Your Country Needs You

by James Taylor

  Although Kitchener enjoyed phenomenal popularity during his lifetime and after his death, with his portrait painted and sculpted by fine artists, and his features adorning a wide range of wartime memorabilia that included matchboxes and matchcovers, tins and toys (including a Kitchener doll), he did have his detractors. Military historian Peter Simkins revealed some of the negative aspects of his character: ‘Although his impressive list of achievements had made him a national hero, Kitchener had a number of serious weaknesses which grew more pronounced at his career prospered. His intolerance of interference and opposition, his seemingly boundless capacity for hard work and his constitutional inability to delegate responsibility all encouraged him to disregard normal procedures and to act as his own chief of staff and military secretary.’

  Winston Churchill wrote: ‘[Kitchener] treated all men like machines, from the private soldier whose salute he disdained, to the superior officers he rigidly controlled… The stern and unpitying spirit of the Commander was communicated to the troops, and the victories which marked the progress of the River War were accompanied by acts of barbarity not always justified even by the harsh custom of savage conflicts or the fierce and treacherous nature of the Dervish.’10

  The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg described Kitchener as ‘a harsh, ruthless, implacable soldier, a skilful military organizer; a faithful servant of the British Empire across the continents – from Africa, to Australia, to India’. George Warrington Steevens, the journalist and war correspondent for the Daily Mail whose accounts of Kitchener’s exploits helped to make him famous, believed Kitchener to be ‘The Man Who Has Made Himself a Machine’.

  Indeed Kitchener was seen by some as being a distant and stern figure, but at the same time he was also widely admired as a tough man needed for tough times, and many thought he was the right man for the job. In fact, according to some sources, if the story is to be believed, it has been claimed that initially he had no desire to take up the position of Secretary of State for War. He was persuaded, in part, by a public appeal launched in the national newspapers, notably The Times, which on 3rd August 1914 published an article urging the Prime Minster, Lord Asquith, to offer the position as Secretary of War to Kitchener, the outgoing governor of Egypt.

  The campaigns in The Times continued and on 5th August the paper launched a full-scale attack against Kitchener’s main rival, Richard Haldane, the Lord Chancellor. The writer of this attack was Eton- and Sandhurst-educated war correspondent Lieutenant Colonel Charles à Court Repington, who had served with Kitchener during the Sudan campaign. On the evening of 5th August, no doubt influenced by popular opinion and pressure from the national press, the Prime Minister offered Kitchener the position. However, Kitchener would ultimately fail to win over the trust of all his Cabinet colleagues.

  It is known that later in the war some politicians disliked Kitchener for misjudging the amount and type of ammunition needed by the military. Perhaps, in part, the shortage of shells helps to explain the scathing comment attributed to Lady Asquith, the wife of the Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith. She claimed he was ‘A poor general, but a wonderful poster’. Later, she assigned this quote to her daughter. Kitchener has also been described as ‘a good poster and poor administrator’.

  Lady Asquith was not the first to describe Kitchener in this manner – as Hiley has observed, that particular honour falls to Sir Arthur Markham, Liberal MP for Mansfield. It was recorded by Hansard (House of Commons Debates, 31 May 1916, volume 82, column 2807) that Sir Arthur Markham made an attack on Kitchener, including the statement: ‘Lord Kitchener, we all know, is a great poster, and has been very successful as a poster, but what happened with regard to recruiting?’ Both Markham and Lady Asquith were almost certainly referring to the PRC ‘Lord Kitchener’ poster (as opposed to the Leete design) as this was known through the official PRC records to have been the most popular recruitment poster of the war.

  ‘Carry On!’ photo-card (NH)

  David Lloyd George, who had replaced Asquith as Prime Minister in December 1916, unfairly endorsed this view. Kitchener accurately predicted, against popular political opinion, that the war would be a long one of at least three years needing millions of men, and when he was in office he started planning immediately to raise the necessary men to fight it. Kitchener’s popularity was such that when Alfred Harmsworth, the press baron better known as Lord Northcliffe, a pioneer of tabloid journalism who owned both The Times and the Daily Mail, dared to criticise him in the pages of the Mail, it led to copies being burnt in the London Stock Exchange.

  Kitchener’s eyes also attracted critical and public attention. Once seen, they left a lasting impression. A contemporary journalist wrote that ‘their colour is quite beautiful – as deep and as clear a blue as the sea, in its most azure moments – and they look out at the world, with the perfect directness of a man who sees straight to his end’. Another journalist observed: ‘About the eyes of Kitchener it may be said without offence that the terror they inspire is heightened by a squint which has tended to grow more pronounced with age. The eyes are blue, penetrating, and full of judgment; without their irregularity, they would be difficult eyes to face, but with this irregularity they fill certain men with a veritable paralysis of terror.’

  Kitchener’s own end was a tragic one and it added greatly to the myths that surrounded him. In June 1916, sailing on a diplomatic mission to Russia aboard HMS Hampshire, his ship hit a mine and sank west of the Orkney Islands. Kitchener, his staff and almost all the crew perished. His body was never recovered. There was national mourning, and later a memorial was created and placed in All Souls’ Chapel at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

  Several posters and photo-cards were produced after his death – his reputation and image still being deemed of valuable assistance to encourage recruitment and bolster morale. One such photo-card of 1916, held in the private collection of Hiley, featured a fairly accurate photographic recreation of Leete’s cover design for London Opinion for 5th September 1914. It was created by the Rotary Photo Company and the card carried the slogan and strapline ‘Carry On! By kind permission of “London Opinion” – The Late Earl Kitchener, War Minister, “Who Being Dead Yet Speaketh”.’

  The genesis of Leete’s design

  A close examination of the ‘Carry On!’ photo-card under magnification reveals that on Kitchener’s collar, just below his thumb, there is a name in white: ‘Bassano’. Alexander Bassano (1829–1913) was the leading high society portrait photographer of the Victorian era. The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London holds a large collection of material from his company dating from the 1870s to the 1940s, of which 2,708 portraits are directly attributable to Alexander Bassano. Between 1876 and 1921, his studio was based at 25, Old Bond Street, London, and it was almost certainly here that he photographed Kitchener. This studio was large enough to accommodate an eighty-foot panoramic background scene mounted on rollers, which provided a variety of outdoor scenes or court backgrounds. Bassano retired from work at the studio in around 1903, although the firm continued and acquired other companies until it closed down in 1974.11

  Bassano personally photographed many members of the British and European royal families, including Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, Queen Mary and Alfonso XII (King of Spain), along with aristocrats, the rich and the famous, as well as politicians such as William Ewart Gladstone. He produced more than one hundred portraits of Kitchener, ranging from full-lengths in military uniform to informal head-and-shoulder shots. Several of these photographs were created as cabinet cards, a larger version of the earlier carte de visite popular in the 1870s.

  One such cabinet card of 1885 from the NPG collections features a close-up view of Kitchener’s head and part of his shoulders. This type of view was more unusual than the standard shots taken at a distance and has been considered as a possible source for Alfred Leete’s portrait head design. In terms of actual image size, this photograph measures only 5⅝ x 4 inches
(NPG reference: x127983).

  Two recruitment poster cigarette cards (NH)

  However, there are several other Bassano photographs that are also potential matches, including a cabinet card dated 1895 (NPG reference: x127982) and also a half-plate glass negative dating from 1900 (NPG reference: x96369). The latter is arguably the closest match to Leete’s cartoon cover design and was almost certainly the primary source for the PRC’s LORD KITCHENER poster produced in 1915. The ‘YOU Are The Man I Want’ picture postcard also derived from the Bassano half-plate negative x96369, and the photographic image also appeared on Wills cigarette cards. In addition, the Rotary Photo Company produced a postcard of Lord Kitchener during his lifetime, which derived from the same photographic source. Entitled ‘Kitchener’s Counsel to Soldiers’, it concluded with the words ‘Do Your Duty Bravely. Fear God. Honour The King’.

  All of these cards, Leete’s cartoon and the associated posters, portrayed a much younger looking and fuller-faced Kitchener than was actually the case in the early period of the war. To that end, these images acted as propaganda.

  The Imperial War Museum has claimed that one of its photographs of Kitchener (IWM reference: Q56739) is the primary source referenced by Leete. However, although their portrait portrays Kitchener wearing his hat (which Leete could have seen in many other photographs to incorporate into his artwork), the thinner features and wearied expression do not correlate closely to the London Opinion cartoon cover or the BRITONS – WANTS YOU poster. The IWM website does not reveal a photographer for the image Q56739, but it does appear in the Lord Kitchener Memorial Book credited to the British photographers Elliott and Fry and was described as ‘one of the latest portraits of Lord Kitchener’ – and therefore dates from late in 1915, or even the early months of 1916.

  It is known that Kitchener visited Bassano’s studio several times, as there are photographs dating from 1888, 1895, 1900 and the last known in 1910. Many other photographers took his portrait and they included: Otto Schoefft, who produced photographic cabinet cards of him in the mid-1880s, G. Lekegian and Co. in 1898, as well as Duffus Bros. in 1901. However, their photos are not such close matches to Leete’s design.

  Photograph showing ‘I Say! U Try’ poster (NH)

  Leete had copied one or more of Bassano’s photographs, and perhaps some others too, in order to produce his design featuring Kitchener. For a cartoonist and commercial illustrator working at that time, this activity was far from unusual, and in a wartime situation many would have regarded it as morally justifiable. This was a period before the widespread introduction of intellectual property rights and concomitant lawyers. Cartoonists and commercial illustrators were for the most part at liberty to use anything, within the accepted realms of decency. Hiley’s photo-card of 1916 bearing the name Bassano was not only cashing in on the death of a popular hero in an acceptable patriotic manner, but acknowledging in a subtle way, perhaps unwittingly, that Leete had borrowed their photograph(s) to create his own design.

  Hiley has shown that Leete’s novel format of portraying Kitchener with outstretched arm and pointing finger actually derived from two significant commercial sources (although, of course, there is a substantial ‘back catalogue’ of art-historical images that depict prominent figures with outstretched arms and pointing fingers – Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel ceiling in Rome, painted between 1508 and 1512, immediately springs to mind, and is without question a familiar image around the world).

  One of the commercial sources can be traced to an advertisement in poster form featured in Howard Bridgewater’s Advertising or the Art of Making Known A Simple Exposition of The Principles of Advertising, published by Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, London, in 1910. However, rather than recruiting soldiers, the man in the photograph, James Motherwell, was promoting the sale of Godfrey Phillips & Sons B.D.V. Pure Virginia Cigarettes.12

  In W.E.D. Allen’s history of the family firm of printers, there was a revealing reference to Motherwell: ‘[A] fine, good-looking man from Belfast who had a long and faithful service with the firm. His face became famous on a nationwide scale. Allens, who did much commercial as well as theatrical work, produced a poster for a famous firm of cigarettes – “B.D.V.” It showed a packet of cigarettes and a very good-looking dark man whose eyes were dead centre of the poster and which consequently followed the observer everywhere as did his pointing finger. That man was James Motherwell.’

  The second commercial source identified by Hiley, and one that David Allen and Sons may well have drawn upon for their tobacco campaign, is featured on a lantern slide of 1903. The slide depicts a boy in, or near, Southampton, standing beside a wall predominantly pasted with various letterpress posters. One pictorial poster stands out as it depicts a man with captivating gaze and accusing finger with the slogan ‘I Say! U Try’, promoting the company name Antelope Furnishing Stores. From such visual evidence it is clear that this promotional format was already familiar in parts of Britain through the medium of commercial advertising at least ten years before the start of World War I.

  Further sources for the novel format include various Victorian and Edwardian advertisements and theatrical poster designs that use images of hands with pointing fingers, albeit usually detached from a human body.

  A striking image and concise slogan

  The whereabouts of the records indicating exactly how many of Leete’s posters were printed and precisely where they were distributed have not been located, if indeed they were ever collated. In 1954, London Opinion was acquired by Men Only magazine, known for its robust adult humour, and because of dwindling sales in April of that year, it was promptly shut down. It is likely that the print run for the London Opinion BRITONS – WANTS YOU poster was in the low thousands – around 5,000, or less – and a comparable figure is also likely for the David Allen and Sons version.13

  Only four PRC posters exceeded 100,000. In ascending order of popularity they were: WE’RE BOTH NEEDED TO SERVE THE GUNS! FILL UP THE RANKS! PILE UP THE MUNITIONS! (101,000); TAKE UP THE SWORD OF JUSTICE (105,000); REMEMBER BELGIUM (140,000) and LORD KITCHENER (145,000).14 As discussed earlier, this final poster was not Leete’s design, but the official poster that did not feature the famous pointing finger.

  If posters featuring Leete’s Kitchener design issued by London Opinion, or for that matter the David Allen and Sons variant, were really so popular and attracted the widespread attention that some writers have claimed, then surely far more copies would have survived today and be found in private and public collections? Britain’s national collection of posters is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, but it does not hold any copies of Leete’s Kitchener designs in poster form. In fact, at the time of writing, the only public collection in England that holds authentic examples is the Imperial War Museum: one London Opinion poster and one of the David Allen and Sons variant.

  Recruitment poster PRC 85 (Priv.)

  The scarcity of Leete’s recruitment posters is also borne out by auction house records. Patrick Bogue, the director of Onslow Auctions, which specialises in posters, has described the BRITONS – WANTS YOU poster as ‘very rare… we have never sold it’, and ‘the David Allen version is rare too’. The Poster Department of Christie’s, South Kensington, could trace no historic or current sales records of Leete’s Kitchener design.

  A recent examination of Imperial War Museum records by Richard Slocombe, the IWM’s Senior Curator of Art, has shown that the BRITONS – WANTS YOU poster was not donated to the museum by Leete, but was almost certainly the one discovered in March 1951 by Lt-Col. F. Hervey in the cellars of the London Central Recruiting Depot in Great Scotland Yard. For some inexplicable reason the IWM records are not accurate for this period and so it is not possible to reveal a precise date for when the poster was formally acquired for the collections, however, it is likely to have been in the 1950s. The story of the poster’s discovery featured in the News Chronicle. Slocombe recounted: ‘Bradley [the former curator who by this time
was Director-General of the IWM] was desperate to see the poster after the story broke. His desperation to see the poster suggests that we did not have our copy by this time, otherwise why the great urgency to see it?’

  Robert Opie, the consumer historian and man behind the private Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising in Notting Hill, London, believes he owns a BRITONS – WANTS YOU poster. It has featured on the contents page (almost full-page) in his lavishly illustrated compilation, 1910s Scrapbook: The Decade of the Great War (Pi Global Publishing, 2000). By reproducing his poster on such a large scale (the publication measures around 36 x 25 cm), the prominence of this recruitment poster has been overstated in relation to the other examples featured, notably the PRC’s LORD KITCHENER design, which is also illustrated although at a considerably smaller size. His poster is not on display and requests to examine the item to check its authenticity were turned down on the grounds that it was too fragile to be moved. However, examination of the detailed photographs point positively towards the opinion that this is indeed an authentic poster.

  The Australian War Memorial (AWM) also claims to hold a rare example of Alfred Leete’s BRITONS – WANTS YOU poster (AWM reference: ARTV04085, date made: c.1914–1916). However, when the author examined it in August 2012, it turned out to be a later reproduction. It is inscribed with the details of a second printer and also a publisher – ‘The Curwen Press, Ltd. [Printer], Her Majesty’s Stationery Office [Publisher]’ – along with the numeric details ‘Dmd. 386043/10/68’. The poster was almost certainly printed in 1968 for sale in various retail outlets to benefit the IWM. The price paid by the AWM for its ‘rare period poster’ was not revealed.