Iconic is a much-overused word but in the case of the 'Your Country Needs You' poster featuring Lord Kitchener, it is an apt description. With 'K of K's' penetrating gaze and pointing finger, this instantly recognisable symbol of the Great War is one of the world's most famous posters having been reproduced on everything from T-shirts to tea towels in the century since it first appeared on the cover of London Opinion magazine on 5 September 1914. The cover was adapted into a poster by the magazine with the wording changed to, 'Britons - (Kitchener) wants you. Join your country's army,' and was circulated privately by London Opinion, never part of the official parliamentary recruiting committee's poster campaign. Nor was it included in a touring exhibition of war posters organised by the newly founded Imperial War Museum in 1917, though it was a popular feature of another exhibition held at the fashionable Grafton Galleries in 1919. The poster was to inspire the great American artist James Montgomery Flagg who replicated the design, substituting Uncle Sam for Lord Kitchener, and the poster's magic formula was used in other countries, as well as during the Second World War. Despite the design's stark, uncompromising message, historians of First World War posters claim that its popularity is retrospective and its effectiveness was limited during the war itself.
Nevertheless, as the centenary of the Great War approaches, the Kitchener poster is more popular than ever. But less is known about its designer, Alfred Leete. Alfred Ambrose Chew Leete (1882-1933) was the son of a Northamptonshire farmer and born in Thorpe Achurch. The family moved to Weston-Super-Mare in 1893 due to his father's poor health where his mother ran boarding houses. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Leete was never formally trained as an artist. He attended the Kingsholme School in Weston-Super-Mare and then the School of Science & Art which he left to take up a brief apprenticeship at a surveyors before trying his hand at furniture design.
His first drawing appeared in the Daily Graphic in 1897 and two years later, he moved to London where he found work as an in-house artist with a printer. When Punch published one of his cartoons in 1905, he decided to become a full-time freelance artist and soon found work with a number of publications including several we hold here in the archive at Mary Evans Picture Library - The Tatler, The Bystander and The Sketch. By the First World War, Leete was an established graphic artist. He created the character, 'Schmidt the Spy,' for London Opinion but his bold, graphic style cartoons appeared frequently in many other magazines. Leete joined the Artists' Rifles during the war, a regiment which drew from the artistic and theatrical community and also included fellow illustrators such as Harold Earnshaw and J. H. Thorpe. He saw action on the Western Front, an experience which informed some of his drawings from this period and post-war work involved designing recruitment posters for the tank corps and army.
The pictures we feature here are part of a series Leete carried out for The Sketch magazine in 1918 called 'Masbadges,' where he created fantastical creatures by combining animal mascots with the badges of various well-known regiments. Ideas include a leek-nosed goat of the Welsh Guards and a surly looking bulldog representing the Royal Artillery. The link below includes several other examples of Leete's illustrations and reveals him to a versatile artist with a wider scope than we might otherwise have realised. His legacy is undoubtedly and inextricably that memorable poster, but Leete's body of work deserves to emerge from its shadow.
http://www.maryevans.com/lb.php?ref=22063
Luci Gosling