Daddy, What Did You Do in the Great War?

"Daddy, What Did You Do in the Great War?" was a British First World War recruitment poster by Savile Lumley, first published in March 1915 by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee. It was commissioned and submitted to the committee by Arthur Gunn, the director of the publishers Johnson Riddle and Company. The poster depicts a young girl seated on the lap of a fatherly figure with the question "Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?" inscribed below. The poster echoes other emasculating messages used in British World War I recruitment posters that relied on guilt and shame to persuade men to enlist, particularly before conscription was enacted in March 1916. Unlike other recruitment posters of the time which focused on more direct calls to action, the poster used indirect messaging to persuade men to enlist in the army at a time when conscription was not yet a policy in Great Britain. Although the poster is now considered an icon of British history during the First World War, it was not one of the most circulated recruitment posters and there was some contemporary backlash to its message.

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