The Ministry of information (MOI) was formed by the British Government as the department responsible for propaganda during the Second World War.
With a bold coloured background, the posters were required to be similar in style and feature the symbolic crown of King George VI along with a simple yet effective font. The first two posters, “Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution will bring us victory “and “Freedom is in peril” were posted on public transport, in shop windows… but the plan for the third and final poster “Keep Calm and Carry On” was to issue it only upon the invasion of Britain by Germany. As this never happened, the poster was only displayed on a very few office walls and was never officially seen by the public.
It is believed that most of the keep calm posters were destroyed at the end of the war in 1945 however nearly 60 years later, a bookseller stumbled across a copy hidden amongst a pile of dusty old book.
