13th February, 1929
PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL
My dear Prime Minister,
You will remember that in previous letters I have drawn your attention to a new form of publicity which the Empire Marketing Board is developing to interest workingmen in this country in Empire matters. The method is to get out small posters stating that a contract for Australia, India or some other Dominion is being executed in the works and that if they want to get more contracts they should buy the produce of Australia or of the other Dominions. The scheme is progressing in a very satisfactory way and at the present moment over 300 factories in Great Britain are displaying these contract posters on their Premises. [1] I have just received four photographs shewing the way in which the posters are being used. I am enclosing these photographs which I am quite sure you will find very interesting. The smallest of the four is the most interesting. It shews the Works Council of the Stanton Iron Works Co. Ltd. near Nottingham meeting in a room on the walls of which the contract posters for Australia and for New Zealand are being exhibited. The other photographs shew the way in which the contract posters are being exhibited in some of the larger workshops in this country. I think that these photographs, and especially the one of the Works Council, are so interesting that you might like to let your colleagues in the Cabinet see them and possibly make some arrangement whereby Members of Parliament might also see them. I understand that the Empire Marketing Board is making some of these photographs available to the Overseas Press.
Yours sincerely, F. L. MCDOUGALL
_1 A miniature of a poster appears as the frontispiece for the Empire Marketing Board’s annual report 1929. It reads in part: ‘A contract for Australia is now in hand at these Works. Question:
How can you help to secure further contracts from Australia? Answer: By buying, and by getting your wife to buy the produce Australia is sending us’. See Empire Marketing Board May 1928 to May 1929, E.M.B. 19, London, 1929.
_
__