Flying Ant Day, then (1953) and then (1978)

How the times they are a-have-changed.

Once the friendly flying ant was as welcome an annual sight as the Padstow Mummy or Doctor Christmas. Now the insect has fallen from favour, and its day (traditionally the third full sun of July) is seen as nothing more than a regular nuisance.

The change seems to have taken place in the 1980s, when increased awareness of sub-surface pestlife like moles and soil turtles was met with the might and maybe of the poisons industry. Turtle powder and mole hammers were regulars under the sinks of the nation’s sinks.

In the 1950s, people were encouraged to put out a saucer of sugary batter to welcome the popular arthropod into their home, to bring good luck or, at least, a stay to any forthcoming death.

But after Britain joined the Common Market, an increasingly busy populace didn’t have time to prepare the Anting Bowl, and neighbours no longer gathered to bob for faeces alongside their insect friends. Ant Carols were no longer sung, and only children on the Isle of Hair now dress as Ant Henry VIII.

By 1978, the only airborne formicida was an unseen character – part of its sad downward journey from local feature to threat, much like the urban fox and the postman. And, by the 1980ses, a traditional Flying Ant Day costume could only be seen in the record videos of pop man Adam Ant, who had chosen the trappings of the ritual – including Ant Henry VIII’s distinctive nose stripe – to promote his double-drum music.

“Ennui - the silent killer,” 1975

A tireless programme of national jam making, competitive vegetable husbandry and choir practice had all but eradicated the perilous sickness of boredom in Britain by 1970, when a new hovercraft link to the Continent and a vogue for day trips sparked fears of contamination from abroad.

Suddenly our spectred isle was vulnerable to virulent foreign strains of boredom, such as German Weltschmerz, French ennui, and the Dutch molenvermeidheid (literally ‘windmill fatigue’, caused by the infrequency of vertical objects on the horizon of the low countries).

After Mrs Sarah Kettleship, the infamous ‘Patient Zero’ shrugged herself to death in Felixstowe in 1974, the focus turned sharply towards the group perceived to be at the highest risk: Britain’s housewives, with their repetitive routine and depressing rollerblinds.

Initial attempts to stem the blight of apathesis included quarantine kennels for globetrotting housewives returning from Calais and Rotterdam, and the introduction by Whitehall’s Central Planning Secretariat of a string of national talking points, starting with breakfast television and ending with AIDS.

Opinion is divided as to whether ennui was ever a real threat. Experts still disagree on what wiped it out, attributing it to a wide number of factors including upstairs phones, the Kays catalogue, and everything.

“There’s a new town in town,” 1969

The building of the New Towns in Britain was the biggest construction project in mainland Europe since France’s national basement was dug in the 1920s. The third wave of towns included Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, Telford in Shropshire, and (Untitled) in Woldborough.

(Untitled) was a troubled undertaking from its inception. The architect, Rolfgang Üd, was unused to the compromises of communal planning, and demanded full rein to explore his dream of building as a “concrete ballet”. Many of the houses he designed had no windows, to avoid “the grotesque discontinuity of curtains,” and his insistence that the radical town centre include three art galleries and a “water library” left planners scratching their drawing-boards.

But it was the town’s name that caused the biggest headache. All Üd’s works were untitled, and he saw no reason why the New Town should be any different. The Postmaster General, Anthony Muchless, angrily challenged Üd to compose a usable address for the citizens of (Untitled). Üd refused to be “musclebound by envelope culture” and further entrenched his position by suggesting the roads be identified by “smells and sighs, building a city of memory and intensity”. Muchless resigned and threw his ministerial car into the sea in protest.

When the first residents of (Untitled) complained that they were unable to receive post or have a telephone connected, Üd replied, “for this they should thank me; I have gifted them more time for contemplation”. The town never achieved even 15% occupancy, and was empty by 1981. It was blown up by Roy Castle on It’s A Christmas Knockout! in 1983, provoking Üd to send the BBC a dead panda as a “gesture of syllepsis”.

“If you’re playing without a licence, you could be fined,” 1976

“Sound synthesis” was discovered one freezing summer afternoon in 1941 at the GPO Research station in Twelveford by Dilwyn Elis Llwy and Herbie Fussiter, two electrical engineers working on the typedryer (a predecessor of the hairdrying typewriters of the 1960s).

No military use was found for the synthesizer, despite enforced deployment of the device at mess dances (one furious Colonel described “entreaties to boogaloo to the sound of a robot with gut-rot”), and eventually the technology was quietly put into the civilian realm (as happened with Teletext, Bigtrak and Toast Toppers).

The synthesizer licence was introduced in 1969 when a quick-thinking junior Treasury minister heard that The Beatles were using one on “Here Comes The Sun”. Rushed legislation was passed in Parliament before the band reached take two.

Editor’s note: Among the materials for this design found in the NOI’s archive was the original synthesizer licence featured in the poster. Though it has aged with no little grace, it is notable for its famous owner: Brian Eno, the flamboyant glam-rocker behind the chart-topping Windows operating system.

“Sit up straight,” 1946

The period immediately following the grand finale of the Second World War found Britain exhausted and impoverished. In an act of unprecedented social engineering, a mass re-energisation was planned, including injecting everyone under the age of 50 with orange juice, and the introduction of the ‘Doctor, Doctor’ joke as a national fillip.

But not all were convinced. Sir Constant Payne, Minister of Labour, who coined the phrase ‘feed them sticks and leave the carrots to their idiot dreams,’ took a dim of view of the project, ridiculing it as ‘no better than putting the country to Nanny’s bosom to cork its mewling’.

His idea was to bully the nation back to its senses, and this was the first of 115 posters he commissioned from the NOI. In his memoirs, No Book For Fools, he wrote

[T]he sight of Britain’s young men slouching like dead tramps in a canoe was enough to make a chap want to take a ferula to their sit-upons. I resolved to get the nation’s backs straight once more – even if I had to break them myself.

Payne went on to present the Open University’s first panel game, British Foreign Policy 1381-1955: A Critical Study.

“Here’s a sight for sore eyes. And soon it could be yours,” 1989

The privatisation of government assets was reaching boiling pitch by the late 1980s and, having sold off Britain’s oil, gas, water, electricity and weather, there seemed little left in HM Government’s asset bank except food and miasma. That is, until one Treasury brightclogs came up with the notion of selling off Britain’s views.

The NOI was co-opted to design the advertising campaign, and the flotation took place on 3rd November 1989. The initial share price of 83p rose to £10.32 by the end of the first day’s trading, making multimillionaires of some lucky millionaires.

Some of the premium views were bought by foreign interests. Most people know that the view of the Houses of Parliament from Albert Embankment is owned by the Japanese prison system; less well known is that the view of Huyton & Prescot Golf Club from the northbound carriageway of the M57 is owned by the bass player from Boney M.

“Ask before you vent,” 1955

The NOI ran this hastily conceived poster in theatres and working men’s clubs in 1955. That year, polite and rude society alike had been outraged by the infamous case of R. v Treadles, brought after popular ventriloquist Archie Treadles was caught red-fingered leaving the dressing-room of rival act Wally Pippin at the Lincoln-on-Land Alhambra.

Treadles at first denied any unpropriety, saying he’d come backstage to congratulate Pippin on a fine turn. And when Pippin admitted under cross-examination that he hadn’t been in the room when the offence was said to have taken place, it looked as though Treadles would be acquitted.

But, in a surprising twist, Pippin’s doll, Señor Moneybags, took to the stand – the only time a ventriloquist’s dummy has been called before a court – and told a shocked Old Bailey that Treadles had “come and got me out of my gox and had a go on me”. His evidence was devastating. 

The press of the day spared the public the grislier details, saying only that Treadles was accused of performing “a variety act” on another’s doll. Treadles changed tack in the face of so damning an accusation, saying he had mistaken Señor Moneybags for a wooden glove, but his defence was in tatters, and he was found guilty and bound over for £350. After his conviction, his own puppet, Dickie Tummie, never spoke to him again.

“Mr Barratt’s hiding – are you?” 1968

Before divorce was fashionable, there were very few options for the unhappily married man. The French tradition of taking a mistress was thought too smutty for the British and, apart from stoicism, there was little available to Johnny Regret except wistfulness or beer.

But all that changed when marriage ointment became available on prescription, and many a troubled coupling became a blissful union again. However, the wonder tincture was a victim of its own roaring success. By the mid-1960s, the government was spending more on marriage ointment than on defence and the search for the Loch Ness monster, and something had to be done to reduce the crippling outlay.

Hiding licences, the brainchild of Lord Lucan, were introduced in January 1968, enabling scores of glum hubbies to run away and hide in complete happiness for the rest of their lives. But even this wasn’t enough to significantly dent the national expenditure, and eventually divorce became the only affordable option, which led to the NOI’s gentle “Give The Old Bat The Heave-Ho” campaign in 1972.

“Kelp, clam and carrion,” 1941

The Second World War II was an era of thrift and self-suffiency. Government campaigns entreated the resourceful British to turn their potato peelings into costume jewellery, grow mushrooms in their Anderson shelters, use their shirt buttons as currency, lay their own eggs, and even hibernate.

This poster was one of some to encourage scavenging. At a time when most of the country’s food supplies were requisitioned to feed the pigs that provided pork to the workers who melted down railings to make armaments to destroy enemy food supplies, survival was often a matter of eating whatever could be sourced.

Other campaigns promoted the consumption of roadkill, rare birds’ eggs and invalids.

“Don’t throw hammers,” 1985

For decades, the only way to pass a hammer to somebody was to first secure a position in their workshop, and even then, it was considered impolite to hand over the tool at anything other than bent-arm’s length. But the so-called 1960s revolutionised attitudes, and suddenly gently passing a hammer looked as repressed and old-fashioned as wearing a bath-bowler or putting up an umbrella when you coughed.

But after a seemingly endless summer of groovy hammer-throwing, dark days were ahead, and first reports of deaths by flying hammers started to emerge from the club scene in 1970s New York. The messsage was hammered home in Britain when Ponda Tang, the flamboyant-groined bassist of Tingletip, passed fatally out during a showbiz mallet-tossing weekend in 1978. The post mortem revealed that his death was not due to excess alcohol or just enough drugs, but blows to the head from some sort of blunt object.

The party was over, and by the time of this NOI campaign, demands for safe-hammermanship had ushered in the more puritan age in which we now live and carefully pass each other hammers.

“Now there’s no excuse not to sing,” 1978

The decline in public singing that characterised the last two quarters of the 1970s was attributed to, among others, the television, the discothèque and the ravioli restaurant.

Keen to hear Britain’s saloon bars avoice with revelry again, the NOI teamed up with the BBC to launch a radio programme, For Pubs And Oil Rigs, and an accompanying book of traditional pub singalong songs.

For a brief, glorious period, pubs up and down the width of the land were again arenas of full-throated crooning and gay serenade. Regretfully, it didn’t last, and by the 1980s most pubs were silent places full of the tearful unemployed, staring holes in their solitary pints while the etiolated afternoon surrendered all hope to the sickly grey of empty evening. Luckily, there was Bananarama.

“I before E except after C,” 1977

Rising levels of dimbo-ism in the 1970s led to a campaign for national literacy, championed by then education minister (now fascinating King of Tuvalu) Hadleigh Carport.

Carport declared that he wanted “Every mechanic to have a not inconsiderable grasp of litotes, every labourer to owe a debt to the masters of bathos (as well as the bookmakers), and every-damn-body to understand tmesis.”

In 1978, the first National Spelling Test was set. At 7am on Thursday, 11 May, queues started to form outside Spelling Stations all over the UK. 56% passed, with 37% failing and 18% spoiling their papers – figures which resulted in calls for a national numeracy test. The answers to the Spelling Test appeared in national newspapers the following day. The Guardian printed 37 wrongly, and the Daily Telegraph asterisked the word “plumbago,” for fear of “mortifying the more delicate reader over the puckles of his hot crumpet”.

“Disburse contiguum against yet the most squamous bulwark,” 1940

With war comes confusion, and with confusion comes a need for clarity. So it was with simple, determined messages like this that the National Office of Information kept the undersieged civilians of Britain in a robust frame of mind during the teething pains of the Second World War.

The language may be arcane, but the message is plain: disburse contiguum against yet the most squamous bulwark. Firm and reassuringly steadfast, it is a call to action that still resonates today, during times of national pandæmonium. Will Self has a tattoo of this poster on his tongue.

“Got something to say? Write it on a wall,” 1970

How times change. What once seemed harmless, devil-may-care – illicitly thrilling, perhaps, but no more – hindsight renders sinister, grisly, even reprehensible. Ask any light entertainment star of the 1970s

and they’ll tell you that Graffiti was the craze that none could afford to shun. The practice was introduced by the Italians during the reign of Franco, as the country’s first hand-gesture-free form of protest. When it became clear Franco was in charge of Spain, not Italy, this was claimed as an early victory by the protestors.

The craze soon spread beyond its seditious roots and into the soil of art. Brian Eno made an entire album by typing “found Graffiti” into an ARP sequencesizer; Do Your Walls! was the most watched BBC-2 series of 1974; and Dennis Healy was famously photographed daubing the perimeter of Buckingham Palace with the popular phrase “Nelson Riddle is innocent”.

But decades of gleeful free expression left their mark, and the 1980s saw Graffiti fall from favour. Home Secretary Lord Bravilor of Bonamat campaigned long and wide against the criminalisation of walligraphy, but the tide was well and truly in over his head, and his refusal to yield to public opinion led to his faking his own botched double-suicide in 1983, in a resignation that still gets heads wagging today.

“A lunchtime drink makes work go with a swing,” 1966

British commerce boomed through the 1960s, and nowhere did it boom more noisily and merrily than in the humble pub.

The first sketches for Concorde were famously done in a puddle of spilt Gin & Quosh, and the iconic hand-drawn logo for Welland’s Filter-Tipped cigarettes was, said designer Neville Turpin, “scribbled on the back of a fag packet”.

Long liquid luncheons are said to have saved the UK many a multi-million on the Channel Tunnel, as the British construction team had only advanced thirty yards in sixteen years when they met the French coming the other way.

Keen to capitalise on the productive (not to mention reproductive!) atmosphere of the lunchtime tipple, the NOI ran this campaign, featuring the then and still unheard of Angela Moldewarp.

“Don’t think about monsters,” 1972

Much of the NOI’s output was designed for the classroom. Campaigns like “Mind that rat!” and “Not everyone’s called Simon” still live on in the collective memory like nostalgia.

This poster – designed to reassure young heads destined for the pillow atop the wooden hill to Bedroomshire – appeared in every primary school the width and breadth of Britain. It was accompanied by a controversial Public Information Film, only passed by the BBFC after cuts which director Ken Russell said rendered it “disjointed and chthonic”.

The Welsh-language version (“Peidiwch â meddwl am anghenedlgarwch”) was withdrawn after a typogryphical mistake left the children of Wales baffled by the stern instruction, “Don’t think about a lack of patriotism”. It is no coincidence that the red dragon, for centuries the Welsh national monster, was removed from the Union flag shortly afterwards, in an unrelated incident.

“Whistling is killing music,” 1981

The success of the title song from Monty Python Live At Brian’s (1979) tempted millions to experiment with whistling, almost destroying the British music industry. Takings at concert venues and sales of LP records plummeted as ordinary people found they could make their own entertainment, a phenomenon Jonathan King described as “morally repugnant”.

Acting on instruction from the Lord Privy Minstrel, the NOI mounted this memorable campaign, which ran alongside a macabre television advertisement showing a young Dexter Fletcher whistling himself to death in a public toilet. The music industry was eventually revivified by the cassingle.

“Don’t delete that blank document,” 1995

The arrival of the electro-digital office coincided with a passing fad for environmentalism, leading to this well-meaning advertisement from the NOI.

The scientific adviser for the campaign was TV phlebotomist Roy Cheddar, who had become the public face of global warning after fronting the “shock-umentary” series Kettlesphere: Earth.

Cheddar claimed at the time that every one of these posters would save “enough trees to stretch a double decker elephant to the size of Wales and back”. By 2011, he had became a high-profile outspokesman for climate change denial, insisting his advocacy of environmental causes was merely youthful naivety. “I was green,” he told Kermit The Frog on Muppet Island Discs.

“Going upstairs? Get your jabs,” 1967

Little did NOI typing pool attendant Maureen Diddley know what she was letting her pussy in for when she agreed to his being photographed for this campaign. Honky, her lager-coloured four-week old Bodleian shorthair, soon became a national star, appearing on Ways Of Seeing, The Ascent Of Man and the ICI trousers advertisements.

Honky toys were the must-buy purchase at Christmas 1971, and his autobiography, Always Landing On The Same Feet (co-written with Fay Weldon) was the bestselling book of 1972, and won the Duff Cooper prize the same year, causing historian Robin Lane Fox to threaten to set himself on fire.

Honky later drifted into a life of homelessness and milkoholism, and died in a wet cardboard box in 1977.

“Watch That Girl,” 1967

The Singing Sixties were a high tide mark for female emancipation. The pill was introduced, hemlines headed north, and sex before marriage was legalised for women, as it had been for men in 1182. But this newfound freedom rattled some in Government, and, in an infamous speech he made in Doorford in 1967, Cabinet Secretary Sterling Bellend warned that

The once fairer sex has become a foul plague. There are now as many women as there are men in this sceptr’d isle, and the indigenous British male is in danger of being swamped by these giddy creatures. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. I see the rivers of this green and pleasant land running red with their lipstick. And this must never be let happen, say I. We are men. We are resolute. We will not secede to Babylon.

Bellend lost his seat and three toes at a by-election shortly afterwards, and his career never recovered from what Joan Bakewell called his ‘rampant homomania’ in her 1968 single, Bubblecar Ding-a-ling.