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Alfred Leete and Lord Kitchener's Poster
In middle August, 2014, despite comments from many people associated with government that the war would be over in months, Lord Kitchener - a war hero and soldier who was appointed to the civilian post of secretary of war, declared that the emergency could last years and require an army of millions of men - a military force undreamed of before that time. To pull this off the government turned to advertising agencies to replace the normally tone deaf political communications used by the opposing political parties to batter each other in the lead up to elections. In the process London Opinion, a weekly magazine, choose artist Alfred Ambrose Chew Leete (1882–1933) to create a cover graphic for their 5 September edition.
Working rapidly Leete decided that the cover should be a "call to action" directed at each reader, leveraging patriotism and the cult of personal responsibility ascendent in British thinking since the Edwardian age to "make the sale" in terms of recruitment for the Army. Recognizing the popularity of Lord Kitchner and his recognizeable mustache, Leete created the poster to have the secretary of war pointing directly at the reader and making a simple call to action, "your country needs you."
The cover, with minor modifications, soon became a postcard, a poster in several sizes, and was featured in many other magazines, expanding its reach far past the original 300,000 circulation of London Opinion. One amazing result was that while the original cover was a paid advertisement, tens or even hundreds of thousands of further placements were paid for at the expense of the person viewing the artwork. This poster, along with others, was credited by many new enlistees as the primary reason they enrolled for service in 1914.
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