Daddy, What Did You Do in the Great War?

No enemy, no trench, no flag. Savile Lumley's 1915 poster for the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee sets the war in an armchair some years later, where a child asks the title question and the father's uneasy face supplies the answer he cannot give. The idea came from a printer, Arthur Gunn, who is said to have pictured himself as that father. This is persuasion through future shame, aimed at the man still deciding whether to enlist. Its tone of emotional blackmail is exactly why it is remembered, which makes it a good poster for asking where pressure ends and manipulation begins.