Analysis: Posters designed by Irish artists for the Empire Marketing Board communicated an officially approved Irish identity for international consumption
By Billy Shortall, TCD
A century ago, the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) was created to promote trade between Britain and its dominions and colonies. Despite remaining a leading global trading power, Britain's economy was showing signs of decline. Three years earlier, the Conservative government had suggested tariffs as a solution, but the idea met resistance. In the 1923 general election, voters, concerned about rising prices, rejected the proposal to tax imports, leading to the Conservatives’ defeat. When they returned to power in 1924, the tariff plan was abandoned.
Instead, in 1926, the government launched the EMB as a means of encouraging reciprocal trade within the Empire. Ireland, whose struggling economy had recently forced cuts to pensions and teachers’ salaries, was particularly keen to join. For Irish Minister for Agriculture Patrick Hogan, the benefits were clear: 'Membership of the League of Nations, and all that it implies, may gratify national pride; but what the Free State needs at present is better trade.’
The EMB's substantial budget was split between product and export research, and newspaper and poster advertising. Posters were displayed on 1,750 special frames owned by the EMB in 450 towns across the United Kingdom. Posters changed every three or four weeks. In addition, posters were displayed in English factories advising workers to buy Irish 'butter, bacon, and eggs' because 'orders from the Irish Free State are now in hand at our works’. Buying Irish would result in additional orders. Similar posters and slogans were posted for other countries.
The EMB hoardings displayed five posters which were almost exclusively designed by English designers and studios. Irish posters advertising Irish produce for British consumers were the exceptions because they were designed by Irish artists. The unique engagement of Irish artists was because of the intervention of John W. Dulanty, Irish Commissioner for Trade in London, who would later become Irish ambassador. Dulanty, an affable and persuasive diplomat, was culturally engaged and friendly with Irish writers and artists, frequently entertaining them in London. He was a member of EMB committees and canvassed for poster design work for Irish artists.
The Free State government sought to affect agency and control over both the production of EMB posters and press advertising, where its identity, produce and market were concerned. This was despite the High Commissioner at the time, James MacNeill, arguing to accept the publicity as it was, rather than loose ‘the value of an advertisement of this nature in the British press free of expense’.
Five Irish artists were commissioned to produce Irish Free State designs to mostly promote the sale of eggs, bacon and butter. Only three of these had their designs produced as posters, the other two, although approved by the EMB, were censored by the Irish government. The first Irish artist selected was Paul Henry, who by this time had a substantial reputation and his tourist and railway posters were well-known and popular. Henry was commissioned to produce a design for the Irish dairy industry. However, when Henry's picture, Dairying in the Irish Free State, was exhibited with other designs at the Royal Academy in November 1926 for visiting premiers, including William T. Cosgrave, it was illustrated and provoked an extremely negative re-action in the press. Reports regarded it as a tourist advertisement for Irish scenery rather than a promotion of Free State industry and agricultural efficiency. Exhibited beside the New Zealand design for an up-to-date dairy industry, it was seen as backward.
Henry took exception to the public re-action and wrote to the Irish Times, who had reproduced the design, saying it was perverse to 'read into my design any suggestion of a reflection upon the agricultural efficiency of the Irish Free State’ and that the complaints demonstrated the ‘Irish inferiority complex’. Whatever about its accuracy, Henry’s design was not the image of the Irish agricultural industry that the Irish government wished to exhibit. The EMB wrote to Henry and told him they were pulling his design, essentially because the Irish government censored it - ‘to respect their wishes’. He declined to resubmit a new design, this time to be exhibited in a set with another Irish artist, James Humbert Craig, and his poster promoting the Northern Ireland flax industry.
Sean Keating was approached by Dulanty and commissioned to produce a single poster advertising Irish dairying but after intervention by the Minister for Agriculture, he was asked to complete a set of three posters. His two later posters, promoting Irish eggs and bacon, were produced at short notice and lack the originality of his dairying image. It represented an ordered and hygienic dairy farm and even if the farmers seem somewhat under-employed it displayed none of Henry's backwardness. Keating’s posters were exhibited in a five-poster set; the remaining two were letterpress explaining the extent of trade between the Irish Free State and the United Kingdom. Photographs of these posters displayed on public EMB hoardings were sent to Cosgrave, who took both a personal and political interest in the scheme; he expressed his approval of Keating’s designs.
Margaret Clarke designed the only complete set of five posters produced by an Irish artist. She was paid a substantial £275 for the commission. These designs were successful, and they won the Publicity Club of London's prize for the most popular posters to be seen in England in 1931.
Files in the British and Irish national archives and the National Library of Ireland show tensions between the EMB and the Irish officials over the maps of Ireland and the UK in the centre poster. Dulanty opined that the EMB would want England in red, the Irish Free State would require green and 'another colour would be needed for the Six Counties'. Other tensions are also evident in the artwork. Press reports mentioned Britannia and Hibernia, who shared this poster, as ‘a symbolic representation of the Irish Free State and Great Britain doing each other a good turn by exchanging their products. Neither of the ladies in this panel, who represent the respective countries, look as if she would give much for nothing’.
Clarke's two posters on the left show an English family consuming Irish eggs, bacon and butter and the Irish farm producing these. Clarke was instructed by the EMB to show how 'the British housewife should be persuaded into buying the products’. Almost unanimously the posters produced by the EMB showed divided economic roles - men as the producers and women as consumers. However, Clarke’s farm is subversively dominated by a farm woman. Clarke received advice on the Irish farm content from the Department of Agriculture.
Clarke’s penultimate poster shows the coal arriving in Ireland as Irish farm produce goes the other way. Set in a bucolic and unmistakeable Irish landscape, probably the East or midlands rather than the West, the creamery in the distance billows coal signifying a rural industry, the manager’s house next door is slated and modern. A coal truck bears an up-to-date Dublin registration, and the workers are busy and efficient. It presented a modern vision of Padraig Pearse’s aspiration for rural development.
The poster set measured approximately 7.6 metres long by 2 metres high and had a title strip that read ‘Empire buying makes busy factories’ and was designed to be read like a cartoon strip. Explicitly the message to the British consumer was: buy Irish produce and this will enable the Irish State to purchase British coal.
One other Irish artist, the set designer, Dorothy Travers-Smith (better known later after her marriage to playwright Lennox Robinson as Dolly Robinson) was commissioned to produce designs. However, although enthusiastically received by the EMB, her posters, like Henry's design earlier, were censored by Irish officials and never went into circulation. Dulanty reported to the Board that their message was too indirect and not acceptable.
Posters by Irish artists, and Clarke’s in particular, were as much about portraying a unique Irish identity to the world as they were about promoting trade. The EMB scheme dovetailed with the State’s economic nation building project, and as part of that, the posters communicated an officially approved Irish identity for international consumption, as rural and modern. They looked to a bright future for a new State.
The EMB scheme was dissolved after the Ottawa Conference of Empire Nations in 1933. It was a victim of rising nationalism and the introduction of worldwide protectionist tariffs.
Dr Billy Shortall is a TRIARC Visiting Research Fellow, School of Histories and Humanities, Trinity College Dublin.
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