Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?

Why it works

A British recruitment poster that sells enlistment by staging a moment from the future. After the war, a father sits in his armchair while his small daughter, a book open on her knee, asks him the title question and his son plays with toy soldiers on the carpet; the man's uneasy stare carries the whole argument. It was issued in 1915 as Parliamentary Recruiting Committee poster no. 79, when the army still relied on volunteers. The Victoria and Albert Museum records that the idea came from the printer Arthur Gunn, who pictured himself as the father and joined up after Savile Lumley sketched the scene, and attributes the poster's fame to its tone of emotional blackmail. It is studied as a textbook guilt appeal that never shows the enemy or the front, only the shame of having no answer. The Australian War Memorial calls it arguably the most remembered British recruiting poster of the war and notes that soldiers pinned it up in their dugouts with their own answers added.