My Google Alert for ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ is going quite bonkers over the last few weeks (see example, and I post some to a Facebook page), and I’ve also seen comparisons of the current coronavirus crisis with the Second World War, and the need for ‘the Blitz spirit’ and the need to be ‘all in it together’, so I thought I’d do an overdue task and re-upload my PhD to my website.
The PhD was passed (without corrections) in 2004 by Lord Asa Briggs and Dr Adrian Briggs.
You can download my entire PhD thesis in PDF format from the British Library Ethos service, including images, etc. but I am putting my text available on my website for those who are interested.
You can find some of the images on Wikimedia Commons, check the IWM collections, or National Archives ‘Art of War’ (for which I wrote most of the content).
- Abstract, contents, acknowledgements, abbreviations
- Introduction
- CHAPTER 1: Methods and Sources
- CHAPTER 2: Placing the British Experience of the Propaganda Poster in Context
- CHAPTER 3: Commissioning, Design & Distribution, with a particular focus on the MOI and the first posters produced. *This is where Keep Calm and Carry On can be found.
- CHAPTER 4: Case Study: Representations of ‘Your Britain’, Urban and Rural
- CHAPTER 5: Case Study: Industrial Posters
- CHAPTER 6: Case Study: The ‘Enemy Within’
- CHAPTER 7: Case Study: The ‘Problem’ of Venereal Disease in Wartime
- Conclusion
The original plan was to turn this into a book, but instead, some papers are published or in development, and I wrote Keep Calm and Carry On: The Truth Behind the Poster for the Imperial War Museum in 2017.