in its propaganda. 

In the next paragraph I am going to give an account of a small but significant element of the series of events which led to the outbreak of World War I. Its purpose is to explain the phrase 'scrap of paper'. It is not intended to be a full account of the immediate series of events leading to the outbreak: that would be another blog of its own; the reader must supply the deficiency from their own knowledge or research. It also does not imply the attribution of guilt for the outbreak to any of the belligerents in particular. My current understanding - which may be revised - is that essentially all the major Powers were coequally guilty in the outbreak of the war and in persisting with it once it had broken out, because they shared a common mindset. This mindset can perhaps be summarised under the term Imperialism: which is to say, they thought and acted like senior gangsters, but with vastly greater resources and consequences. Some examples of how they resembled gangsters are the following: intense competition with their rivals, with the accurate fear of being overtaken and destroyed; greed for territory and resources; willingness to use violence to get what they want and to hold it. When I say all the Powers were guilty, I mean exactly that, not that no one was guilty because everyone was. Wars do not just happen: they are not a mysterious event occurring without any human intervention; they are the outcome of political decisions.

Early on the morning of August 4th, 1914, the German Army invaded Belgium on its route to northern France. They were taking this route to bypass the network of forts defending France's eastern frontier with Germany. The Belgian Government called for military assistance from Great Britain under the Treaty of London of 1839, which had established Belgium as a country recognised by all the major Powers and guaranteed its neutrality. The British Government issued an ultimatum to the German Government that they had to withdraw, which expired at 11 pm London time. The British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Edward Goschen, went to see Gottlieb von Jagow, the State Secretary at the German Foreign Office, to see if the Germans would withdraw, but he said it was too late. This was about 7 pm. Goschen then went to see the German Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. Goschen subsequently wrote in his report to Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary:

"I found the Chancellor very agitated. His Excellency at once began a harangue, which lasted for about twenty minutes. He said that the steps taken by His Majesty's Government was terrible to a degree; just for a word -- "neutrality," a word which in war time had so often been disregarded -- just for a scrap of paper Great Britain was going to make war on a kindred nation who desired nothing better than to be friends with her."

         (- you can read the report here: Origin of the Term "A Scrap of Paper" - World War I Document Archive (byu.edu))

The German Government did not comply with the ultimatum, and King George V declared Britain at war with Germany that night.

So here is the origin of the term 'scrap of paper' - taken up and broadcasted by British propaganda as a derisive German reference to the Treaty of London and hence Belgian neutrality.

Having stressed how alien the motivation behind our poster of the Highlander is, we see a familiar technique in the caption 'A Wee "Scrap o' Paper" is Britain's Bond' - it is as if the Scottish soldier is saying it - 'A Wee "Scrap o' Paper"' as opposed to 'A Little "Scrap of Paper"', which would be the Standard English way of putting it. A regional accent and vocabulary are intended to make the statement seem more "authentic" and therefore more convincing. One hears this technique endlessly in modern advertising: something will be proposed or recommended in a Geordie (North-Eastern), Scouse (Liverpool), Yorkshire or other regional accent to make the recommendation somehow more "genuine" because it's coming from a "real person". It's all complete nonsense of course: every single element of the given advertisement is finely tuned for maximum persuasive value; as here on our poster of the Highlander.

Here is another poster on the "scrap of paper" theme:

December, 1914. PRC no. 15

Whatever my misgivings about fighting to maintain the honour and glory of the British Empire, either as me now or as an imaginary potential recruit in 1914, the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee must have felt it was a good line to take because they produced another poster on the same theme (apologies for the poor quality reproduction, it was the best I could find): 

by Lawson wood. 1914. PRC no.18.

The caption is 'A Chip Off the Old Block'.

Here are more posters on the theme of Empire:

PRC no.68

by Arthur Wardle. March, 1915. PRC no.58

Another version of this poster makes who 'The Overseas States' are explicit.

As well as the ancient indigenous cultures of Australia, Canada and New Zealand, the absurdity of calling civilisations as old as those of the Indian subcontinent 'a young lion' is jarring to a modern eye.

Here is another poster on the theme of the invasion of Belgium, focusing on real and alleged atrocities committed by the German Army there:

December, 1914. PRC no. 19

Conscription was introduced in Britain in early 1916, starting on March 2nd, so there was no longer a need for posters urging men to enlist. Here is a poster announcing the Military Service Act:

The following posters were not produced by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, but turned up during my research and are worth seeing. The first is from Ireland, it was produced in Dublin in July, 1915:

German soldiers are bursting in through the door: the man has not just his wife but also his baby and aged father to protect - or has failed to protect them by not joining up.

This next is from the USA in 1917:

by H. R. Hopps. Note 'Kultur' written on the club.

To finish with, a British recruiting poster from an earlier era - a really remarkable document.

I have been unable to establish which King George is referred to here, that is the date of the poster. My guess from the diction is Regency. But what diction ! Read it aloud. This is the patter of a recruiting sergeant transcribed. The typesetting emphasises the central message: 'Young Heroes' - 'Marines' - 'Prize Money'. As typical of its own time as it is, the message here resembles modern advertising in that the prospect of prize money is alluring, but if you look more carefully, nothing definite is promised: "Remember these Times may return, it is impossible to say how soon." Join the Royal Marines and you might get enough 

PRIZE MONEY

to set you and your family up for life: it's happened (once) before: who knows what might happen ? you never know !

*Mike Boddington informs me that the interview with Tim O’Brien is in Ken Burns’ ‘Vietnam’ series, & it is reproduced in his ‘Vietnam: An Intimate History’ book, p.319

** My brother JP identified our Highlander as a member of the Black Watch – source: National Army Museum.

Trump's Victory

It's a familiar feeling now, but still a bad one. One goes to bed with the commentators, the polls and the markets all calling it one way, as they have been doing for months, generating a very definite expectation: by the time one wakes up, the outcome is the opposite. This applies in sequence to our General Election in 2015, the Brexit vote and now Trump. At least in the General Election we had the ugly surprise of the BBC's exit poll calling it as a Tory victory as a warning: but it was a surprise, very much so.

As to Trump's victory - who among world politicians is excited today ? Who is happy ? Vladimir Putin, Geert Wilders and Marine le Pen.

Labour: Jeremy Corbyn versus Owen Smith

Jeremy Corbyn

Owen Smith

Is Owen Smith the person to save the Labour Party ? He might be: he could give Labour what it needs above all - time in which to start sorting itself out, to recover.

On 28th June, Labour MPs voted 172-40 that they had no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn as leader: the fact that he remained and remains as leader despite this is unprecedented and morally incomprehensible. I say morally to compare the situation to that of the Brexit vote. Neither the UK Government nor the House of Commons nor Parliament as a whole are bound by the result of the EU referendum legally or technically. The referendum is purely advisory. The House of Commons is sovereign, it can do what it likes. (A curious aspect of the referendum is that the electorate insisted on giving back full power to the House of Commons, power the House didn't want since it has a majority for Remain at the moment.) In fact though the referendum result is absolutely binding in a moral and political sense.

Similarly, a no confidence motion of that size ought to have caused Jeremy Corbyn to resign by all usual expectation in party politics as it has been practiced in the UK hitherto. As an example, consider Mrs Thatcher's resignation in 1990. Mrs Thatcher it need hardly be said was a figure of vastly more political weight and significance than Jeremy Corbyn. When she was challenged for the leadership by Michael Heseltine, she won the first ballot but not by enough to win outright and prevent a second ballot. The voting rules were complicated. There were 372 Tory MPs. She had to secure a 15% lead over her challenger in the first ballot to prevent a second ballot. The results were 204 to her versus 152 for Heseltine with 16 abstentions. In percentages this was 54.8% for her versus 40.9% for Heseltine: thus she was just short of winning outright. Her first response was to fight on. However, senior colleagues persuaded her she couldn't win the next round and so she resigned. She became very bitter about this as time went on: she famously said regarding that advice from her subordinates "It was treachery - with a smile on its face." A more disinterested observer might say that, in the cycle of politics, she was pulled down as she had pulled Ted Heath down in 1975. The point here is that Mrs Thatcher resigned after she had actually won the first vote, but not by enough to win entirely. Her parliamentary colleagues regarded that first round as in effect a vote of confidence. The contrast with Jeremy Corbyn's response to losing the confidence of more than 80% of his MPs is astounding.

The reply of Corbyn and the group around him to the no-confidence vote is that he has an overwhelming mandate from the leadership election in 2015, and this is true. He won among all categories of voters as you can see here in the results on the Labour Party's website: http://www.labour.org.uk/blog/entry/results-of-the-labour-leadership-and-deputy-leadership-election
The night before the no-confidence vote, 27th June, as the Parliamentary Labour Party were meeting to decide whether to have the vote, Momentum held a rally outside the Houses of Parliament. John McDonnell addressed the rally and said the following:

"The protests will be peaceful, but the reason the protests are taking place is because we will not allow the democracy of our movement to be subverted by a handful of MPs who refuse to accept Jeremy's mandate."°

Granted this was said the night before the actual vote, but 80% is hardly a handful, and he must think the principle still applies since he and the Corbyn group continue to fight to retain the leadership.

How does Corbyn manage to continue in the face of such hostility and opprobrium from his colleagues ? Partly, he is used to being beleaguered, his entire experience of politics has been in that position: the more your opponents attack you, the more evidence it is of your own righteousness. Partly, he has achieved almost magically and certainly unexpectedly a position in the Labour Party that his group have been dreaming of since at least when he was involved in Tony Benn's campaign for deputy leader of the Labour Party in 1981. Newsnight unearthed some great footage from that time:

Thanks to Ed Miliband's new rules for the Labour leadership election - of which more later - and nominations from colleagues who neither agreed with him or thought he stood a chance "so that the Left will be represented in the leadership debate", Corbyn leapfrogged even Benn's ambitious goal and became leader. This outcome would have seemed extremely unlikely at the start of the contest. Having got the leadership, Corbyn and his group will go to almost any length not to lose it. There is also the consolation of bathing in his supporters' adoration at rallies across the country during this leadership campaign.

I think the anti-Corbyn Labour MPs are under few illusions as to Owen Smith's wonderfulness. They have to use the means to hand. They face the same set of choices as Julius Caesar when he crossed the Rubicon in January 49 BCE. The context of this decisive move was a crisis in a sustained dispute Caesar was having with his enemies in the Senate. As long as he retained his command in Gaul, he was immune from prosecution: being Consul also had this status. Therefore Caesar wanted to become Consul without any interval from laying down his command: conversely his enemies wanted just such an interval so that they could attack him through the courts: they wanted to prosecute him for what they regarded as illegalities committed while he was Consul ten years earlier. In late 50, Caesar's enemies in the Senate finally got that body to insist that he lay down his command while his great rival and former partner Pompey retained his: Pompey was now allied with the group in the Senate who were determined to preserve the Republic and regarded Caesar and his ambition as fundamentally inimical to it. Caesar now had two choices with three possible outcomes. His first choice was to do nothing, to acquiesce, to obey the Senate: then he would inevitably be destroyed. His second choice was to fight, that is to invade Rome illegally. If he lost the civil war which would definitely follow, again he would be destroyed. But he also might win that war, in which case he won all. From his own point of view, his eventual choice was obvious, and he took it: he invaded. The Rubicon was the border between Caesar's province of Cisalpine Gaul and Italy as the Romans understood it. By crossing it with troops Caesar was committing an irreversible act of insubordination and defiance against the Roman state. Given Caesar's character - which they knew far better than we do - his enemies must have known he would fight, and therefore they must have either wanted a war which presumably they expected to win, led by Pompey, or at least been prepared to accept one.

Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE)

Gnaeus Pompeius (106-48 BCE)

The anti-Corbyn MPs are in a similar position to Caesar in January 49. They can do nothing, acquiesce, leave Corbyn in place, in which case they will probably go down to a disastrous defeat in the next General Election whenever it is and many of them will lost their seats. There is the possibility also that before or after that General Election many MPs could face deselection by hostile constituency Labour parties (CLPs) dominated by Corbyn supporters. (Some Labour MPs also face reselection when their constituencies merge or disappear when the current boundary review for parliamentary constituencies reports its final proposals in 2018. Fifty seats in the House of Commons are due to be abolished, lowering the total from 650 to 600.) If the anti-Corbyn Labour MPs challenge him and lose, all of these consequences still obtain. But in challenging him, the possibility exists - however remote - of removing him and thus perhaps making the outcome of a General Election less bad, and reducing the threat from Corbyn supporters in their CLPs. The boundary changes will take place regardless. As I said above, I don't think many of the MPs think Owen Smith is the answer to all their problems. But the key point for them about the election of Smith is it would buy time in which who knows what might happen. They are fighting to create the space for the Micawber option, to see what turns up, and in their difficult situation this is an entirely reasonable approach, indeed the only one. It's not capitalism in this case but the Labour Party that really might collapse from its internal contradictions.

I think the memory of sticking with Ed Miliband in spite of their misgivings and then the defeat in 2015 has also hardened many Labour MPs' attitude now. Similarly, the threat as it seemed at the time they made their move of Theresa May calling an early General Election. That threat seems to have receded at the time of writing, but we don't really know when it will take place, it could still be soon. Finally, many of the MPs as committed Remainers were fed up at what they regarded as Corbyn's lacklustre and half-hearted performance during the EU Referendum campaign.

Speaking of Ed Miliband, we can see clearly now how utterly disastrous his leadership was. It culminated as we have already seen in the election defeat of 2015. He also instituted the leadership election system under which Corbyn got elected and is almost impossible to remove. The intent of this system's promoters was that if you widen the franchise, you would inevitably get more centrist victors. You can see this argument in full in this piece from March 2014 by John Rentoul, one of the few people who really is a Blairite: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/ed-miliband-s-labour-party-reforms-are-good-news-for-all-9162681.html *. Reading it now in the light of events is a striking witness of just how wrong someone can be.

To some of Corbyn's supporters - though they wouldn't put it like this - it is as if his very uselessness at modern politics is the clearest guarantee of his authenticity: he is not 'spun'. And isn't Corbyn the most unlikely focus of a personality cult ? Not even his most crazed worshipper could honestly call his colourless and Pooterish personality charismatic. Here he is on 12 July welcoming his automatic inclusion on the ballot paper for the leadership election:

Jeremy Corbyn resembles Tony Blair in this respect: he doesn't care what short or long-term damage he does to the Labour Party as long as he and his faction come out on top.




°From Steve Richards' 'The Corbyn Story' on Radio4, episode 3.
*I picked up this article from Owen Jones on Twitter.