The poster design features a bright red background, and the slogan “ KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON” is printed down the majority of the page in a bold, sans serif typeface. holds a trademark for this exact slogan, the slogan and graphic style have been countlessly replicated, parodied and imitated since the original design’s resurgence in popularity. This image has become so ubiquitous, in fact, that you have probably already seen it printed somewhere on something today. This design only became an icon of popular culture more recently, when the design was rediscovered, and redistributed on a worldwide scale in the early 2000’s. After 1945, all of the prints in storage were destroyed to make pulp (for new paper) and very few of these original prints remain. The poster was printed in a run of 2.5 million copies, but the government deferred them to storage for use after a potential air raid, and they were never actually hung or distributed. Enter Mark Coop, who tried to register the slogan as a trademark in the UK, failed, and then succeeded in gaining an EU trademark.“KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON” was a poster design originally created in 1939 as a series of three motivational posters from the British Government’s Ministry of Information, in order to boost public morale during WWII. But if I felt superior by having a ‘Carry on’-free zone, I learnt of another little drama that changed everything. I found it particularly galling that most of the ‘Keep calm’ stuff that occupies our lives is now made in China, an insidious invasion we’ve lacked the courage to resist. The poster in the kitchen came down and I quietly boycotted all objects that alluded to it (although if a mug with ‘Work hard and call home’ had appeared, I might have relented). Slowly but surely, the all pervasiveness of the slogan began to get on my nerves. * Subscribe to Country Life and save £1 per week I confess that I bought one for my son when he left for university-‘ Work hard and be nice to people’-but that was back when the slogan still evoked the courage of a people who brewed tea as bombs fell. Almost overnight, T-shirts, coffee mugs, cufflinks, doormats, tea towels, biscuit tins, dog beds and nappy sacs were shouting ‘Keep calm and carry on’. Call it the morphic resonance of merchandising. Who wouldn’t be moved by the elegant understatement of the rallying warcry, the icon of the crown, the stiff upper-lipiness and Dad’s Army innocence, simplicity and goodness of the message?Īnd then something happened. Part of its beauty was the knowledge that the original was produced by the Ministry of Information in 1939, and was intended to go up all across the land within 24 hours if Britain was invaded. When I saw a canvas bag with the slogan printed on it, I bought it for friends celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. I framed copies to sell in my shop, sent rolled-up copies to friends in America and hung one in my kitchen. In 2001, the owners found an original poster in their attic, framed it, hung it by the till, and, after checking with the Imperial War Museum that it was out of copyright, began reproducing it for their customers, who also loved it. The poster became my mantra and I ordered a dozen at a time from Barter Books, the secondhand bookshop in Northumberland. What wise advice: remain calm as you rush out to Waitrose/the dentist/the vet/the train station/ the Farm Watch meeting carry on even though it’s the third trip of the day to fetch folks who couldn’t manage to take the same train, you’ve seen the vet a dozen times about the dog’s ear infections (at £50 a visit) and Farm Watch hasn’t deterred the vandals who dumped two dozen rimless tyres on the sugar-beet pad. When I first saw the poster ‘Keep calm and carry on’ on the ancient oak door of Blo’ Norton Hall, I nearly swooned at the genius of it.
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