Listen to this episode and find out more about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/keepcalm
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, hear a lot from language about its homemade kombucha. Oh, scoby’s an acronym is it? And it’s your yeasty son? Uh huh, uh huh...
Coming up in today’s show is something that’s red and white and annoying all over, in my highly subjective assessment.
On with the show.
Keep calm and carry on.
Keep calm and carry on.
HZ: Maybe you’ve seen it on mugs. On tea towels. On cushions. On phone cases. On Tshirts. On bags. On birthday cards.
Maybe it’s on your wall RIGHT NOW.
The 21st century enthusiasm for ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ can be traced back to a secondhand bookshop in a restored railway station in Alnwick, on the northeast coast of England. Barter Books is owned by Stuart Manley and his wife Mary.
STUART MANLEY: So now we're talking 20 years ago now, in the year 2000. We get lots of books from auctions. And this particular box of books had been hanging around for some time. They were pretty rough-looking books.
HZ: Stuart went through the box; most of the books ended up in the recycling.
STUART MANLEY: But right at the bottom, folded up, was this little poster: Keep Calm and Carry On. And I immediately thought, wow, that's quite something.
HZ: The poster has a red background, with the text in large white capital letters, and a Tudor crown at the top. Allegedly the red-white colour combination was inspired by the cover of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Stuart and Mary framed it, and hung it on the wall of the bookshop beside the counter.
STUART MANLEY: The next thing we knew was that people wanted to buy it. We weren't prepared to sell it. And I suggested making copies but my wife was a bit of a purist about it and said no, it would cheapen the poster. So I actually had some copies made when she was away on holiday. When she saw the sales figures, she relented!
HZ: The reprinted posters were pretty popular with customers at the bookshop - but then a few years later, the posters were featured in a Guardian article.
STUART MANLEY: That's when it went mad. The entire shop staff was devoted to packing posters for the next month, I think about 10,000 in a month. We almost stopped the bookshop just to get the posters away! But that was the start of it: that's when it started going national, international, all over the world. It begat so many things. It's not just the T-shirts and the mugs; there was a Keep Calm book, birthday cards, Christmas cards, there were so many things. Even condoms!
HZ: Wow. Hmm! I'm not sure that's the right message for that moment.
STUART MANLEY: We were not responsible for the condoms.
HZ: Stuart and Mary don’t even get royalties for any of the condoms - someone else trademarked the slogan.
STUART MANLEY: We never owned it. It was crown copyright - it was out of copyright, but we never even attempted to take ownership of it.
HZ: Why didn't you try?
STUART MANLEY: It just seemed wrong to do so. It wasn't ours. You know, we discovered it - sorry, we rediscovered it - but it was never ours.
HZ: So Stuart is not responsible for most of the Keep Calm merch - nor all the variations on the theme.
STUART MANLEY: One or two are actually quite witty. But most of them, frankly, are tiresome.
OWEN HATHERLEY: If I like any, which I don't, I think they're all bad, it's the ones like that that are just total non-sequiturs that just make no sense at all. Where they're just nonsense.
HZ: Anything can happen after the ‘and’.
Keep calm and curry on
Keep calm and party on
Keep calm and kiss on
Keep calm and knit on
Keep calm and craft on
Keep calm and golf on
Keep calm and yoga on
Keep calm and prosecco on
- the ‘on’ is the next part to go -
Keep calm and go shopping
Keep calm and play golf
Keep calm and eat a cupcake
Keep calm and eat a cookie
Keep calm and eat pizza
Keep calm and make a cup of tea
Keep calm and drink coffee
Keep calm and drink wine
Keep calm and drink prosecco
Keep calm and merry Christmas!
Keep calm and don’t forget to be awesome
Keep calm and don’t forget to BCC
Keep calm and dance
Keep calm and love poodles
Keep calm and kill zombies
Keep calm and hug a tree
Keep calm and Gangnam Style
Keep calm and be original - that’s a laugh
Keep calm and be yourself
Keep calm and grow a moustache
Keep calm and stare into the void
- then we lose the ‘and’ -
Keep calm, I’m a Scorpio
Keep calm, I’m a girldad
Keep calm, I’m a good driver
Keep calm, It’s your birthday
Keep calm, I’m an actuary…
Whatever you do, keep calm!
HZ: Some of them don’t even bother with the Keep Calm, or the distinctive design, but when you see a riff on Keep Calm and Carry On, you know it. You just know it.
Now, the 21st century popularity of Keep Calm and Carry On is perhaps surprising: it wasn’t popular when it was first printed in 1939, a few weeks before the declaration of war. In fact, the posters were never even circulated.
OWEN HATHERLEY: The interesting thing with that is that nobody who actually fought in World War 2 could possibly have seen the Keep Calm and Carry On poster. So you have this constant thing of like, "As we did in 1940, let's keep calm and carry on, the famous Blitz slogan of Keep Calm and Carry On." Which just simply would not have featured in any account of the Blitz. Ever.
HZ: Owen Hatherley is the author of books including The Ministry Of Nostalgia, about how the austerity of the past is resold as cute in modern times. As exemplified by a government poster from 1939.
OWEN HATHERLEY: So there were three posters, which were "Freedom is in peril, defend it with all your might" and "Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution will bring us victory." And then there was a third one, which was "Keep calm and carry on". All three are the same, they've got the crown at the top, they've got the same typeface, the way that they're laid out is very, very similar.
HZ: These three posters were designed as part of a ‘Home Publicity’ campaign from the Ministry of Information to reassure the populace in the event of the outbreak of war. Over the summer of 1939, a shortlist of 20 slogans was prepared by a Publicity Planning sub-committee, the Home Secretary Samuel Hoare chose three, of which two were widely circulated around Britain shortly after war broke out: “Freedom is in peril, defend it with all your might." "Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution will bring us victory”. But while as many as 2½ million ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ posters were printed, they were held back until such time as Britain received heavy bombardment or gas attacks, which didn’t materialise in 1939.
OWEN HATHERLEY: The first two were incredibly unpopular.
STUART MANLEY: The first two were actually issued, and they got such a poor reception; there were stinging letters in the Times about how patronizing, how unBritish they were.
OWEN HATHERLEY: People didn't like those posters at all, they found them very, very patronising. They found the "us" and "them" in the poster really annoying. "Your cheerfulness will bring us victory", there was a real kind of like "you" and "us". And the "Freedom is in peril" one, apparently people just didn't know what it meant, because I think people ascribe a kind of political meaning to World War Two that wasn't that obvious at the time. I think at the time a lot of people saw it as being kind of rerun of the First World War, and only really when the concentration camps were liberated did a lot of people realise the magnitude of what they were actually fighting against.
HZ: The campaign was so unpopular that a month after the initial two designs were put up around the country, it was cancelled. The British public never was instructed to Keep Calm and Carry On. And a few months later, nearly all of the posters were pulped.
STUART MANLEY: It's interesting to think what might have happened if they had Keep Calm coming out first, because I think that would have always had resonance.
HZ: It's a bit more punchy as well than the other slogans.
STUART MANLEY: They were a bit clunky, weren't they.
HZ: What do you think about the slogan itself? Does it make you calm?
STUART MANLEY: Well, I've been around it too long, but we recognised just what the effect is. My flip answer to that is: people bought it because it was cheaper than anti-depressants. But it sort of is an anti depressant. And that's why originally, when we had the first rush of orders, they were from doctors' surgeries, schools - all the places where people are working under pressure. It was quite noticeable, people just loved it to sort of give an alternative view to the high pressure they were working under.
HZ: Does being told to keep calm work?
JANE GREGORY: I can think of so many ways why it doesn't work. The whole thing. We don't like being told how to feel anyway, so just being told how to feel is already a bad start.
HZ: Don't tell me I don't like being told how to feel, Jane!
JANE GREGORY: You definitely don't like being told how to feel.
HZ: Welcome back to the show Jane Gregory, clinical psychologist and cognitive behavioural therapist.
JANE GREGORY: So both parts of that phrase: neither of them work, because to keep being anything, to keep being in any kind of state, is impossible, because our state naturally fluctuates. So to start with, if you're not in that state to begin with, you've already failed; it's impossible to win from there. And even if you are in that state, telling someone to stay in that state just puts pressure on them to do something that's not possible, so it automatically increases your stress, just being told that you have to stay in a particular state.
You can’t keep calm unless you’re already calm.
You can’t keep calm unless you’re already calm.
JANE GREGORY: Again, telling someone how to feel is incredibly invalidating. So if they're not feeling calm, then it completely invalidates how they are feeling, which can then cause you to completely spiral because we don't have any control over how we feel. So if someone tells you you're feeling 'the wrong thing', then saying that something that you can't control about yourself is wrong makes you feel like there's something wrong with you deep down.
So that it leads to feeling embarrassed or ashamed of how you're feeling, which then creates a conflict between the different states in your body of whatever you were feeling, plus the shame. And then in order to protect ourselves from feeling the shame, we start to get angry who had just told us we shouldn't be feeling that way, which protects us from feeling bad about ourselves, but then introduces a third layer of emotion. We might have been able to deal with just whatever the original primary emotion was, but now you've suddenly got a layer of shame on top of that, and a layer of anger on top of that.
HZ: Also being told to calm being told to calm down seems like only designed to inflame someone.
JANE GREGORY: Absolutely. Again, it's the implication that there's some kind of hysteria about them in the first place and that their feelings are wrong and invalid, or that it puts the person who's saying it in this position of power like, "I am the person who says how things should feel" is incredibly patronizing.
HZ: Even if you are calm, if you encounter something telling you to keep calm, would that automatically make you suspect that something's up, and that you should not be calm?
JANE GREGORY: Yeah. It's like being told not to panic. If you're not panicking, then suddenly you get suspicious and paranoid that there must be a reason that you should be panicking if someone someone's telling you not to. There must be a reason not to be calm if someone's telling you to stay calm. People don't give that instruction when people are automatically feeling calm.
OWEN HATHERLEY: Why do I think it's so annoying? I think it's the smugness of it. There's always a kind of wagging finger, you know, saying to someone else that you should keep calm and carry on. The kind of, "No, no, you shouldn't, don't complain, you know, carry on, stiff upper lip." So there's that. And I think just also the completely kind of false version of history that that presents. You know, to understand how we got here, it's a really, really bad way of… it kind of throws you off course attempting to understand your own history and your own recent past.
JANE GREGORY: I'm trying to work out who it was even intended for, because there are people who weren't feeling calm and therefore they can't just magically feel calm. But even the people who are feeling calm will probably feel resentful of being told to do something they're already doing, or that's already their strategy, to try to suppress their feelings and stay calm.
HZ: What a British thing to put up a poster advising to suppress feelings.
JANE GREGORY: Yeah. Yeah. Which that again, as a strategy - that's also a terrible strategy to suppress your feelings, because it doesn't actually help you to get on with things. Suppressing your feelings actually introduces stress into the situation, because it takes a lot of energy to suppress your feelings. They've done studies on this: people who are trying to suppress their feelings are actually less functional and can focus less on what they're doing because it takes up so much energy trying not to feel something or trying not to express something, that feeling.
HZ: That's me told.
JANE GREGORY: I think it comes from this idea of British stoicism being sort of like a romantic notion or something. But even that isn't quite accurate because that comes from the stoic philosophy, which wasn't actually about suppressing your emotions, it was about not letting your emotions influence your decisions. So you would still feel the emotions, but you wouldn't make decisions whilst you're in the midst of the intensity of that emotion. So the 'carry on' part would still fit with the stoic philosophy, but it wouldn't be 'Don't have feelings' or 'keep calm'. It would be 'have the feelings, but then carry on'.
HZ: Also, if you're a citizen of a country that's at war, you can't really stoic your way out of the danger that that imposes.
JANE GREGORY: No, you do need to actually be on high alert and ready for things to happen. You need to be in that enhanced state in order to protect yourself and to be ready to act if action is needed. I think people recognise - well, I hope people recognise that it's a relic now, it's not an actual instruction. I think if people are reading it as a useful strategy, then they're setting themselves up for failure. If you think of 'keep calm' as being a behavioural instruction rather than an emotional instruction so you can still have the feelings, but try to maintain a sense of calm on the outside, maybe that's a little less invalidating.
HZ: I blame alliteration as well, I think that's another reason why it works.
OWEN HATHERLEY: Yes, that's a good point. That's certainly not true of "Your cheerfulness and your resolution", which is, you know, not not very snappy.
HZ: There's too many criteria.
OWEN HATHERLEY: It's a snappy slogan, that's the thing.
HZ: Yeah. And I suppose it’s fairly clear instructions, even though they are nonsense instructions.
OWEN HATHERLEY: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
HZ: Five words.
OWEN HATHERLEY: Whoever actually did it at the Ministry of Information knew what they were about.
HZ: Must have been ahead of their time.
OWEN HATHERLEY: Must have been infuriating. One of the things that comes out in the books I've read about the posters and the Ministry of Information is the most popular slogan, by far, was "Go To It".
HZ: Eh?
OWEN HATHERLEY: Everyone loved "Go to it". They usually had a picture of like someone rolling up their sleeves and go to something. "Go to it." Everyone loved it. People at the time would have remembered "Go to it".
HZ: So it sounds a bit more work-y, which I can understand the appeal of.
OWEN HATHERLEY: Exactly.
HZ: Maybe just, people are a lot more docile 70 years after, and now we're ready to be patronized.
OWEN HATHERLEY: I think people just weren't fighting an actual war.
HZ: Why do you think people are nostalgic for war?
OWEN HATHERLEY: I think largely because of the fact that they've not been in one. So you really had to have people who either remembered it as children and so didn't really understand it, or just didn't remember it at all in order for it to be kind of reclaimed as something fun.
HZ: File away your government-issued communications now, because in seventy-odd years your grandchildren might want to stick them on the fridge. Next to their Keep Calm And Play Hovergolf magnet.
OWEN HATHERLEY: This is petty, but I’m just amazed by the fact that it won't go away. It must be the most successful meme in history. It has been ubiquitous for 12 or 13 years. And in a situation where memes change so thick and fast, to have something like that that just won't die, and won't go away, is incredible. And irritating.
HZ: How did you feel about that?
STUART MANLEY: Mixed. I mean, even now, I'm actually quite proud that I was responsible for introducing it to the world and what has become one of the first iconic images of the 21st century. Yeah, I'm proud that I found it and and started it all. You get a bit sick of the take-offs, the various versions of it. But nevertheless, overall, I think it's a good thing.
OWEN HATHERLEY: There's a particular thing which I really want to be on air in one way or another. People keep sending me versions of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster...
HZ: Oh no.
OWEN HATHERLEY: Different versions of it, different motifs, different parodies of it, and I would like them all to stop doing it and never do it again. Usually about once a day, I get one of these. Please take it away. I never want to see it again.
HZ: Owen Hatherley is a writer and the cultural editor of Tribune Magazine. He’s also the author of books including The Ministry of Nostalgia.
Stuart Manley rediscovered the Keep Calm and Carry On poster at his bookshop Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland. Look it up at barterbooks.co.uk.
Jane Gregory is a psychologist and therapist - you heard her before on this show in the episodes A Novel Remedy and Behave. And she’s about to launch a new project about misophonia - that’s when you can’t stand the sounds of mouths. If that’s something you deal with, sign up to learn more about it at https://www.soundslikemisophonia.com.
The Allusionist is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the finest podcasts on the interwaves. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
velleity, noun, formal: a wish or inclination not strong enough to lead to action.
Try using it in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com. Thanks to Dawn Foster, Avery Trufelman and Ian Steadman.
You can find me @allusionistshow on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The other place to go for all Allusionist business, such as further information about every topic, a lexicon of each word covered on the show, the full dictionary entry for the randomly selected words, etc, is the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
