Is Your Journey Really Necessary?

Why it works

Britain's wartime railways were needed for troops and supplies, and coal and petrol were needed for the war effort, so the public had to be persuaded to travel less. The Railway Executive Committee, the body set up to run the railways in wartime, put the request as a question rather than a ban. In Bert Thomas's 1942 poster a soldier loaded with equipment, rifle in hand, stands at a ticket window and points straight at the would-be traveller under the words "Is your journey really necessary?", with "really" picked out in a different colour. The National Archives uses it to teach how wartime posters worked: a direct, personal question that stops the reader and invites a little guilt, with the issuing body named only in small type. It is studied as an example of persuasion through self-questioning, and as a demand-reduction message in which a service provider asks customers to use it less.