When posters told us our place

As a sign of the way things have changed, nothing could better this. Hester Vaizey, Cambridge history don and ‘publishing co-ordinator’ at the National Archives, has collated this splendid collection of posters issued by various government agencies in the 30 years or so after the second world war. This was, of course, the heyday and highwater mark of what furious red-faced men of my acquaintance now call ‘the nanny state’ — a phrase, incidentally, first used by an editor of The Spectator (Iain Macleod) in the pages of this magazine back in 1965. Although I never had a nanny myself, I know from repeated childhood viewings of Mary Poppins that Nanny Knows Best, and so these posters confirm. Governments of the times clearly saw it as part of their remit to wag a furious finger at the populace, to tell it to tuck its shirt in and stop dragging its feet.