Keeping the Home Fires Burning by Phil Carradice

Author:Phil Carradice [Carradice;, Phil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History / Military / World War I
Published: 2022-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

It was an interesting phenomenon. No working man could ever dream of owning an original Kirchner painting but he could for just a few pennies purchase a card showing one of the famous Kirchner beauties. Within a few years Kirchner had painted a thousand different postcard images of his women – most of them based on or inspired by his wife. Kirchner, like Alphonse Mucha, strode the line between respectability and soft pornography. His pictures were tantalizing but not so explicit as to upset either the delicacies of the women receiving the cards back home in London or Paris or the morals of the army censors.

If Kirchner wasn’t on the sleazy or squalid side of art appreciation, a wide range of pornographic art and photography was always available to men who needed it, invariably found behind the lines and in the side streets in the embarkation ports of France. Many men bought these cards. They were never intended for family members but, if the soldiers survived, were stored in drawers and other out-of-the-way places, to be taken out at rare and highly personal moments. If they were killed or wounded, then mates would make sure the images were destroyed or passed on to another man in the same unit.

Pornography remained something of a niche market and did not feature in any of Masterman’s plans. ‘Below the counter’ it may have been but for many of the young recruits, away from home for the first time, such images were their introduction to the hidden world of sex.

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Early on in the game Charles Masterman realized that if his Propaganda Bureau did not take advantage of this collecting mania, it would be missing a trick. And that was something Masterman was never going to allow. Patriotic postcards had been used effectively during the Boer War, images of departing troops and lyrics of popular songs like Goodbye Dolly Grey being used to whip up enthusiasm for the distant conflict. But never before were they employed by the government or in such an intense and deliberate fashion as Masterman now put into action.

So, how to make best use of the card-collecting craze? It was not really a dilemma or a problem for Wellington House. Masterman had, from the onset, a pretty fair idea of what he would do and how he was going to do it. It was going to be a structured approach. His first step was to ensure that the postcard publishers had the materials they needed to produce good-quality cards. These included enough thin but strong card on which to print. Seemingly a minor issue, this was in fact crucial – too thin and the cards would tear, too thick and they would become unwieldy. To become collectors’ items, they would have to look and feel just right.

Then there was access to quality images. Without these no one would buy the cards, no one would dream of collecting them, and so Masterman had to ensure that there was no hindrance to the postcard companies accessing modern images.

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