“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.