KEEP BOXING & FIGHT ON (A2) 

Description : Keep Calm and Carry On was the third in a series of World War 2 posters drawn up by the UK Ministry of Information in order to boost the morale of the British people by passing on a message from King George VI. The posters were a stark white text on a red background, with the only image on the poster being the royal crown of George VI. A representation of the "Tudor Crown" (a symbol of the state).

The first two posters, "Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution will Bring Us Victory" and "Freedom is in Peril" were widely printed and distributed. However, the third poster, which carried the simple message "Keep Calm and Carry On" although printed, was never distributed, as it was intended only if invasion was imminent. At the end of the war, the posters were collected up and pulped. It is believed that only two original posters out of a print run of over a million survive to this day. The story would have ended there were it not for Stuart and Mary Manley, who run a bookshop called Barter Books in Northumberland. Whilst sorting through a box of old books, they found one of the few surviving original copies of the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' poster. They liked it so much that they had the poster framed and placed near the till in their shop. They soon found that customers were very keen on the poster - even to the point of asking if they could buy it! So, Stuart and Mary started selling and printing facsimilie copies of the poster. The rest, as they say, is history...

As the popularity of the poster in various media has grown, innumerable parodies, imitations and co-optations have also appeared, making it a notable meme. Messages range from the cute to the overtly political, typically with references to other aspects of popular culture. Here we extol the virtue's of Boxing! The poster is now seen "not only as a distillation of a crucial moment in Britishness, In the years since 2000 the poster has become world famous, having been mentioned in news articles, on TV and having been seen in many disparate places from country pubs to Parliament.

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