Lord Kitchener Wants You was a 1914 advertisement by Alfred Leete which was
developed into a recruitment poster. It depicted Lord Kitchener, the British
Secretary of State for War, above the words "WANTS YOU". Kitchener, wearing
the cap of a British Field Marshal, stares and points at the viewer calling
them to enlist in the British Army against the Central Powers. The image is
considered one of the most iconic and enduring images of World War I. A hugely
influential image and slogan, it has also inspired imitations in other
countries, from the United States to the Soviet Union.
Development Prior to the institution of conscription
in 1916, the United Kingdom relied upon volunteers for military service. Until
the outbreak of the First World War, recruiting posters had not been used in
Britain on a regular basis since the Napoleonic Wars. UK government
advertisements for contract work were handled by His Majesty's Stationery
Office, who passed this task onto the publishers of R. F. White & Sons in
order to avoid paying the government rate to newspaper publishers. As war
loomed in late 1913 the number of advertising contracts expanded to
include other firms. J. E. B. Seely, then the Secretary of State for War,
awarded Sir Hedley Le Bas, Eric Field, and their Caxton Advertising Agency a
contract to advertise for recruits in the major UK newspapers. Eric Field
designed a prototype full-page advertisement with the Coat of Arms of
King George V and the phrase "Your King and Country Need You." Britain declared
war on the German Empire on 4 August 1914 and the first run of the full-page
ran the next day in those newspapers owned by Lord Northcliffe.
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom H. H. Asquith had appointed Kitchener as
Secretary of State for War. Kitchener was the first currently serving soldier
to hold the post and was given the task of recruiting a large army to fight
Germany. Unlike some of his contemporaries who expected a short
conflict, Kitchener foresaw a much longer war requiring hundreds of
thousands of enlistees. According to Gary S. Messinger, Kitchener reacted
well to Field's advertisement although insisting "that the ads should all end
with 'God Save the King' and that they should not be changed from the original
text, except to say 'Lord Kitchener needs YOU.'" In the following months Le
Bas formed an advisory committee of ad men to develop further newspaper
recruiting advertisements, most of which ran vertically 11 inches, two columns
wide. Alfred Leete, one Caxton's illustrators,
designed the now-famous image as a cover illustration for the 5 September 1914
issue of London Opinion, a popular weekly magazine, taking cues from
Field's earlier recruiting advertisement. At the time, the magazine
had a circulation of 300,000. In response to requests for reproductions,
the magazine offered postcard-sized copies for sale. The Parliamentary
Recruiting Committee obtained permission to use the design in poster form. A
similar poster used the words "YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU".
Kitchener, a "figure of absolute will and power, an emblem of British
masculinity", was a natural subject for Leete's artwork as his name was directly
attached to the recruiting efforts and the newly-forming Kitchener's Army. Le
Bas of Caxton Advertising chose Kitchener for the advertisement because
Kitchener was "the only soldier with a great war name, won in the field, within
the memory of the thousands of men the country wanted." Kitchener made his name
in the Sudan Campaign, avenging the death of General Gordon with brutality
and efficiency. He became a hero of "New Imperialism" alongside other widely
regarded figures in Britain like Field Marshal Wolseley and Field Marshal
Roberts. Kitchener's appearance including his bushy mustache and court
dress jacket was reminiscent of romanticized Victorian era styles.
Kitchener, 6 ft 2 in tall and powerfully built, was for many the personification
of military ethos so popular in the present Edwardian era. After the
scorched earth tactics and hard-fought victory of the Second Boer War,
Kitchener represented a return to the military victories of the colonial era.
The fact that Kitchener's name is not used in the poster demonstrates how
easily he was visually recognized. David Lubin opines that the image may be one
of the earliest successful celebrity endorsements as the commercial practice
expanded greatly in the 1920s. Keith Surridge posits that Kitchener's
features evoked the harsh, feared militarism of the Germans which bode
well for British fortune in the war. Kitchener would not see the end of the
war; he died onboard HMS Hampshire in 1916.
Original versions by Alfred Leete Impact
Leete's drawing of Kitchener was the most famous image used in the British
Army recruitment campaign of World War I. It continues to be considered a
masterful piece of wartime propaganda as well as an enduring and iconic image of
the war. Recruitment posters in general have
often been seen as a driving force helping to bring more than a million men
into the Army. September 1914, coincident with publication of Leete's
image, saw the highest number of volunteers enlisted. The Times recorded
the scene in London on 3 January 1915; "Posters appealing to recruits are to be
seen on every hoarding, in most windows, in omnibuses, tramcars and commercial
vans. The great base of Nelson's Column is covered with them. Their number and
variety are remarkable. Everywhere Lord Kitchener sternly points a monstrously
big finger, exclaiming 'I Want You'". One contemporaneous publication decried
the use of advertising methods to enlist soldiers: "the cold, basilisk eye of a
gaudily-lithographed Kitchener rivets itself upon the possible recruit and the
outstretched finger of the British Minister of War is levelled at him like
some revolver, with the words, 'I want you.' The idea is stolen from the
advertisement of a 5c. American cigar." Although it became one of the most
famous posters in history, its widespread circulation did not halt the
decline in recruiting. The use of Kitchener's image for
recruiting posters was so widespread that Lady Asquith referred to the Field
Marshal simply as "the Poster." The placement of the Kitchener posters
including Alfred Leete's design has been examined and questioned following an
Imperial War Museum publication in 1997. The War Museum suggested that the poster
itself was a "non event" and was made popular by postwar advertising by the
war museum, perhaps conflating Leete's design with the so-called "30-word"
poster, an official product from the Parliamentary Recruitment Committee. The
30-word design was the most popular recruitment poster at the time having
been printed ten times the volume of Leete's image. Leete's image has been
praised for being more arresting while his accompanying text is also far less
verbose. The official wording, taken from a Kitchener speech, may seem more
fitting for a character in a Henry James novel. The 30-word recruiting poster was
developed as Britons' collective hopes of the war being over by Christmas were
dashed in January 1915 and volunteer enlistments fell. A 2013 book researched
by James Taylor counters the popular belief that the Leete design was an
influential recruitment tool during the war. He claims the original artwork was
acquired by the Imperial War Museum in 1917 and catalogued as a poster in
error. Though the image of Kitchener inspired several other poster designs,
Taylor says he can find no evidence in photographs of the time that the Leete
poster was used, although a photograph from 15 December 1914 taken at the
Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway station in Liverpool clearly depicts Leete's
depiction among other recruiting posters.
The effectiveness of the image upon the viewer is attributed to what E. B.
Goldstein has called the 'differential rotation effect.' Because of this
effect, Kitchener's eyes and his foreshortened arm and hand appear to
follow the viewer regardless of the viewer's orientation to the artwork.
Historian Carlo Ginzburg compared Leete's image of Kitchener to similar
images of Christ and Alexander the Great as depicting the viewer's contact with a
powerful figure. Pearl James commented on Ginzburg's analysis agreeing that the
strength of the connotation lies with a clever use of discursive psychology and
that art historical methods better illuminate why this image has such
resonance. The capitalized word "YOU" grabs the reader, bringing them directly
to Kitchener's message. The textual focus on "you" engages the reader about
their own participation in the war. Nicholas Hiley differs in that Leete's
portrayal of Kitchener is less about immediate recruiting statistics but the
myth that has grown around the image, including ironic parodies. Leete's
Kitchener poster caught the attention of a then eleven-year-old George Orwell,
who may have used as it the basis for his description of the "Big Brother"
posters in his novel 1984. In 1997 the British Army created a
recruiting ad re-using Leete's image substituting Kitchener's face with that
of a British Army non-commissioned officer of African descent. Leete's
image of Kitchener is featured on a 2014 £2 coin produced by sculptor John
Bergdahl for the Royal Mint. The coin was the first of a five-year series to
commemorate the centennial of the war. Use of Leete's image of Kitchener has
been criticized by some for its pro-war connotation in light of the human losses
of the First World War and the violence of Kitchener's campaign in Sudan. In
July 2014, one of only four original posters known to exist went to auction
for more than £10,000. The other three originals exist on display in State
Library of Victoria, the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising, and
the Imperial War Museum. Leete's design was also used for a corn maze in the
Skylark Garden Centre in Wimblington to mark the centenary of World War I.
Imitations The image of Lord Kitchener with his
hand pointing directly at the viewer has inspired numerous imitations:
See also Recruitment to the British Army during
the First World War References
= Citations= = Bibliography=
James, Pearl. Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture. University
of Nebraska. ISBN 978-0-8032-2610-4. Messinger, Gary S.. British Propaganda
and the State in the First World War. Manchester University Press. pp.
214–216. ISBN 0-7190-3014-5. Surridge, Keith. "More than a great
poster: Lord Kitchener and the image of the military hero". Historical Research
74: 298. doi:10.1111/1468-2281.00129 – via Wiley Online Library.
Tynan, Jane. British Army Uniform and the First World War: Men in Khaki.
Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-137-31831-2.
Welch, David; Fox, Jo, eds.. Justifying War: Propaganda, Politics and the Modern
Age. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-24627-0. Retrieved 2014-03-04.
Further reading Thatcher, Martyn; Quinn, Anthony. The
Amazing Story of the Kitchener Poster. Funfly Design. ISBN 978-0-9569094-2-8.