Now were I to be picky (which I’m going to be, because it’s fun) there are a couple of holes in this story. The owners framed it, and then were asked about it so much that they reprinted a few copies. Until in 2000 a single copy turned up in a box of books at Barter Books in Alnwick.

This never came, and the poster was eventually pulped and forgotten. But the third – Keep Calm – was held back in the case of invasion. Hundreds of thousands were printed, and the first two were plastered all over the country in their hundreds and thousands as soon as war was declared. They were meant to be messages from the King to his people, and the three slogans were Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution, Will Bring Us Victory, Freedom Is In Peril and, of course, Keep Calm and Carry On. In 1939, with war looming, the Ministry of Information commissioned three posters with the aim of reassuring the British public when the inevitable came.

The backstory, as repeated all over the interweb in very similar terms, goes like this. Most of the copies that are around today, not only on posters but also on everything from soap to golf balls (does the world really need this, I am forced to ask) have in fact been reversioned from the original and thus look slightly different.Īnd if you go and look on eBay (which I wouldn’t actually advise) you can find versions where the type has been bastardised even further from the original, but I don’t want to give these ones the oxygen of publicity. This is actually the original poster, as produced by the Ministry of Information in 1939. Here it is then, exhibit A, Keep Calm and Carry On. But I’ve been delving into the history of World War Two posters recently, and rather to my surprise have discovered that a whole chunk of its history – and to my mind the most interesting part – never gets told. I’ve never written about the Keep Calm and Carry On poster on here until now, mainly because the internet is already thoroughly pock-marked with its image and the story done to death, so I was bored of the whole thing before this blog had even begun (and rather assumed that everyone else was too).

Keep calm and carry on british