A million “ Your Courage” posters, 600,000 “Freedom Is in Peril” posters and 2.5 million “Keep Calm” posters were printed, but only the first two were ever distributed and posted everywhere from shop windows to outdoor advertising billboards. War was seen as inevitable by then, and the nascent Ministry wanted to have posters printed and ready for wide distribution when the other shoe dropped. Production on all three began in August of 1939. The first slogan printed was “ Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory,” the second “Freedom Is in Peril Defend It with All Your Might,” and the third “Keep Calm and Carry On.” The idea was to convey a message of encouragement from the King himself, a rallying cry to inspire people through the initial shocks and horrors of war on the home front. They settled on three slogans printed in fine type against a single bold color backdrop topped with the only image in the series, the crown of King George VI. Meanwhile, the Home Planning Committee was tasked in April of 1939 with devising poster designs that would be simple, striking and difficult for the already well-developed German propaganda machine to duplicate. Reestablishing an MOI would be tantamount to a government announcement that they expected to go to war again, so the organization was developed in secret in the late 1930s and only officially formed on September 4th, 1939, four days after the German invasion of Poland, one day after Britain declared war on Germany. There wasn’t even a Ministry of Information, in fact, when the posters were first conceived, because the department responsible for propaganda and censorship had been closed at the end of World War I. “Keep Calm and Carry On” was one of three posters designed and printed to rally the population of Britain for war before war was even declared. This is the only known collection of the original 1939 poster whose iconography has become ubiquitous over the past few years both in its original form and in countless parodies. A unique cache of approximately 15 original “Keep Calm and Carry On” World War II propaganda posters were brought in for appraisal to an Antiques Roadshow event at St.
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