During this last week of remembrance I stumbled on this…
A book jacket that I designed back in 1971. This, and the many references on radio and television devoted to Britain’s many wars have got me thinking about man’s inhumanity to man and the waste of war.
I was born towards the end of the WW2 during an air raid. Apparently as I cried out to take my first breath sirens echoed the all clear. My childhood was spent in the remnants of post was Britain; bomb scared, rationed, traumatised and fog ridden, all played out in black and white. At my grandmother’s I would amuse myself for hours with a box of assorted shrapnel collected from bombsites…
Photo © Dave Caplan
My first job in 1959 was at a small engineering firm that sat amidst the ruins of London Wall. War was still indelibly printed on the cityscape - it was impossible to forget what had happened to our country…
London Wall Photo © The Museum of London
But as London finally rose up from the ashes in the 1960s everything changed and memories faded. A new generation was born possessing optimism for the future. The Prime minster of the day, Harold McMillan told us that we had “never had it so good”. There was a healthy anti war feeling in the country with the many CND anti nuclear marches. But what comes around goes around. In 1984 Margaret Thatcher mobilized our troops to fight the Falklands war in an historic show of jingoistic patriotism…
Our smiling boys and girls were cheered off just as they had been in 1914 and 1936, amidst much ticker tape and flag waving, to smash the enemy. Throughout this month and the many months and years before, soldiers are routinely returned home. Not in the way they were expecting, but in a coffin draped in a union jack, to sleep forever. It is impossible not to be moved; no matter what position you take on war. 18 year olds die, often without really knowing why. When one hears of the atrocity recorded in Afghanistan and Iraq to innocent men, women and children, it is impossible to believe that we live in the 21st century. We have learned nothing. Only this week the former President of the United States, George Bush told the world that water boarding was not torture because his lawyer had said so. And this is supposed to be the most advanced nation in world? What hope do we have?
© Brian Harris Commonwealth War Graves Commission
Back in 1978 I visited the war graves of the Somme with some enthusiastic friends. We camped at Railway Hollow, now known as the Sheffield City Battalion Park.
Our little group with me on the right and my original partner Ken Carroll left. Photo © Duncan Sturrock
On the morning of 1st July we set off – just as the Accrington Pals and Barnsley Pals had done in 1916 – into the blinding morning sun as skylarks sang overhead. The only difference was that we walked over soft green grass. For them it was heaps of mud and debris and a horrific blizzard of bullets and shells. 60,000 casualties were recorded on that fateful July day.
Battle of the Somme 1916
Visiting the war graves it is one of the most moving experiences I have had. You need to do it to understand what I mean.
In 1998 I once again found myself in the same location. I had commissioned the Great War photographer Don McCullin to take a photograph for a stamp, which formed part of the 48 Millennium set that I was working at the time for Royal Mail. I was in France scouting locations for Don, with this result…
Don McCullin's tribute to the fallen 1999 © Royal Mail
Artists through the ages have visually recorded their take on war, often powerful and moving, from vast canvases to monumental sculptures. For me one of the most sensitive evocations in recent times is the work produced by the multi talented Turner Prize winner, Steve McQueen. After spending time as an official war artist in Iraq he return home to produced Queen and Country a beautifully crafted wooden cabinet with a series of vertically sliding panels, each containing a sheet of stamps featuring portraits of the British service men and women who sacrificed their lives in Iraq between 2003 and 2009.
I could not help making a connection between those sliding panels and the soulless mortuary draws in the field hospitals of war zone.
We live is an age where pilotless drones can be controlled via a joystick while viewing a TV screen from the comfort of an air condition room in Nevada. It is akin to the ultimate electronic war game but where real people are clinically eliminated 7,000 miles away. No guilt, no shame it’s all a game.
I leave you with a stamp designed by Hat Trick. It is a perfect and beautiful example of what graphic design is at its best – intelligent thinking, superbly crafted.