1951 Unknown Keep the Peace Keep Labour at Westminster

that was largely anonymous and indecisive. We again see paired with these messages a typographic style that is worlds away from Middleton’s ‘Soldiers of Lead’ and more in keeping with the 1951 brush script, although this time in a slightly heavier weight. When we look at the criticisms section we see a further miss-match of typographic styles, ‘What price tea?’, ‘Pensioners hard up!’, ‘Mills Closing Down’ & ‘Record High Prices! [№ 037-40] make up the attempt by the party to discredit the effectiveness of the Government in the preceding 5 years, while utilising the similar brush typography that we see in the earlier work, but they are all flanked with a strong resounding claim ‘Toryism doesn’t work’ depicted in a stencil style serif font, ‘Vote Labour’ tags the poster in a small patch. The three styles of poster come together to create an interesting yet largely confused set of messaging. An interesting observation is the colour scheme, which largely returns to the advice given in 1950, strong bold colours are used across the campaign, striking yellows and blues and abstract patterns featured on the criticism posters, whereas on the promises posters, red and green are prominent features, this cohesion creates a narrative that allows the reader to garner a subliminal connotation with the message.

Within my research, I’ve been particularly interested in trying to understand the aesthetic choices of the campaign, within the 1950s the use of the brush script is something that on face value doesn’t make a large amount of sense, it wasn’t at first glance a particularly popular design trend, but in the context of politics maybe we can argue there is an interesting idea around ‘DIY’ culture, handwriting or brush stroke can feel more humane, it can speak a language that is more conversational and less authoritative than the Gill Sans