Selling Britishness: Commodity Culture, the Dominions, and Empire 9780228012153

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selling britishness

Selling Britishness Commodity Culture, the Dominions, and Empire

f e l i c i t y ba r n e s

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022 ISBN 978-0-2280-1051-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-1056-2 (paper) ISBN 978-0-2280-1215-3 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-2280-1216-0 (ePUB) Legal deposit third quarter 2022 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Selling Britishness : commodity culture, the Dominions, and empire / Felicity Barnes. Names: Barnes, Felicity, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220233381 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220233543 | ISBN 9780228010562 (paper) | ISBN 9780228010517 (cloth) | ISBN 9780228012153 (ePDF) | ISBN 9780228012160 (ePUB) Subjects: LCSH: Consumption (Economics)—Great Britain—History—20th century. | LCSH: Commercial products—Great Britain—Marketing—History—20th century. | LCSH: National characteristics, British—History—20th century. | LCSH: Imperialism—Economic aspects—Great Britain—History—20th century. Classification: LCC HC260.C6 B37 2022 | DDC 339.4/709420904—dc23

This book was typeset in 10.5/13 New Baskerville ITC Pro. Copy-editing and composition by T&T Productions Ltd, London.

Contents

Figures vii Acknowledgements xi Introduction 3 1 The New Empire Marketing: Dominion Organisations in the Metropolis 21 2 Trading on Sentiment? Dominion Campaigns, Emotion and the Cultural Economy of Empire Trade 44 3 ‘All-British’ Lands: Advertising and the Construction of Commodity Britishness 66 4 ‘British to the Core’: Trade Films, the Metropolis, and Dominion Identity 88 5 Bringing Another Empire Alive? The Dominions and the Empire Marketing Board 111 6 ‘Another Empire Link’: Advertising and Britishness in the Dominions 134 Conclusion: The End of Selling Britishness? 161 Notes 167 Bibliography 205 Index 231

Figures

1.1

Australia brings a Christmas pudding to the Lord Mayor’s Show. ‘The Lord Mayor’s Show’, British Pathé, 1925. 22

1.2

Advertising New Zealand meat at ‘Home’: a 1933 British butcher’s shop window. New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Eleventh Annual Statement of Accounts for the Year Ended 30th June 1933, n.p. 30

1.3

Advertising ‘British’ Australian fruit on van sides. ‘Blackfriars Rd, August and September 1930’, Australian Publicity in the United Kingdom – Copies of Miscellaneous Memos Between Official Secretary and Director of Trade Publicity, A2910 430/1/98 Part 1, National Archives of Australia. 33

1.4

Selling Canadian apples and promoting the empire spirit: the 1934 Imperial Fruit Show’s Miss Canada and Miss Nova Scotia give away apples to cheering boys at the Cottage Homes (orphanages) in Countesthorpe. Leicester Chronicle, 10 November 1934, 4, Mirrorpix/Reach Licensing. 40

3.1

The producer periphery and the consuming centre. ‘Canada Calling Edinburgh’, 19 October, OM(S) 05, History of Advertising Trust. 74

3.2

Making a masculine Dominion: the settler figure and his bounty of sultanas. Liverpool Echo, 27 May 1927, 11, Mirrorpix/ Reach Licensing. 84

3.3

The Australian settler cut-out ready for ‘better class stores’ and his Canadian counterpart from the ‘Canada Calling’ campaign. Advertiser’s Weekly, 26 November 1926, 324; Advertisers Weekly, 22 July, 150; History of Advertising Trust. 85

viii

4.1

Figures

Queues for Australia’s film show in Blackburn. Australian Dairy Review, 27 June 1936, 8, National Library of Australia. 91

4.2 Even more publicity: front-page press reports of New Zealand’s movie competitions. Derby Daily Telegraph, 16 February 1935, 1, Mirrorpix/Reach Licensing. 100 4.3 New Zealand reimagined as a British pastoral. The Milky Way: Dairying in New Zealand, F5215, Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision. 106 5.1

The Dominion dress code: Australian sultana farmers at work. Nottingham Evening Post, 24 June 1929, 3, Mirrorpix/ Reach Licensing. 132

6.1

‘Another Empire Link’: Ilotts campaigning for British clients. Advertiser’s Weekly, 27 May 1927, 329, History of Advertising Trust. 135

6.2

Frank Goldberg on a ‘carpetbagging’ tour. As with Ilotts, Goldberg also pictured his firm as a ‘link’. Advertiser’s Weekly, 30 July 1926, 159, History of Advertising Trust. 142

6.3 Making a British market in Australia: Gordon & Gotch introduce cousin Kelly. Advertiser’s Weekly, 26 July 1929, 130, British Library. 148 6.4 Making a modern Dominion: Ovaltine’s up-to-date advertising. New Zealand Herald, 23 February 1931, 14, Auckland Libraries – Ngā Whare Mātauranga o Tāmaki Makaurau. 157

c o l o u r p l at e s 1

Australian Trade Publicity Committee’s promotional material featuring ‘British’ Australian apples. ‘Buy Australian Fruit: British to the Core’, C. Shiers, PIC Poster Drawer 250, National Library of Australia.

2

Materialising the ties of kinship with commodities in ATP promotional pamphlets. ‘Australian Eggs for the Homeland’ and ‘Australian Butter for the Homeland’, Emigration Box 1, 10, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, University of Oxford.

Figures

3

EMB poster mapping mighty New Zealand. ‘Map of the Shipping Lanes of Empire’, F. Taylor, B098/X4 2845194, Libraries and Archives Canada.

4

Imagining shared Dominion landscapes in an EMB orchard poster. ‘The Apple Orchards of Empire’, G. Sheringham, B090/X10 2834280, Libraries and Archives Canada.

5

The EMB’s Australian ‘interchange of trade’ sequence, with Britain at its heart. ‘Dairying in Australia’, 1935.750; ‘The Good Shopper’, 1935.643; F. Newbould, Manchester Art Gallery. ‘Every Time You Buy Empire Produce You Help the Empire to Buy the Goods You Make at Home’, F. Newbould, B085/X6 2845088, LAC. ‘Our Steel for Australia’, 1935.648; ‘Steel Manufacturing in the United Kingdom’, 1935.723; F. Newbould, Manchester Art Gallery.

6

Making Britain the heart of India in another EMB ‘interchange’ map. Curtains, a desk, a pot plant, and some visual sleight of hand work hard to put Britain at the centre. ‘India and the British Isles Drawn to the Same Scale’, 1935.575, K. Henderson, Manchester Art Gallery.

7

EMB posters featuring the Dominion difference: working in Australia and East Africa. ‘A Flock of Merino Sheep’, 1935.774, A.B. Webb; ‘East African Transport New Style’, 1935.713, A. Allinson; Manchester Art Gallery.

8

Subjects of art as well as empire? In these EMB posters, workers in a Canadian bacon factory are detailed as individuals; African cocoa workers are transformed into featureless colour blocks. ‘A Bacon Factory’, 1935.767, A. McNab, Manchester Art Gallery; ‘Cocoa’, E. McKnight Kauffer, CO 956/499, The National Archives (UK).

ix

Acknowledgements

Writing acknowledgements is the last step in finishing a book, and the most enjoyable. It is a cliché to say that any book is the work of many more people than the person named on the cover but it is no less true for being one. Let me begin by acknowledging the support of the University of Auckland – Waipapa Taumata Rau, and in particular the Faculty of Arts Research Development Fund and School of Humanities PBRF funding. I would also like to note the significance of the university’s continued support for research leave. Some of this was spent as a visiting fellow in the history faculty at the University of Cambridge, and I am grateful to Saul Dubow for facilitating this, and for the company of the History and Economics Group there. Numerous colleagues at the University of Auckland – Waipapa Taumata Rau played a part in supporting this book, including Charlotte Bennett, Charlotte Greenhalgh, Candida Keithley, Bailey Masters, and Ross Webb. Maartje Abbenhuis and Malcolm Campbell read part or all of the manuscript, an effort above and beyond the call of duty that is greatly appreciated. Thanks are also due to David Higgins of Newcastle University (UK) for reading and commenting so helpfully on the complete manuscript, and to Marvin McInnis, emeritus professor at Queen’s University, Canada, who read an early draft of the first chapter and shared his expertise on various aspects of the Canadian agricultural economy. Thanks also to the anonymous referees for their kind and helpful comments, many of which have found a place in the book. I am also grateful to Lisa Bailey, Annalise Higgins, James Belich, Caroline Daley,

xii

Acknowledgements

Deborah Montgomerie, Ellen Nakamura, and other colleagues for their input. The remaining flaws are all my own work. The book benefited enormously from the opportunity to present some of its findings in various seminars, including Annabel Cooper’s Film in the Colony Symposium; the New Zealand Historical Association conferences in Auckland and Christchurch; Charlotte MacDonald and Charlotte Greenhalgh’s Gender History Network; the Australian National University’s history seminar; the Canadian Historical Association conference; the graduate cultural history seminar at the University of Oxford, organised by Sasha Rasmussen; and the Menzies Centre’s film seminar. Special thanks must go to Jatinder Mann for his kind invitation to outline the book’s key themes at the inaugural New Zealand, Australian, and Canadian Studies lecture at Hong Kong Baptist University, and to Mahito Takeuchi (Nihon University) and Katsuhiko Yokoi of the Research Institute for the History of Global Arms Transfer at Meiji University, Tokyo, for the invitation to speak at the workshop on ‘The Economics of the British World’. Not only am I grateful for their superb hospitality, but the workshop itself was a wonderful opportunity to swap ideas with colleagues, in particular my fellow presenters, Andrew Dilley and Rachel Bright. The research itself was only made possible through the efforts of staff at the Alexander Turnbull Library, Archives New Zealand, Auckland Libraries, the British Library, the Bodleian Libraries, the History of Advertising Trust (UK), Libraries and Archives Canada, the National Archives of Australia, the National Library of Australia, the National Archives (UK), the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision, the University of Auckland Library, and the University of Cambridge Library. I should note that this might not be a book at all were it not for Richard Baggaley, my commissioning editor at MQUP, who spotted the Hong Kong Baptist University lecture and thought there might be a book in it. It seems he was right, and I am very grateful to him for shepherding what might otherwise have been an endlessly postponed project so expertly. Thanks also to Kathleen Fraser at MQUP, and to Sam Elworthy at Auckland University Press for coming on board to co-publish. Bringing this book to life has also required the talents and assistance of Sam Clark and Alex Chambers at T&T Productions, and Judy Dunlop. Elements of chapters 2 and 3 have appeared in ‘The Importance of Being “British”? Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the Cultural

Acknowledgements

xiii

Economy of Empire in the Interwar Era’ (published by the Journal of Research Institute for the History of Global Arms Transfer), while chapter  5 is based on ‘Bringing Another Empire Alive? The Empire Marketing Board and the Construction of Dominion Identity, 1926–33’ (published by the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History), which in turn drew on work first explored in my first book, New Zealand’s London. I am grateful to both organisations for permission to republish. Thanks also to R. Twining and Company Ltd for granting permission for an advertisement for Ovaltine to be included. This book took much longer to complete than I anticipated. The combination of an episode of personal ill health, followed by a global pandemic that is still unfolding as I write, conspired to make the usually protracted business of writing a history stretch out even further. As I had originally envisaged a more ambitious project, incorporating immigration advertising, some re-scoping was required. At the same time, these two events mean I have more than the usual number of people to thank for their part in seeing this book finished. So my thanks to Helen Bones for her long-distance research assistance, when it was not possible to travel, and to the numerous archivists and librarians who digitised materials essential to the project in between lockdowns. I  owe more than the usual thanks to Isaac Cranshaw, Abbey Wrigley, and their teams, along with some friends and family who proved indispensable in a crisis: Karen Smith, Josephine Gagan, Susan Matthews, Gina Hochstein, Victoria Spence, Daniel Barnes, and Katie Barnes. I am also grateful to Jennifer Frost, Katrina Ford, Marco de Jong, and Kim Moore. This book is dedicated with love to three exceptional people who have weathered it all with me: Michael, Hope, and Piper Whitehead.

Plate 1 Australian Trade Publicity Committee’s promotional material featuring ‘British’ Australian apples.

Plate 2 Materialising the ties of kinship with commodities in ATP promotional pamphlets.

Plate 3 EMB poster mapping mighty New Zealand.

Plate 4 Imagining shared Dominion landscapes in an EMB orchard poster.

Plate 5 The EMB’s Australian ‘interchange of trade’ sequence, with Britain at its heart.

Plate 6 Making Britain the heart of India in another EMB ‘interchange’ map. Curtains, a desk, a pot plant, and some visual sleight of hand work hard to put Britain at the centre.

Plate 7 EMB posters featuring the Dominion difference: working in Australia and East Africa.

Plate 8 Subjects of art as well as empire? In these EMB posters, workers in a Canadian bacon factory are detailed as individuals; African cocoa workers are transformed into featureless colour blocks.

selling britishness

Introduction

On a misty London day in late October 1925, thousands of people made their way to Wembley to witness the end of a great imperial spectacle.1 After two years and almost 27  million visitors, the British Empire Exhibition was closing. Its last rites were observed with fitting pomp and ceremony. The Duke of York made a speech and inspected various guards of honour, then the Bishop of Willesden offered a prayer as the large crowd turned congregation to sing ‘O God, our help in ages past’. Buglers sounded ‘The Retreat’, and the exhibition flag slowly slid down as the sun set on this particular version of empire.2 Finally, massed bands struck up, and those gathered joined them in one last tribute, singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, and ‘God Save the King’. With the official formalities over, the Duke departed, but the crowd stayed on to bring down the final curtain. Long after midnight, while some queued for one last ride on the ‘Racer’, there was a ‘certain amount of boisterous ragging in the Amusement park’, leaving windows smashed and dustbins overturned. ‘About fifty people, mostly women,’ continued the demolition process, raiding the flower beds and ‘scurrying away with arms loaded with bouquets’ despite the stern commands of police.3 After the last visitors made their way out late the next morning, the moving vans arrived and the ‘landmark of empire’ began to be dismantled in earnest.4 It was to be an ignominious finale – even the end of a model empire is not pretty. The British Empire Exhibition’s two-year run had been marked by mixed fortunes, with fluctuating crowd numbers and disappointing financial returns. By January 1926, liquidators had been appointed. ‘High class furniture and effects’ – including a model

4

Selling Britishness

railway carriage and Persian, Indian, and Axminster carpets – were advertised for sale, along with domestic detritus such as fans, electric heaters, typewriters, curtains, and china.5 The thrones used by the king and queen in the opening ceremony were donated to a local church, while former ‘palaces’ of arts or industries were demoted, being reinvented as factories. Colonial pavilions suffered similar fates: Palestine’s was sold off to become a laundry in Glasgow, and the Nigeria pavilion became a garage in Preston.6 The Dominion pavilions also fell from grace; once-proud showcases of ‘progress’, they were unceremoniously pulled down for scrap.7 Wembley’s decline into rubble and red ink is symbolic. Imperial exhibitions would remain an occasional feature of interwar commodity culture: a number of Wembley exhibits were packed up to be sent to the New Zealand South Seas Exhibition in Dunedin, while others were stored temporarily in the former Malta pavilion, awaiting a planned movable exhibition designed to ‘carry the lessons of Wembley into all parts of the country’.8 Johannesburg and Glasgow hosted smaller versions of Wembley in the 1930s. But nothing of the size or style of the British Empire Exhibition would be attempted again.9 This makes it tempting to see Wembley as an example of a wider story of imperial decline and fall in the first part of the twentieth century, and even more tempting to read that story as a morality tale, with the ambitions of a mighty empire reduced to a garage in Preston.10 But Wembley signalled a change, not an end. Though the great era of imperial exhibitions was over, a new version of what Thomas Richards has called the imperial commodity spectacle was just beginning.11 Facilitated by the continued rise of mass advertising and underwritten by changing economic conditions, that spectacle, once contained by exhibitions within their carefully curated colonial pavilions and Dominion avenues, would now spill out into city streets, appearing in shop windows, on billboards and bus sides, on cinema screens and magazine pages. As the spectacle changed in form, it changed in name. Imperial exhibitions gave way to empire marketing, and its campaigns would prove to be a far more potent force in teaching ‘the lessons of Wembley’ than plaster palaces and pavilions. The British Empire Exhibition closed after two years and 27 million visitors: the new empire marketing schemes would run for more than a decade, with individual campaigns reaching millions in a single month.

Introduction

5

The leaders of the new empire marketing were a group of Britain’s white settler colonies, known, from 1907, as Dominions. From the end of the British Empire Exhibition until well after World War II, three of those dominions – Australia, Canada, and New Zealand – undertook large-scale advertising and marketing campaigns in Britain to promote the sale of their commodities to British consumers. Using the very latest marketing techniques, Dominion governments, producer organisations, and private companies worked together to secure and expand their positions in the British marketplace. In extensive campaigns beginning in the mid-1920s, New Zealand lamb and dairy products filled British shop windows; specialty Canadian ‘Empire’ shops plugged wheat, apples, bacon, and even macaroni; and Australian fruit and butter appeared on British cinema screens. In-store demonstrators offered busy housewives a taste of the Dominions; British children received birthday cards from ‘Uncle Anchor’, courtesy of New Zealand’s Anchor butter club; aeroplanes towed banners reading ‘Canada Calling’ over major cities; and Australian cricketers took time off the pitch to extol the virtues of Antipodean apples.12 The head of the new Australian Trade Publicity (ATP), A.E. Hyland, even claimed to have come up with what was surely the era’s most overworked marketing idea – the ‘Empire Christmas pudding’ – in 1925, adding that ‘since then the idea has grown until all over the country Empire Christmas puddings are now being made in a spectacular way.’13 It seems the imperial commodity spectacle did not end in a garage in Preston after all. Instead it found new life as Dominion advertising on metropolitan buses and billboards and in grocers’ windows. The imperial commodity spectacle also lived on in the nature of the campaigns. Though initiated by the Dominions, these campaigns were only nominally national in character. While they promoted ‘Australian’, ‘Canadian’, or ‘New Zealand’ commodities, the defining feature of the products, and of the lands and people that produced them, was Britishness. Slogans such as ‘British to the backbone’ (one marketing genius’s contribution to selling New Zealand lamb) and, more tastefully, ‘British to the core’ (used to promote Australian and Canadian apples) were commonplace.14 Images, symbols, and even the media forms adopted also worked to naturalise the idea of the Dominions as thoroughly British. Advertisements anglicised Dominion landscapes and emphasised kinship

6

Selling Britishness

connections, reducing the imaginative distance between the former colonies and the metropole. Children receiving birthday cards from ‘Uncle Anchor’ may not have been all that surprised to find he lived in Birmingham instead of New Zealand. Nor was the Dominions’ new commodity spectacle limited to selling their own commodities in Britain: during the same period, ambitious Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand advertising agencies set up shop in London to exploit opportunities to bring British goods to Dominion consumers. Following similar strategies to advertisers of Dominion produce, these Dominion agencies used a shared sense of British identity as a rationale for advertising metropolitan products back to Dominion consumers. New Zealand agency Charles Haines called New Zealand the ‘Most British of all the Dominions’; Australia, according to publishing juggernaut Gordon & Gotch, had ‘no fundamental differences in taste to consider’.15 The other Dominions – South Africa, the Irish Free State, and Newfoundland – were also involved in some empire commodity marketing, but to a much lesser extent. All three appeared in campaigns run by the British government’s Empire Marketing Board, but they do not appear to have been as active in initiating their own promotional schemes. There is a complex set of possible explanations for their lack of involvement, including relative size (for Newfoundland in particular) and varied political status (both Newfoundland and the Irish Free State would cease to be Dominions during this era, albeit for very different reasons), along with very distinct commodity profiles that had equally distinct development stages. As an example, during this period, the Irish Free State’s dairy industry suffered from organisational frictions, quality problems, and fragmentation that ruled out the possibility of group marketing that formed the backbone of other Dominions’ campaigns.16 South Africa, however, remains a partial exception, as it did operate small-scale metropolitan-based marketing promotions, based largely around citrus, in the 1930s.17 But extensive marketing of South African produce in Britain did not really get underway until the 1960s, by which time the empire, and its marketing, had changed profoundly. So too had South Africa. No longer part of the Commonwealth, the republic continued to export to the United Kingdom, but far from taking a ‘national’ approach, even nominally, the deep unpopularity abroad of its apartheid policy led marketers to attempt to conceal the origins of that produce from the consuming public.18

Introduction

7

For these reasons, this book has focused its research attention on the new empire marketing’s main players – Australia, Canada, and New Zealand – rather than on all six Dominions. Their campaigns and the effects of those campaigns are the subject of this book. It argues that Dominion empire marketing worked to reflect and construct a particular form of Britishness, and that this, in turn, worked to support and sustain empire more broadly. Interwar commodity marketing campaigns, then, form an unacknowledged element in the wider construction of imperial power. Campaigns were sites where the former settler colonies forged a new form of imperial identity. Following the familiar fault lines of imperial power – especially race and gender – they harnessed consumer marketing’s image-making possibilities to transform themselves into modern white Dominions. For all their spectacular nature, these Dominion campaigns have largely been forgotten. But though they were evanescent, they had enduring consequences. The campaigns did not simply sell produce: they sold a Dominion version of Britishness. Their evocation of Britishness helped normalise the empire, both within the Dominions and in the metropolis itself. Selling Britishness, then, joins a burgeoning field of research interested in the connections between consumption, commodities, and the cultural construction of empire. Work by Arjun Appadurai, Daniel Millar, Frank Trentmann, and others has drawn attention to the myriad ways in which acts of consumption can be ‘charged with social meaning’.19 In such work ‘consumption has served as a lightning rod for new ideas of self and subject, of gender and class, of nationality and community, of race and place’.20 The attractions of these ideas for understanding empire are obvious, as they converge with imperial history’s own cultural turn. This introduction cannot do justice to the proliferation of studies generated by such a productive encounter; however, it can point to some absences relevant to this book’s interests.21 Notably, while there has been plenty of research – and some debate – about empire and its commodities’ impact on the metropole, much of this has been confined to the nineteenth century and the ‘exotic’ produce of the dependent colonies.22 Yet, as this book details, empire marketing’s greatest enthusiasts were the Dominions, not the dependent empire, and they reached the peak of their activity in the twentieth century, not the nineteenth; their produce was familiar, not exotic,

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Selling Britishness

and though they surely did have an impact on metropolitan culture – cheap wheat, meat, and dairy produce transformed diets – this book argues for a broader view of their effect. Empire marketing created the Dominions as an imperial success story, with former colonial frontiers transformed into modern white ‘neo-Britains’. Such a success story legitimised and supported what John Darwin terms the ‘empire project’: that ‘chaotic pluralism’ of agents and actions, at home and abroad, that came to constitute Britain’s empire.23 Though novel in form, Dominion campaigns were simply the latest iterations of a sustained colonial engagement with, and commitment to, the imperial commodity spectacle. Their forerunners – exhibitions – have generated a rich scholarship, where it has been convincingly argued that these monumental, if ephemeral, displays did not simply reflect imperial culture but were instrumental in creating it. Historians have routinely analysed these commodity spectacles as sites of identity formation. In particular, they have been interested in the ‘self-conscious reworking of fluid national and imperial identities’.24 Exhibitions, considered in their entirety, could reify empire, while individual plaster pavilions and their contents have been understood as metonyms for nations. Though by far the greatest focus has been on the Great Exhibition of 1851 and its nineteenth-century progeny, a newer vein of research has begun to breach this temporal boundary to investigate the role of twentieth-century exhibitions such as Wembley in the maintenance and construction of imperial and national identities.25 This book links an older exhibitionary culture with empire marketing, suggesting the new imperial commodity spectacle offered a similarly powerful opportunity for both the formation of a particular form of identity and the maintenance of imperialism alike. As in exhibition spaces, Dominion marketing went beyond simply representing an identity to play a critical role in producing one.

adve rt i s i n g c a m pa i g n s , t h e cultural e co n o m y, a n d t h e i n v ention of c o m m o d i t y b r i t i s hnes s Framing Dominion commodity marketing as a site where Britishness was produced as well as displayed extends an important current debate about the role of Britishness in the economic expansion of the empire. For economic history, once deeply suspicious of the

Introduction

9

irrational worlds of society and culture, has taken a cultural turn. There is now growing interest in understanding the complex interrelationships between culture and the economy, rather than treating them as separate entities.26 Approaches to what is termed the cultural economy vary, but they all reject the older separate-spheres model of culture and economics, instead insisting that ‘the production, distribution and accumulation of resources … have always been a cultural performance’.27 Imperial historians have followed this change. Stuart Ward’s work on the role of imperial sentiment in Anglo-Australian commercial relationships set out to ‘bridge the chasm that has traditionally separated the work of economic and cultural historians’. He argues that sentiment remained an important element in determining Australia’s economic relations with Britain up until the post-war period.28 Andrew Thompson and Gary Magee’s recent examination of the economy of the ‘British World’ to 1914 continues bridging the gap. Working on a wider canvas, they implicate culture – in this case, Britishness – in underwriting imperial economic expansion in the nineteenth century. They argue, first, that the mass migration of Britons to the settler colonies from 1850 led to the formation of ‘ethnic and cultural ties that bound settlers emotionally, financially and spiritually to home’, and second, that these ‘co-ethnic networks’ were crucial to empire’s development.29 In particular, co-ethnic networks help explain the accelerating demand for British exports in settler societies around the end of the nineteenth century. Though far from the metropole, migrants in these colonies remained ‘British, or at least partly so’, and this ‘had material implications, not only shaping consumer tastes and preferences but impacting more broadly on the very nature and orientation of economic activity and behaviour’.30 Likewise, others have begun to implicate an ‘empire effect’ in the construction of financial and investment networks, highlighting the role Britishness played as both cultural glue and economic lubricant, embedding economic analyses within a cultural matrix.31 These new approaches are important interventions into existing narratives about the nature of empire’s economy. However, the imperial economy did not simply benefit from culture: it also helped to produce it. Shifting the emphasis is more than an exercise in semantics, for reconsidering imperial trade networks as producers of, rather than products of, culture recasts empire as a dynamic and

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Selling Britishness

contingent cultural force. In work such as Ward’s, which argues for the persistence of British ties, sentiment becomes a yardstick for measuring imperialism’s endurance. But if cultures can be produced by economic activity, then sentiment becomes a contingent – even volatile – force. Similarly, if sentiment can be produced by economic interaction, then co-ethnic networks were not simply the natural outcome of an unchanging set of tastes, attitudes, and values transmitted by migration. Instead, these tastes and attitudes might also be cultivated. Thompson and Magee do note that Britishness was not static, but ‘co-ethnic networks’ and related ‘empire effects’ tend to presuppose a shared and stable Britishness. Consequently, some have suggested that the cultural economy of the ‘British World’ can seem all too ‘cosy’, underplaying the tensions between some of its elements – in particular, the role of politics.32 However, Dominion marketing suggests the cultural economy functioned rather differently. In the interwar period, imperial networks of trade and consumption were creators as well as beneficiaries of Britishness; marketing helped to make the imperial sentiment that it hoped to profit from. Though migration underwrote sentiment, the ‘global chain of kith and kin’ was also the product of consumer advertising. Repositioning Britishness as, at least in part, constructed through trade’s networks makes the idea of co-ethnicity rather less than cosy for a further reason. Research on social networks, which underpins economic history’s cultural turn, is, naturally enough, focused on inclusivity. Work has revolved around family networks such as the Rothschilds, or business ties based around religion such as those formed by Quakers or Jews, to demonstrate culture’s role in facilitating the economy. Accordingly, it has spawned neutral and inclusive-sounding terms such as ‘co-ethnic networks’ or ‘non-market advantages’ to describe these cultural formations.33 But the economics of empire were never neutral. Scholars applying these ideas in the imperial setting have therefore been quick to acknowledge that British co-ethnic networks played a role in the dispossession of Indigenous groups.34 Yet their impact on First Peoples was more than a regrettable side effect. A co-ethnic network is, by its very nature, also exclusionary, meaning dispossession was less a consequence of these networks than a condition of them. Powerful exclusionary dynamics were at play in the construction of imperial identities through trade in the interwar period – dynamics that are

Introduction

11

easily overlooked when work on cultural economies focuses on inclusivity. Pursuing the ‘non-market advantages’ of Britishness in commodity culture required mobilising that familiar standby of imperial cultural power: racial difference. Advertising, as Liz McFall has observed, ‘is a constituent material practice in which the “cultural” and the “economic” are inextricably entangled’.35 It is unsurprising, then, that an argument along these lines has already been made for Britain’s imperial commodity culture in the nineteenth century. In an influential analysis, Anne McClintock has argued that the rise of mass marketing after the Great Exhibition allowed the proliferation of what she terms commodity racism. Taking shape around ‘the reinvention of racial difference’, commodity racism helped reshape and ‘maintain British national unity in the face of deepening imperial competition and colonial resistance’.36 This process was not monolithic, varying in style and timing between products, with some eventually evading their colonial origins completely.37 But the key point is that Victorian commodity culture could both construct and communicate ideas about imperialism and race, taking ‘scenes of empire into every corner of the home, stamping images of colonial conquest on soap boxes, matchboxes, biscuits tins, whiskey bottles, tea tins, and chocolate bars’.38 Advertising’s ability to bring empire into ‘every corner of the home’ had increased by the interwar period. In Britain, expenditure on advertising grew from an estimated £31 million in 1920 to £59 million in 1938.39 Along with greater volume, advertising during what has been termed Britain’s ‘golden age’ also became more sophisticated, as practitioners adopted new techniques – often borrowed from America – such as market research, and new creative approaches that emphasised a product’s ‘more abstract qualities’ rather than its utility.40 Rather than offering a laundry list of features, advertisers moved towards associating products with ‘qualities desired by consumers – status, glamour, reduction of anxiety, happy families’.41 Improvements in image production, including art and photography, along with faster printing times in familiar media such as magazines and newspapers facilitated these new approaches. Advertising also found its way into new media, starting with radio and film and going on to encompass wild and wonderful ideas such as aeroplane advertising. All of these changes, designed to improve advertising’s reach and impact, suggest even greater possibilities for that reinvention

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Selling Britishness

of difference found in commodity racism, especially the focus on a product’s symbolic rather than actual qualities.42 Yet, as with studies of imperial consumption generally, only a few studies have traced commodity racism’s continuing career into the twentieth century, and these tend to focus on advertising’s use (or, rather, misuse) of blackness in the construction of a racialised ‘other’.43 The Dominions reinvented difference in a distinct way. Instead of consolidating their identity through the familiar process of racial othering, the Dominion campaigns stressed their particular version of Britishness while expunging any trace of imperial exoticism. Consequently, the Dominions’ commodity advertising lacked the spectacularly explicit racism found in advertisements for exotic produce such as tea and even in mundane household items such as toothpaste. At first glance, then, the Dominions’ British-styled commodity campaigns are more likely to inspire embarrassment than outrage. But the construction of ‘British’ Dominions through advertising remained a pernicious process. Just as recent research on nineteenth-century commodity racism argues for its covert role in upholding imperial power in colonial settings, so Dominion empire marketing belied the violence of its origins.44 As Lorenzo Veracini has observed, ‘the peaceful settler hides behind the ethnic cleanser.’45 Marketing fruit grown in ‘British soil’ required the expropriation of Indigenous land, a process simultaneously masked and restaged in a benign fashion in commodity promotions. As a result, First Peoples became even more marginal in these carefully constructed commodity identities than they had become in their own lands. Gender too was mobilised in this work. Colonialism coupled race with gender, creating ‘manly’ Englishmen and feminised ‘natives’ – a  familiar binary that flourished in Dominion commodity advertising in ways that have yet to be examined.46 The new empire marketing deployed race and gender together to construct a very specific form of identity, which this book terms ‘commodity Britishness’. Commodity Britishness, then, co-opts Anne McClintock’s idea of commodity racism to identify and interrogate a particular set of images and ideas that have slipped under the historiographical radar. But invoking Britishness of any kind requires some definition – a job made more difficult by its flexibility of usage. As a collective form of identification for the four constituent parts of the United Kingdom, the term has a robustly debated set of meanings and effects,

Introduction

13

especially when Britishness is conflated with Englishness.47 Recent debates around citizenship – ignited by events such as the Windrush scandal and of course Brexit – have added further intensity to the problem of the idea of Britishness. Alongside these debates, and sometimes in dialogue with them, other scholars have focused on the idea of Britishness as a ‘global phenomenon’. Rooted in the imperial processes of trade, conquest, and settlement, this version is transformed in response to local settings.48 Fluid and labile, the componentry of this global Britishness was never stable. It drew from a wide and flexible repertoire of cultural referents, which, though combined in different ways, perpetuated the idea of Britain and Britishness as the apogee of civilisation.49 Empire itself offered proof of the virtues of Britishness, as did the monarchy, military heroes, Westminster democracy, and English literature, along with a panoply of other cultural signifiers from gardens to Gilbert and Sullivan to Shakespeare. These ideas spread widely: ‘At its zenith Britishness joined peoples around the world in shared traditions and common loyalties that were strenuously maintained.’50 My invocation of commodity Britishness reflects this amorphous yet powerful cultural form, sometimes termed ‘British race patriotism’.51 But it also tries to pin it down, by analysing the particular repertoire developed by marketers in their pursuit of a ‘British’ identity. In this way, butter, cheese, meat, and fruit advertisements offer a case study in the construction of one form of this transnational identity. In the hands of commodity marketers, being British meant being modern, masculine, rural, and white. Rather than relying on a nebulous, if widely disseminated, sense of identity, Dominion advertisers drew on shared elements to articulate their own distinctive version. This book, then, delineates a certain type of imperial identity – that of the former settler colonies, or Dominions – at a certain time: the interwar period. Rather than assert a generalised, even fugitive, Britishness, it argues for paying close attention to a specific mode of identity formation: one revealed by a careful examination of commodity marketing and advertising. In doing so, however, it does not perform an analysis of the marketing’s effectiveness; as it largely conforms with other advertising and marketing approaches in this era, though, we have no reason to suspect it was not effective. Nor is this an analysis of the advertising itself. Much of the scholarship around advertising seeks to understand how advertisements work, whether at an instrumental level, creating and communicating

14

Selling Britishness

brands, or in a broader sense, forging consumer societies, or generating gendered and racial identities.52 A number of these analyses work to understand advertising’s impact through the lens of one product, such as tobacco or soap.53 Such scholarship, and its basic presumption that advertising is indeed a potent cultural force, underpins and informs this book’s argument. However, its ambition is different. Rather than using empire marketing to chart the ways advertising works, this book uses advertising to trace the way empire works. In the new spaces provided by commodity culture, older forms of imperial power found new expression.54

th e ot h e r e m p i r e m a r keting: i m p e r i a l  e c o n o m i c s a nd the e m p i r e m a r k e t i n g b oard Selling Britishness, then, positions Dominion commodity marketing as a potent cultural force. Such a reading is, at first glance, wildly at odds with existing scholarship. Empire marketing in the twentieth century has become synonymous with the work of the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), a British government-funded body organised to promote empire produce to British consumers. History has not been kind to the EMB: one economic historian has described its work as ‘pathetic’, while a more recent study has concluded that its campaigns had no discernible impact on the buying public.55 To round out the dismal record, further research shows that these metropolitan-generated schemes also failed to excite the empire abroad.56 Cultural historians have been more charitable, suggesting that the EMB had more success promoting the idea of empire than selling imperial produce, although they also conclude the empire it promoted was both racist and gendered.57 In any case, studies that differ a little on the EMB’s success nevertheless converge on its ephemerality. Conventionally, empire marketing exists between 1926 and 1933 – the lifetime of the EMB – where it forms a diverting but largely inconsequential byway in the inglorious narrative of the end of free trade and Britain’s ultimately unsuccessful retreat into protectionism.58 Inaugurated as a way to persuade British shoppers to buy more empire goods without taking the risk of imposing tariffs, the EMB was considered redundant once Britain adopted imperial preference at the Imperial Economic Conference in Ottawa in 1932.

Introduction

15

But empire marketing did not end with Ottawa, even if the EMB did. On the contrary, Dominion marketing campaigns actually gained momentum after Ottawa. While economic histories tend to focus on Ottawa as a ‘potentially transformative’ moment for intra-imperial relationships, the existence of active Dominion campaigns in the metropolis from the mid-1920s lends weight to the argument that, for marketing at least, Ottawa was more a case of continuity than change.59 The Dominions were already convinced of the importance of the British market: well before Ottawa, Australia, New Zealand, and even Canada had turned their resources and attention to capturing a bigger share of Britain’s consumers. They may have had ambitions for other markets – for Canada, in particular, their own domestic economy and the vast market across their border would always be important considerations – but the majority of the Dominion marketing effort in the interwar period was spent on Britain. The board spent 68 pence on publicity for every £1,000 worth of empire produce imported. By contrast, New Zealand alone spent almost double that just on its dairy campaigns.60 Indeed, economic historians have battled over the impacts of the Ottawa agreements on sales without ever realising the potential effect of Dominion advertising campaigns. We cannot be sure of their effectiveness, but a recent study of the EMB’s marketing impact suggests it was Dominion campaigns, not British ones, that were effective in driving sales.61 At the same time, the Dominions still benefited from the Board’s work, along with other imperially motivated campaigns, augmenting the power of their own promotion. Post Ottawa, Dominion efforts increased, as global trading conditions made the United Kingdom an even more important market for them.62 Continued campaigning also demonstrates that the Dominions recognised what economic approaches tend to skirt: that the government’s imperial preference was not necessarily the same as the consumers’ preferences.63 The Ottawa agreements certainly helped the Dominions, but so long as there were competing products in the British market – and all Dominion products faced competition, often from other Dominions – they could not ‘leave the “voluntary” preference to look after itself’ once quotas and tariffs were introduced.64 Instead they needed to keep on selling to the public.65 Nor were the Dominions as dismissive of the EMB as later historians would be. As we will see in a later chapter, Australia and New

16

Selling Britishness

Zealand in particular co-opted the EMB as a complement to, and extension of, their own programmes. (Canada took a little more convincing.) Consequently, it is neither an indication of the EMB’s lack of success, nor particularly surprising, that when the British government would no longer fund the scheme the Dominions would not pick up the slack. The EMB had been a useful, free, auxiliary promotional system, but by the time of its demise in 1933, the Dominions had their own organisations running, and versions of them would be in place well into the post-World War II period. Rather than adopt the old centrifugal model of imperial influence, with the EMB’s initiatives rippling out to the Dominions, it would be more accurate to think of empire marketing as a largely Dominion-led enterprise that would benefit from time to time from metropolitan support.66 Accordingly, this book charts an unanticipated trajectory for Dominion marketing campaigns, which grew in strength and complexity through the 1930s, revising the conventional narrative of empire marketing’s rise and fall. And just as these campaigns change the story of empire marketing in the metropolis, so they also suggest revisions to interpretations of imperial economic and political history in the former Dominions.67 In Australia, for example, a recent history of the trade commissioner service misses the work of ATP, concluding instead that established markets such as the United Kingdom were ‘neglected’ during the interwar period.68 Likewise, the history of New Zealand’s trade commission does not capture the extensive publicity work carried on by other bodies alongside its more modest efforts in the first part of the twentieth century.69 These absences inadvertently help to sustain nationalist accounts of growing Dominion independence during the interwar period. As Francine McKenzie notes, these usually focus on political and constitutional change, but ‘there is a parallel economic nationalist narrative’ in which commercial ties to Britain are ‘evidence of persistent colonial subordination’.70 Loosening ties, and the development of alternative markets, then become proof of growing independence. The story plays out slightly differently in each Dominion. For Canada, the interwar economics of empire is positioned as another arena in which to test its fledgling national strength, with Prime Minister Mackenzie King, like Laurier before him, taking ‘great pride in fighting off imperial advances’. Bureaucrat Oscar Skelton, a quiet yet powerful influence on external affairs, ‘regarded imperialists

Introduction

17

with somewhat less affection than he did the bubonic plague’, and strategised endlessly to free Canada from what he saw as its colonial past.71 For Australia too, preference debates have become sites for flexing a little colonial muscle. Once considered evidence of colonial servility to British interests, trade negotiations such as Ottawa have been recontextualised as occasions where politicians rationally ‘asserted the autonomy of the nation state’.72 No longer British bootlickers, Australian politicians were recast as ‘hard and devious bargainers with little sentiment towards empire except where it suited their national interests’.73 New Zealand, on the other hand, with its greater economic dependence and tractability, earned the not especially flattering sobriquet of ‘dutiful Dominion’. Selling Britishness argues for a more complex reading. Whereas economic and political analyses emphasise divergence, both between the Dominions themselves and between each Dominion and Britain, a cultural analysis of marketing campaigns in the same era points to strong convergences. Though it has been argued that the politics around imperial preferences ‘confirms that the dominions were centres in their own right’, this study offers a more equivocal picture, blurring the familiar binaries between sentiment and selfinterest common to both political and economic studies.74 All three Dominions focused their marketing resources on the British market, and all three developed remarkably similar strategies to do so. The similarities are strong enough to argue, as this book does, that settler colonies’ commodity campaigns worked together to help forge a shared form of identity. In metropolitan advertising, Australian sultanas, Canadian cheese, and New Zealand lamb were not only all ‘British’, they were ‘British’ in the same way. Even though they may have offered competing products, marketers mobilised identical techniques to create their Dominions as modern, white, masculine members of empire. Reconceptualising empire marketing in this way reinforces a growing scholarship that draws on the economics of empire to reassert the importance of British sentiment and identity in the Dominions through this period and beyond.75 It also responds to calls to decentre empire by considering the ‘cultural traffic’ between colonies as well as that between metropolis and periphery.76 Dominion commodity campaigns also require us to rethink what exactly ‘empire’ marketing was. Much of the EMB’s bad press, then as now, has been related to the supposed folly of trying to convince

18

Selling Britishness

consumers, whose purchasing decisions were motivated by a range of factors, to prioritise imperial produce. It has been persuasively argued that the idea of patriotically shopping for empire had limited appeal outside of middle-class Conservative housewives.77 Consequently, as Erika Rappaport has shown in the case of tea, explicitly imperial advertising fell out of favour from the early 1930s.78 We could read this as further confirmation of empire’s decline in the interwar period. But its replacement is interesting. From the early 1930s, Rappaport suggests that older imperialist themes were overtaken by a cosy, domesticated version of Britishness, enlivened by a touch of modernity – a version symbolised by the cartoon character Mr T. Pott. She argues that Mr Pott better reflected tea’s consumers, who seemed to be disconnected from empire: as one market researcher found, some working-class customers knew nothing about where tea came from and assumed that it was British because they bought it at a local shop.79 However, Dominion marketers were ahead of their tea-selling colleagues. Empire marketing Dominion-style was not averse to using imperial tropes to attract those middle-class housewives, among others, but they had long positioned their product as more British than imperial. Indeed, as later chapters will argue, their campaigns mostly steered clear of vague empire terminology, preferring nominally national campaigns with a distinctly British flavour. Even their EMB campaigns developed a particular Dominion form of Britishness. Yet the adoption of a less imperially inflected Britishness was not a sign that colonialism had lost its grip. Instead, the construction of ‘commodity Britishness’ marked a high-water mark in the creation of settler colonies as ‘white men’s countries’.80 To focus too much on overtly imperial advertising is to miss the power of this subtler form of imperial identity and, consequently, to miss the important role commodities have played in the maintenance of empire and its hierarchies of power. Along with better-known strategies such as migration restrictions, commodity culture helped construct ‘white’ Dominions.

s e l l i n g b r i t i s h n es s Selling Britishness starts as the gates of Wembley swing shut, tracing the development of official Dominion marketing entities that sprang up in the exhibition’s wake. Unsurprisingly, each Dominion

Introduction

19

took a slightly different approach in marketing its produce to Britain: what is surprising is how much those approaches were alike. Even Canada, often characterised as only reluctantly imperial, became an enthusiastic empire marketer in the metropolis. Chapter 1 details the organisations and commodities at the centre of the new empire marketing: New Zealand’s meat and dairy producer boards, along with independent butter advertising by the New Zealand Co-operative Dairy Company; Australia’s Trade Publicity Committee, which undertook government-supported advertising for dairy produce and fresh, dried, and canned fruit; and Canadian efforts to market bacon, cheese, and apples, including the eventual development of the government’s ‘Canada Calling’ campaign in the late 1930s. In keeping with the argument that trade helps make culture, chapter 1 considers the extent to which each Dominion’s commodities were ‘British-prone’, suggesting that this, rather than any inherent imperial sympathy, dictated Dominion marketing involvement. But imperial sympathy – or sentiment – is not ignored. Chapter  2 draws on new work in the history of emotions to re-evaluate sentiment’s role in, and creation through, empire marketing. No longer simply a ‘natural’ side effect of migration networks, sentiment, both for metropolitan consumers and for Dominion marketers, becomes a contingent cultural creation. The next three chapters focus squarely on the campaigns themselves and the work they do in constructing the Dominions’ shared version of Britishness. Chapter 3 pays close attention to the two main modes of articulating commodity Britishness: first, the co-ethnic inclusivity suggested by work on the cultural economy, which created the Dominions as ‘kith and kin’; and then, its antithesis, the exclusionary approaches that systematically effaced any ‘non-British’ elements. Chapter 4 is devoted to a discussion of these impulses in Dominion trade films. These films constitute a completely forgotten genre, but not only were they one of the most successful elements of Dominion campaigns – and perhaps the Dominions’ most successful film export industry until the late twentieth century – they also illustrate how adeptly marketers adopted the most modern techniques to create their thoroughly modern Dominions. Chapter 5 also deals with adoption, this time of the British government’s attempt at imperial commodity marketing: the Empire Marketing Board. The chapter offers a detailed analysis of the Board’s famous poster campaigns to argue that, not only did the Dominions benefit

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Selling Britishness

most from the Board’s work, but its spectacular poster sequences also worked in harmony with the identity crafted in their own commodity campaigns. The book’s final chapter offers one last redefinition of empire marketing by considering another forgotten marketing phenomenon: the expansion of Dominion advertising agencies in London. Working with agency archives – in particular, those of New Zealand agency Ilotts – this chapter analyses the ways in which campaigns to bring British goods back to Dominion consumers also worked to construct a shared identity. But at the same time as settler consumers were being urged to ‘buy empire’, another group of imperial consumers was being locked out. Once again, the rules of inclusivity and exclusivity applied, as Indigenous people were overlooked in the push to bring ‘British’ goods to the Dominions’ ‘British’ consumers. Selling Britishness negotiates some uneven archival terrain in rematerialising the new, Dominion-led empire marketing. The campaigns, and the organisations that ran them, have left varying traces: Australia’s Trade Publicity committee obsessively counted film audiences, New Zealand’s Ilotts agency left behind glowing client testimonials, the ‘Canada Calling’ press campaigns have survived in a British advertising archive. Consequently, not every chapter deals with each Dominion in the same depth. But, just as there was strength in a shared Dominion identity, so this project has found strength in a transcolonial approach. Archival gaps in one area can, in part, be compensated for by the richness of another. Together they help bring a neglected past back to life. That past – saturated with images of Christmas puddings, settler farmers, ‘Uncle Anchor’, and touring cricketers – not only sold commodities but also constructed a powerful version of empire that was invented by the Dominions and shipped back to the centre along with the butter and wheat and apples. This commodity Britishness imagined the Dominions in quite particular ways: as modern, masculine, rural, and white – a process that reified the success of the settler-colonial project on the periphery and in the centre. Empire marketing’s effect was more than representational: buying and selling empire created and sustained imperial identities.81 Yet the inclusive world of shared Britishness created through consumption had another, exclusive side. Selling Britishness had its limits. Consumption – and its denial – would be one more way in which the white settler colonies were implicated in the construction of imperial cultural power.

1

The New Empire Marketing: Dominion Organisations in the Metropolis

On 9 November 1925 – just nine days after its last rites had been observed – the British Empire Exhibition came back to life. Determined to ‘drive the lessons of Wembley home’, the committee behind the annual Lord Mayor’s Show in London decided to update its annual celebration of ancient traditions with a ‘Pageant of Empire Trade’.1 Organisers consulted with the Dominions about participation and found enthusiastic support. Australia and New Zealand, already regular parade attenders, wasted no time capitalising on this new opportunity, quickly assembling floats for the show’s ‘Wembley on Wheels’.2 Australia’s display included Freda the mechanical cow, one of its star attractions from the exhibition – so popular that she had become a well-known rendezvous point for Wembley visitors.3 On London’s streets, however, famous Freda took a back seat to a brand new exhibit: an enormous Christmas pudding, topped with a Christmas cracker and variously flanked by Father Christmas, a kangaroo, and an emu. The whole tableau was framed with a banner reading ‘Make your Christmas pudding an Empire one’(figure 1.1).4 ‘Uniformed ex-Diggers’ walked beside the float, throwing cartons of raisins and sultanas into the crowds, one of which was caught by ‘a pretty typist on the fourth floor of a Strand building’ who blew a kiss while the crowd roared its approval.5 Freda took up the rear, delighting spectators by ‘wagging her tail and bellowing’ behind the pudding.6 New Zealand’s float included its own competitor to Freda: a mechanically milked model cow that had also featured at Wembley. She

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Selling Britishness

Figure 1.1 Australia brings a Christmas pudding to the Lord Mayor’s Show.

rolled through the city’s streets accompanied by displays of mutton, fruit, eggs, and honey, ‘all surmounted with maps of Great Britain and New Zealand linked together with a large steamer’.7 Should anyone have missed the empire trade message, a ‘striking tableau’ of ‘John Bull and a New Zealander shaking hands each as the other’s best customer’ crowned the float.8 Canada did not contribute any floats to the parade, but the Dominion still put in an appearance, contributing a detachment of Mounties to the show.9 The Dominions’ presence in London’s ‘Pageant of Empire Trade’ was an ephemeral yet strikingly symbolic moment. Shifting from a Wembley of pavilions and palaces to a ‘Wembley on Wheels’ echoes a broader change in the Dominions’ engagement with the imperial commodity spectacle. With Wembley’s exhibition gates closed, the Dominions would now have to bring the commodity spectacle to consumers, rather than relying on consumers to come to them. Putting Freda the cow on a float was just the beginning of this process: over the next decade or so, Dominion marketing would range from shop window displays and newspaper advertising through to cinema

The New Empire Marketing

23

shows, in-store demonstrators, and even boxing kangaroos. A  further change, also signalled by the Lord Mayor’s Show, made this expansion possible. Dominion commodities, such as New Zealand meat, Canadian apples, and Australian sultanas, had been advertised before, usually by enterprising individuals or organisations.10 After the British Empire Exhibition, commodity advertising became official Dominion business, run and funded, in whole or in part, by Dominion governments. They diverted exhibition resources, and more, to the business of marketing Dominion produce to Britain’s metropolitan consumers, and they would continue to do so right through the Great Depression and beyond, pausing only with the outbreak of World War II. This chapter focuses on the origins and development of these Dominion marketing organisations, restoring them to the story of empire marketing and changing that story in the process. As noted in the introduction, the concept of empire marketing has been dominated by the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) – the British government’s notoriously unsuccessful attempt to persuade British shoppers to buy more empire produce. However, empire marketing was always much more than the work of one short-lived, London-based board: it was a widely shared and enduring cultural phenomenon, and one primarily driven by the Dominions themselves.11 Accordingly, this chapter charts the invention of Dominion empire marketing. It argues that, while Dominion and metropolitan marketing efforts had much in common, ultimately it is the Dominion version that really defines empire marketing. Unlike its better-known metropolitan counterpart, empire marketing Dominion-style grew in strength and complexity through the interwar period. Following the story from those first floats in the Lord Mayor’s ‘Wembley on Wheels’, the chapter outlines the Dominions’ increasing commitment to marketing commodities to British consumers, even after the implementation of tariffs through the Ottawa agreements in 1932 proved fatal to the British government’s own empire marketing effort. While the EMB folded, Dominion marketing flourished. Yet while Dominion marketing organisations and their campaigns collectively survived and thrived, there were differences between them. While Australia and New Zealand constructed spectacular floats for the ‘Pageant of Empire Trade’, Canada settled for a contingent of Mounties. The influence of the Dominions’ own nationalist histories mean such differences might be read as evidence

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Selling Britishness

of more or less imperial spirit, more or less Britishness, more or less dependence. This chapter avoids the tendency to use more floats or fewer Mounties as barometers for waxing or waning imperial sentiment. Instead it argues that any variations are best explained by the nature of their commodity connections to the metropolis and the limits of their organisation. Each Dominion may have had a different mix of commodities to sell, and different resources to mobilise, but all three were committed to the new empire marketing.

‘l e s s o n s f ro m w e m b l e y ’: the origins o f d o m i n i o n - l e d m a rketing What drove the development of the new empire marketing ? Wembley is one part of the answer. The British Empire Exhibition held at Wembley may have been the last of the great imperial exhibitions, but it stimulated a new wave of British imperial propaganda and activity.12 At the same time, the exhibition also encouraged Dominion trade promotion: all the new Dominion-led marketing campaigns began in earnest in London in the 1920s. Timed to take early advantage of Wembley, New Zealand’s operations were underway by 1923, led by newly formed meat and dairy boards (discussed later in this chapter), while Australia’s new Trade Publicity committee opened its doors in 1926, taking over some small existing campaigns in the process. A year later, Canada moved the focus of its government publicity operations to London as well. Not long after Wembley opened, Australian dairy interests argued it was ‘essential’ to follow up their exhibition displays with other ‘propaganda’.13 As it drew to a close, a former Australian exhibition commissioner urged that one of the ‘lessons from Wembley’ was that Australia needed more publicity ‘on a scale much more extensive than hitherto’.14 The government agreed: ‘In order that the benefit of the Empire Exhibition would be maintained after its close’, the Australian government ‘proposed to spend a liberal sum in advertising Australian products’, initially voting to allocate £20,000 to this end.15 Even Canada’s prime minister, Mackenzie King, famously allergic to empire, ‘readily approved’ participating in Wembley’s second season, saying it was the ‘best advertising medium’ for immigration and trade.16 All three Dominions hoped to take advantage of what seemed to be a new public sentiment towards ‘buying empire’. Imperial sentiment

The New Empire Marketing

25

is discussed in the next chapter, but the recommendation of the Imperial Economic Committee (IEC) in August 1925 that £1  million be spent on marketing empire commodities was a tangible example of that sentiment in action. It was not quite what the Dominions had in mind: they had been lobbying for some time for a preferential tariff. Still, it was better than nothing. The funding would be used to establish the EMB, which, like the IEC and other ostensibly metropolitan organisations, included Dominion representatives and would work predominantly in the interests of Dominion producers (see chapter 5). The Weekly Times in Melbourne could see the potential: the IEC’s recommendation, combined with post-Wembley enthusiasm, meant Australia was ‘on the eve of one of the greatest marketing movements ever initiated’.17 But initiatives inaugurated in Britain were never a substitute for Dominions’ own activities. Even with the announcement of the EMB’s plans, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand continued to build their own marketing organisations. To do so, they built on some existing capabilities. The Dominions were no strangers to promoting themselves in the metropolis. All had lengthy histories of marketing themselves to Britons, although mainly as destinations for immigrants and investment rather than as trading partners. During the nineteenth century they actively promoted their various colonies and provinces as ideal homes for British settlers. The migration business, coupled with the colonies’ drive for investment, also provided some of the infrastructure for later commodity campaigns. To manage these interests, each government established commercial beachheads in London in the form of colonial agents that would eventually morph into High Commissions.18 These organisations quickly became multifaceted connection points between the imperial centre and its colonies – New Zealand’s High Commission handled everything from commercial loans to sourcing salmon ova for acclimatisation societies – but migration campaigns, in different forms, were a key responsibility, and they gave the Dominions plenty of experience in organising exhibition displays, press advertising, film shows, and other techniques. To differing degrees, the various Dominion High Commissions and agents would use these skills to facilitate the new commodity campaigns of the 1920s. Underpinning all this renewed enthusiasm for empire was Britain’s changing importance as a Dominion export market. As James Belich argues, from the end of the nineteenth century the former

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Selling Britishness

white settler colonies forged a new economic relationship with the metropolis. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand changed economic gear as part of a ‘recolonial’ shift. At different times over the previous century, each colony had experienced staggering growth underwritten by the dispossession of their First Peoples and supercharged by a mix of imported money and migrants, extractive industries, and the settler belief in ‘progress’ itself. When, towards the end of the nineteenth century, those booms turned to bust, their economies slowed and refocused, usually on the mass export of a few staples back to the colonial homelands.19 Aggregate figures for Australia, New Zealand, and – to a surprising degree, given its next-door neighbour – Canada demonstrate Britain’s critical role in their economies. Between 1901 and 1939, Britain usually took more than a third, and often close to a half, of Canada’s exports, although the United States sometimes took the lead, especially in the 1920s.20 Australian exports to Britain were generally higher, ranging around 40 per cent to 50 per cent over this period.21 New Zealand made the most of the British market, with exports to Britain regularly exceeding 80 per cent of New Zealand’s total exports.22 These figures demonstrate unequivocally why Dominion governments would come to see empire marketing as an official function. They also seem to give economic substance to those old cultural tropes of New Zealand as ‘dutiful’ and Canada, for example, as more ‘independent’: the higher the figure, the more dutiful the Dominion. Yet the numbers can be misleading. When it came to developing empire marketing, quality literally outweighed quantity. The nature of the commodity mattered more than the volumes traded. Hidden within the aggregate figures are a number of exports that were disproportionately powerful in the creation of official, government-supported consumer marketing schemes in the metropolis. These commodities had some shared characteristics. First, and perhaps most obviously, each relied on the British market. But reliance alone was not enough: they needed a second, easily overlooked, characteristic. The commodities at the heart of Dominion-led empire marketing were all sold to consumers with little to no further processing. When combined, these two factors created an ideal platform for the Dominions’ empire marketing experiment. Nascent marketing efforts could be concentrated on one large market and on just a few commodity types. Further, these

The New Empire Marketing

27

direct-to-consumer commodities were, typically, unbranded, which led to one more shared characteristic. As following chapters will show, the Dominions chose to fill that brand vacuum with expressions of their own versions of Britishness. The commodities at the heart of the Dominions’ new empire marketing, then, were British-prone in two senses: they were mostly sold in Britain, and they were sold as ‘British’. Australia’s, Canada’s, and New Zealand’s lamb, butter, cheese, bacon, and apples had few other markets open to them (although a growing domestic market, and that of the United States, offered some opportunity for Canadian produce, albeit unreliably).23 All were sold to British shoppers with little extra processing, meaning the Dominions could exert control over presentation and branding. As it happened, all would then be marketed by using ‘national’ brands that identified strongly as ‘British’. Canada and Australia filled greengrocers’ windows with ‘British to the Core’ apples, Australian butter was ‘All British’, and New Zealand sold metropolitan customers ‘British New Zealand lamb’(plate 1).24 By contrast, some of the Dominions’ more conventionally important commodities, such as wheat and wool, turn out to be less British-prone on all counts. With wider global markets open to them, these exports did not concentrate on the British market or identity to the same extent, and even when Britain was the major market, they were hard to sell as ‘British’ to consumers. Metropolitan shoppers did not buy raw wool or wheat. Instead they bought wool or wheat transformed into carpet, cloth, or bread, and the manufacturing process both obscured and diluted the Dominion content.25 As a result, though such exports look impressive on trade tables, and often loom larger in economic historiography, they were less important in the creation of Dominion-led marketing than the commodities they usually overshadow. The 1935 Australian apple campaign demonstrates the ‘British-prone’ effect particularly well: in that year, apples earned just 2  per  cent of Australian export revenue, and yet apples were promoted by the prime minister, by Australian cricketers, by a new movie, and by a host of advertisements, point-of-sale material, and window displays. Not one cent was spent promoting wool, wheat, or gold, which made up 50 per cent of Australia’s exports to Britain that year.26 British-prone exports, then, rather than all Dominion exports to Britain, played the decisive role in the development of the new

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empire marketing. This subtle but critical difference explains why the ostensibly ‘independent’ Canada would still join ‘dutiful’ New Zealand in vigorous metropolitan marketing campaigns. However, just as deals at Ottawa did not guarantee sales to shoppers, so being British-prone was no guarantee, on its own, of marketing success. Here, a final factor came into play. To flourish in the highly competitive metropolitan market, the Dominions needed well-organised marketing. New Zealand and Australia were most successful at this, with Canada lagging behind. But despite its lower ratio of British-prone produce, by the mid-1930s Canada would catch up, eventually even trying to market wheat in a ‘British-prone’ way. By the late 1930s, empire marketing’s reputedly least enthusiastic adherent came from behind to take the lead as Dominion marketer-in-chief.

bri tis h - p ro n e : au s t r a l i a ’ s and new z e a l a n d ’ s c o m m o d i t y c ampaigns As we might expect, given its markedly British-prone profile, New Zealand led the way in developing the new Dominion-led marketing. It had a long history of independent commodity marketing activity to draw on, starting with the successful inauguration of the frozen meat trade in 1882. That first shipment was followed almost as quickly by inaugural publicity schemes. Within two years more than 100,000 lamb chops were given away at the International Health Exhibition in South Kensington, and in 1885 New Zealand produce made its first appearance in the Lord Mayor’s Show in London, with frozen mutton optimistically promoted as the ‘meat of the future’.27 By 1902, New Zealand’s ‘Canterbury’ lamb was established as a premium brand for both wholesalers and consumers. (Here, they were almost too successful: ‘Canterbury’ became a generic term for frozen meat, forcing the New Zealand Meat Producers Board to constantly defend its reputation against other, lower-quality meat masquerading as New Zealand produce.28) Butter marketing – the second wave of New Zealand’s early British-prone export trade – developed more slowly, hindered by a proliferation of dairy companies, who initially marketed their exports under more than 600 different factory brands.29 As butter was generally scooped from casks or boxes, and sometimes blended with other butters, then sold to the consumer by weight, the babble

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of brands made little difference at first. But by 1919 a series of mergers created the New Zealand Co-operative Dairy Company (NZCDC), which would go on to control around one-third of the country’s dairy exports. They also developed the Anchor brand, which by 1925 was regarded by wholesalers as ‘the superfine N.Z. butter’.30 Anchor moved quickly from being a trade brand to becoming a consumer one: shoppers also knew it well, as the NZCDC had already begun selling butter in wrapped and branded pats.31 The NZCDC remained the most important force in marketing New Zealand butter. However, from the early 1920s on, New Zealand’s British-prone marketing was boosted by the development of government-formed producer boards. A response to the volatile marketing conditions that followed the end of World War  I, New Zealand was the first nation to institute these boards, as farmers, who had previously experienced the security of having all their produce commandeered by Britain, struggled to cope with the return of free marketing at the war’s end. First meat and then dairy came under board control. ‘Orderly marketing’ rapidly spread to New Zealand’s other British-prone produce, such as honey, fruit, and eggs. Although their remits usually began with practical matters such as organising shipping to prevent gluts, negotiating freight and insurance, and maintaining grading schemes, boards very quickly turned their attention to advertising in Britain as well. The New Zealand Meat Producers Board was formed in 1922, and by 1923 they had their first refrigerated display window running in New Zealand’s High Commission Office in the Strand and had worked with the New Zealand government on a film to promote the industry. Plans for an exhibit at Wembley that would be ‘second to none’ were underway, and the newly appointed London manager sought special advertising opportunities throughout the United Kingdom.32 That special advertising began, after Wembley, in 1927. Because targeting British consumers was key, the board became the first marketer to utilise butcher’s shop windows as a display space, developing a network of 20,000 participating stores.33 Courtesy of the board, by 1930 butchers could feature one of more than 1,000 specially selected prime lamb carcasses to adorn their windows (figure 1.2). Other prime lambs ended up as dinner rather than decor, cooked up and served in sandwiches given away at exhibitions, empire shops, and fairs as ‘another means of interesting people … as to the merits of New Zealand meat’.34 Those other means included

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Figure 1.2 Advertising New Zealand meat at ‘Home’: a 1933 British butcher’s shop window.

hundreds of thousands of pieces of advertising collateral: picture shows, pamphlets, cookery demonstrations, a lamb gift presentation scheme, and an electric van touring seaside resorts and flashing messages on those merits a thousand times a day.35

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Most advertising efforts targeted consumers, but other promotions – including film screenings, social events, and window-dressing competitions, complete with prizes for the best displays of New Zealand lamb – focused on the trade. As the board itself recognised in one report, a full list of their activities would be ‘tedious’.36 Still, by 1932 the board could boast that it was ‘impossible to visit any town or village in Great Britain without being reminded that “NEW ZEALAND LAMB IS THE BEST IN THE WORLD” ’.37 The Ottawa agreements signed that year made little difference to the board’s activities. In fact, ‘in view of the large supplies of meat from all countries reaching the British market’, in 1933 the board was ‘convinced of the necessity of increasing its advertising activities’.38 Two years later, the board had still ‘not relaxed its publicity efforts for New Zealand meat at Home’.39 Indeed, the expansion of meat advertising continued until the outbreak of war in 1939. New Zealand’s dairy marketing board was operating by 1924, and it too prioritised metropolitan marketing. Starting at Wembley, the board followed the conventions of monumental exhibition displays, with life-size butter sculptures and ‘mammoth’ one-ton cheeses.40 However, by 1927 the new empire marketing approach had taken hold, with the board taking advice from London advertising agencies and working with the EMB on regional promotion activities.41 Work had also commenced on creating a national brand, although for consumers it would be overshadowed by the NZCDC’s Anchor brand. Only three years later, in 1930, New Zealand butter featured in nearly fifty exhibitions and demonstrations, and the board sold more than 300,000 samples of butter and cheese. That same year, the board joined forces with Australian dairy marketers to create an ‘Empire butter fleet’. Billed as the ‘greatest quantity of butter … yet exported to the Homeland’, the boards choreographed a welcome for the fleet at Hays Wharf that was widely reported. It involved London’s Lord Mayor, dairymaids representing the Dominions, hundreds of ‘cheering dockmen’, and yet another model cow, this time sculpted from butter.42 Though the emphasis would soon return to ‘New Zealand’ rather than ‘empire’ butter and cheese, board-sponsored exhibitions, parades, window displays, and film shows ran throughout the 1930s. Australia quickly followed New Zealand’s marketing lead. Immediately after the war, Australian dairy and fruit producers moved to implement orderly marketing. By 1924 boards had been formed,

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and by 1925 wine, dried and canned fruit (fresh fruit would follow), and dairy interests held a joint conference, ‘with the object of evolving a joint scheme for advertising Australian primary products in overseas countries’.43 ‘Overseas’ in this case meant ‘Britain’: they also resolved to undertake ‘systematic and continuous advertising and propaganda in Great Britain’, via a brand new body, Australian Trade Publicity (ATP), which would be based in London.44 Producer board levies funded half of the operation, with the rest of the funding coming from the federal government, beginning with the £20,000 promised as the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley was closing. ATP’s newly appointed head, A.E. Hyland, wasted little time getting started, with a ‘very active scheme’ including press advertising, posters, ‘scenic window displays’, and marketing material for retailers underway by July 1926.45 Three years later, ATP added films, lectures, and demonstrations to the mix. By then, more than 200,000 retailers had received display material, while promotional pencils, buttons, and balloons were ‘distributed to children in the tens of thousands’, and ‘cookery books by the millions’ carried ‘the Australian message into British homes’.46 ATP’s campaigns continued throughout the decade, with spending reduced rather than curtailed as the depression bit. Once conditions eased, government and producer board support for publicity increased, and Ottawa again made no difference to spending levels.47 As an example, in April 1935 alone ATP made more than 1,700 sales calls, screened trade films to around 80,000 people, dispatched more than 15,000 sets of display material, and ran a number of window display competitions and in-store demonstrations.48 In addition to this routine work they also launched a special apple campaign that employed fifteen temporary salesmen, placed thousands of advertisements everywhere from newspapers to the sides of buses, and had its own specially made promotional film starring the Australian prime minster, booked to play in 160 cinemas in enough sessions to reach an audience of 3.5 million(figure 1.3).49 The one exception to all this activity was meat. Though sheep meat and, later, chilled beef exports were ostensibly British-prone products, there were no big Australian metropolitan campaigns. The industry was too disorganised.50 Even with government intervention, farmers only agreed to form a producer board in 1936,

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Figure 1.3 Advertising ‘British’ Australian fruit on van sides.

and trade – let alone consumer – marketing waited until 1938.51 Before then, the only effort at publicity was a poster reminding railway workers to handle produce carefully because ‘reject lambs pay no dividend’ – a level of publicity well suited to meat that sometimes could only be sold to institutions anyway because of its low quality.52 Australia’s meat marketing was a rare failure for the Antipodean commodity marketers, and as such it provides a small but important reminder of all the conditions required to make the new Dominion-led marketing effective. It also neatly demonstrates the perils of equating trading activity with imperial sentiment. Sheep and beef-cattle farmers were not necessarily any more or less imperially inclined than dairy farmers or apple growers, but they were less organised, and so, despite being British-prone producers, they could not take advantage of the new empire marketing in the way that other Antipodean producers did. On a bigger scale, something similar happened to Canada. Like Australian meat producers, Canada seemed to be much slower to adapt to the new empire marketing. But we do not need to invoke sentiment – or a lack of it – to understand why.

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bri t i s h - p ro n e ? t h e c as e of c anada Though the senior Dominion, with the longest history of representation in London, Canada’s trade publicity work in the United Kingdom in the early 1920s was modest. In 1922, the newly appointed high commissioner, Peter Larkin, enquired into the state of Canada’s trade promotional activities in Britain.53 A wealthy businessman who owned Salada, Canada’s largest tea brand, Larkin clearly knew a thing or two about marketing, so the answer may have surprised him. The Dominion distributed a few films and photos, but ‘beyond that’, explained the deputy minister of trade and commerce, ‘we have no publicity other than the information contained in our reports’.54 That other publicity included 8,000 copies of a brochure – ‘Canada as a field for British branch industries’ – and the first ever Canadian trade-route map.55 Lacklustre trade promotion in the metropolis sits well with myths of assertive Canadian nationalism in the interwar period. As we have seen, historians often use trade as a benchmark of growing Canadian independence, with Mackenzie King, and Laurier before him, cast as doughty defenders of Canadian autonomy against the evils of imperial entanglement.56 And it was not just prime ministers who spurned imperial advances: Mackenzie King’s right-hand man, and undersecretary for external affairs, Oscar Skelton was legendarily suspicious of all things empire. Worse, not only did he oppose Canadian involvement in such organisations as the Imperial Economic Committee and the Empire Marketing Board, he held the budget for external publicity. In this light, 8,000 brochures and a traderoute map look less like accidental incompetence and more like determined indifference. However, close analysis of Canada’s trade promotions reveals a different picture. Far from being indifferent, Canada actually pioneered an early form of the new Dominion-led marketing. But, for reasons that have nothing to do with empire scepticism, or robust independence, they were unable to capitalise on this lead. Initially, Canada was not sluggish with promotion. Like the other Dominions, the Canadian government had long experience in running migration campaigns (although these were often outsourced to Canadian rail companies). The most extensive of these, begun by Clifford Sifton in the 1890s, had churned out almost 3 million pieces of propaganda by 1914, a record year for immigrants, and

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new campaigns began after the war ended.57 Indeed, only a little before Larkin began looking into trade publicity, hundreds of thousands of migration pamphlets were distributed to schools, along with thousands of atlases designed to ‘correct the grotesque ideas about Canada which still prevail in many communities’.58 A weekly news poster was developed to ‘arrest the attention of the public and give the latest information regarding our Dominion’,59 while an exhibition ‘motorwagon’ – a ‘true missionary of Canada’ – did its own fair share of arresting: it would stop ‘at the hedgeways to discuss Canada with men at work in the fields’.60 However, through the 1920s the emphasis began to swing from migration to commodity marketing. The two came together at the British Empire Exhibition in 1924. Again, Canada was no slouch, spending almost $1  million on its pavilion, which also had the distinction of being the only one that was ready on opening day. Overseen by the minister of trade and commerce, the exhibition provided the perfect platform for a new emphasis on Canadian commodities:61 ‘Wembley has been aptly described as the Empire’s shop window. The unstinted praise given our exhibits indicates that Canada occupied generous space in that shop window.’62 Then when Wembley closed, Canada, despite a reputation for independence, followed the other Dominions and opened its own ‘shop window’.63 In 1927, it was decided to move the government’s Ottawa-based Exhibition Commission to London ‘for the purpose of enabling the department to carry on continuous exhibition work in the United Kingdom’. Not only would there be a constant presence in Britain, but it was also ruled that ‘for the present year … Canada should not participate in any large fairs elsewhere as the whole time of the Exhibition Commission now in London is fully taken up with making exhibits on behalf of Canada throughout the British Isles’.64 In fact, exhibitions anywhere other than Britain reduced to a handful – less than one a year – for the next decade. When the commission moved to London it also moved departments – from Immigration and Colonization to Trade and Commerce. Encouraging exports was now a greater priority than attracting migrants. At the same time, the minister for trade and commerce established a London-based publicity office. As O.M. Hill notes, activities were now focused on the metropolis: ‘Britain was the target.’65 At this point, Canada’s efforts, already running behind those of the other Dominions, stalled. There was some early success creating

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‘Canada shops’, which, ironically enough, given Oscar Skelton’s distaste for empire, were rolled into the EMB’s promotional playbook.66 But other campaigns remained relatively small scale. In 1930, Canada participated in twenty-four local exhibitions, including a ‘Canada week’ in Bristol, and sent material to another eleven ‘miscellaneous’ events, including a Boy Scout jamboree. Ten London department stores featured Canada displays, while seventeen other retailers, along with chain stores such as Sainsbury’s, also mounted window displays.67 By comparison, that same year the inexhaustible ATP organised ‘Australia weeks’ in Oxford, Liverpool, Nottingham, Birmingham, and Portsmouth. A butter campaign focused on the Midlands and the south of England was in ‘full swing’ by March, with butter sculptures drawing the admiring attention of the queen and Princess Mary. Then, as Empire Week rolled around in May, ATP estimated that around 1,000 shops in London had display material, while ‘fifty or sixty of the very largest shops notably in the West End went out of their way to stage miniature exhibitions’.68 If Britain was the target, then Canada seems to have been missing it. It is tempting to see this promotional misfire as part of the senior Dominion’s imperial reluctance. But even if Canada was averse to the old official empire marketing, it was not against the new version: in 1925, faced with the unpalatably imperial EMB scheme, Skelton asked, ‘If it is worth doing, why not do it ourselves?’69 The answer also does not lie in the nature of Canadian exports. Though wheat, which was not especially British-prone, increasingly dominated Canadian exports in this era, the earlier Australian apple example demonstrates that exports did not have to be large in volume to be large in advertising impact. Rather, it seems that systemic problems allied with ineffectual organisation diminished Canada’s metropolitan presence. The story of cheese and bacon, Canada’s most important Britishprone produce, illustrates the systemic issues. Though Canadian marketing lagged behind that of the other Dominions in the interwar period, at the end of the nineteenth century Canada was well in front. From the 1860s, Ontario farmers, using factory methods gleaned from their American neighbours, had begun exporting cheese to Britain. In 1866 – more than sixty years before New Zealand’s one-ton Wembley cheeses – they sent a promotional ‘mammoth’ cheese, three times as heavy and more than six feet

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in diameter, to England.70 By the mid-1890s, English-style cheddar was Canada’s leading export by value.71 The rise of industrial-scale cheesemaking also encouraged a bacon export trade, as pigs could be raised on the whey by-product.72 Just as the dairies had become specialists in English-style cheese, so farmers and meatpackers turned to producing Britain’s favourite breakfast bacon: the ‘Wiltshire side’.73 One company, William Davies, came to dominate this trade, becoming the largest pork-packer in the British Empire in the process.74 By 1903 – a peak year for bacon exports before World War I – more than $15 million of bacon was sold.75 That same year, 95  per  cent of Britain’s cheddar imports came from Canada.76 Combined, the value of both trades that year was more than oneand-a-half times the size of the great staple of both the export trade and Canadian economic history: wheat.77 However, Canada’s impressive early British-prone lead did not last. From their peak in 1903, trade in both cheese and bacon declined precipitously. By the outbreak of war in 1914, cheese exports had fallen by 20 per cent and bacon exports by a disastrous 80 per cent. The abrupt reversal in fortune of Canada’s leading export industry has not garnered much historical attention, but some historians do suggest that the fall in cheese figures reflected product diversion, away from export – which, in this case, is a turn from empire – towards domestic production of fresh milk or butter for local markets. The collapse of the bacon industry would then be a knock-on effect, with less whey available. But the most detailed study finds no evidence for this, instead arguing that the most important factor in the decline of cheese production was the availability of farm labour. Smaller family sizes, and the growth of city-based, industrial jobs that drew people away from rural work, led farmers to shift towards less labour-intensive activities, such as cattle raising.78 Similarly, the failure of the bacon industry had little to do with either attitudes to, or the economics of, empire. Instead, poor management in the dominant packing company and fierce Danish competition were responsible.79 Sir Joseph Flavelle, the head of William Davies, apparently developed ‘a form of entrepreneurial arteriosclerosis’ in the early 1900s. Putting his faith in a bottomless British market for Canadian bacon, as competition increased he refused to reorganise his business to put it on a stronger footing. In the face of aggressive Danish marketing, by 1914 the Canadian trade had ‘withered away’.80

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British demand for imported food during World War  I temporarily rescued both the cheese and bacon export trades,81 but at the war’s end, they fell away again. The value of cheese exports declined from a high of $36 million in 1918 to just $6 million in 1935, and it would take a second war to revive it. Bacon fell even further, from $69 million in 1920 to just $1.7 million in 1932.82 Once again, there is little research to draw on, but it seems that, this time, farmers diverted their milk supply away from cheesemaking to newer dairy industries such as powdered and condensed milk, with disastrous results: ‘Between 1904 and 1931 the number of cheese factories in Ontario declined by more than forty per cent.’83 But the cause-andeffect relationship to exports remains unclear. The new processors might have drawn milk away, causing exports to decline, or they might have been using surplus from an already declining market. One possible explanation is that cheese exports, like bacon exports, were becoming uncompetitive. Canadian factories were small and less productive than either local alternative dairy processors who produced dried and condensed milk or other, overseas cheese exporters. Cheesemakers did respond to competitive pressures: the aptly named United Empire Loyalist Cheese and Butter Company bought new machinery to improve profitability in 1918.84 But structural issues remained. As late as 1932 a Department of Agriculture report urged smaller factories to consolidate, but a few years later an economist could still note that the nine counties ‘responsible for the bulk of Ontario’s remaining cheese factories were roughly similar in size to the area devoted to dairying in New Zealand, but paled in comparison to the latter’s output’.85 As a result, New Zealand muscled its way in to take Canada’s place as the big cheese in the British market. Systemic issues were not the only cause of Canada’s diminished presence in the metropolitan market. The country also lacked the strong producer organisations or cooperatives that propelled the New Zealand and Australian campaigns and made Denmark such a devastating competitor.86 Wheat aside, Canadian schemes were limited to voluntary cooperatives at the provincial level, whose operation was often hindered by ‘petty jealousies’.87 Effective federal legislation for orderly marketing was not successfully implemented until 1939.88 Without similar organisations, Canadian marketing efforts and funding were spread between various departments, including the Exhibition Commission, the Departments of Trade and

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Commerce and of Agriculture, and the High Commission in London. Reflecting some frustration at this situation, the Department of Agriculture tried twice, unsuccessfully, to take over responsibility for metropolitan publicity in the 1930s. Meanwhile, Canada’s British-prone produce, and its profile, lost more ground. By the 1930s it seems little of Canada’s reduced bacon output was sold as ‘Canadian’. Some was marketed through multiple stores, where it was often sold under the store’s own trade name, while other retailers displayed it – fraudulently – as the more popular Danish bacon.89 Canadian cheese, likewise, was not regularly displayed as ‘Canadian’, often being sold as ‘American’ or ‘empire’. Some disappeared from shop windows altogether, being used instead as an ingredient in the newly fashionable processed cheese, making it about as useful for marketing purposes as wool or wheat.90 Other British-prone produce – such as canned fruit and vegetables, catsup, and salmon – also offered marketing challenges. Whereas produce such as cheese and bacon could potentially have been strongly promoted as Canadian, canned goods arrived in Britain under a multitude of brands from ‘competing and conflicting firms which do not pull together’.91 Worse, some Canadian breakfast cereal would be marketed under the American Kellogg’s brand. Yet despite these drawbacks, Canada would still go on, belatedly, to build a prominent profile in the British market. The driver was a small but strongly British-prone export: apples. Sold directly to consumers, with limited alternative export possibilities, Canadian apples, like cheese and bacon, had a long history of concentrating on the metropolis, with Nova Scotia sending apples to Britain from the mid-1800s.92 Although they lacked a single marketing body, apples did have some provincial-level support. Interestingly, though, Britain itself offered an alternative support structure: promotion for apples from different Canadian provinces could coalesce around the British-initiated Imperial Fruit Show, a London-based event begun in 1921.93 Canada got off to a ‘splendid’ start here, helped along by the show’s timing in the northern hemisphere’s apple season. By the end of the decade, apple marketing had spread beyond the show to become ‘the most important practical advertising’ run by Canada’s new London publicity organisation.94 In 1929, ‘every retail fruiterer in Great Britain’ was offered window display material, and a consumer competition to ‘ask for Canadian apples by name’

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Figure 1.4 Selling Canadian apples and promoting the empire spirit: the 1934 Imperial Fruit Show’s Miss Canada and Miss Nova Scotia give away apples to cheering boys at the Cottage Homes (orphanages) in Countesthorpe.

proved so popular that more than 2  million copies of the entry booklet had to be printed. A year later, there was ‘a very great extension in its activities’.95 By 1931, Canadian apple advertising had taken on the feel of its Antipodean counterparts, with advertisements on 200 London buses; posters at railway stations; a promotional movie, ‘Alice in Apple Land’; and 400,000 giveaway pencils bearing the imprint ‘CANADIAN APPLES – the pick of the empire’s orchards’.96 There was just one disappointment: Miss Canada only came second in the beauty competition held in conjunction with the Imperial Fruit Show (figure 1.4).97 Exhibition work continued alongside these promotions through the first part of the 1930s, but it was not until 1936 – again, well after Ottawa – that the momentum around apple advertising was extended to a more general Canadian scheme. Under a new chief trade commissioner, Frederic Hudd, and a new high commissioner, Vincent Massey, publicity was reorganised, and by October ‘Canada Calling’, their first fully fledged Dominion-style empire marketing scheme, was finally underway. These campaigns focused on one city at a time, and although they have been interpreted as ‘national’ campaigns they deployed

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all the familiar set pieces of Dominion-led empire marketing.98 In Glasgow, the first target, there were shop window displays, press advertisements, posters, a ‘Canada shop’ complete with samples, and Canadian film shows at local cinemas. Planes towing ‘Canada Calling’ banners marked the opening day, and the Canadian minister of trade and commerce summoned up the ties of empire across the ether when he telephoned the Lord Provost of Glasgow ‘during a luncheon for civic and other dignitaries’.99 Planes and transatlantic telephone calls would later be dropped as too expensive, but variations of these activities occurred throughout Britain, in Edinburgh, Liverpool, Cardiff, Birmingham, Manchester, and other key urban centres.100 Yet even this was not enough for some. In 1937, in one of its bids to take control of marketing, the Department of Agriculture commissioned its own report into UK publicity. The department was well aware that Canadian publicity in the UK had fallen behind that of its Dominion competitors: in fact the report had to be withdrawn and revised after it accidentally made details of Australia’s and New Zealand’s expenditure public. Revision also allowed some of the report’s language to be softened, but even the amended version remained sharply critical: ‘British retailers are not by any means as familiar with Canadian agricultural products as they are with many products of our competitors. The reason is apparently, that Canada until recently has done little to impress the retailers or consumers in regard to the quality and availability of her agricultural commodities whereas the other Dominions and some of the competing countries have done much and their products have been kept prominently before retailers and customers.’101 One casualty of the bad press was Canada’s British advertising agents, Mather and Crowther, who were replaced with Canadian agency MacLaren. This could be read as more Canadian independence in action. However, taking a wider Dominion view gives a different perspective. The shift to a Canadian agency may have recognised the importance of keeping some competitive distance. Though it appears strange now, Mather and Crowther also handled Australian and New Zealand fruit advertising. Canada and Australia even used the same ‘British to the Core’ slogan, which perhaps made sense under a wider imperial umbrella, where different hemispheres could work together to maintain supply and the biggest competitor was the United States. Further, as we will see in

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a later chapter, the Dominion advertising business was itself a little British-prone, so while the use of a Canadian firm in London is interesting, it is not necessarily so remarkable. In any case, the report’s main effect was to consolidate the importance of marketing in the metropolis. The new managing director of Canadian publicity doubled down on the ‘Canada Calling’ campaign. For the 1938 campaign in London, along with the now familiar window displays and film shows, vans designed as ‘Canada billboards’ travelled ‘every day for nine months over every residential and business street in London’, with large-scale newspaper displays, running for 39 consecutive weeks in 72 newspapers. At a cost of $130,000, it was claimed as the largest campaign of its type yet run. Expenditure for 1939 was raised even further, to $350,000, before war intervened and brought an end to all the Dominion campaigns.102 ‘Canada Calling’ marked Canada’s most intensive engagement with commodity marketing in the metropolis, and this, combined with Canada’s reputation for independence, has led the campaigns to be read as a sign of growing Canadian nationalism.103 Yet when recontextualised alongside the other Dominion campaigns, such a reading seems doubtful. Though an early engager with the British market, an unwieldy and shifting array of British-prone produce, combined with a lack of effective organisation, stunted the trajectory of Canada’s publicity activities. When they did gain momentum, Canada utilised exactly the same methods – even the same advertising agency and slogans – as the other Dominions, and there was nothing especially independent about the New Zealand or Australian campaigns. As Canada’s scathing 1937 report showed, even with a growing domestic market, and another enormous one right next door, the imperial context still mattered. Though it arrived late, Canada, like New Zealand and Australia, created publicity schemes that took over from the older promotional standby, exhibitions, to collectively establish a new form of empire marketing. Their miscellany of aeroplane advertising, lamb sandwiches, butter sculptures, and apple films may have been forgotten, but together the Dominions marketing organisations outpaced the activities of their better-known metropolitan counterpart, changing the story of the empire and the economy in this period. Yet these organisations did more than invent a new form of empire marketing: they also invented a new kind of imperial identity. Subsequent

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chapters will explore the ways in which the invention of a Dominion imperial identity, built through commodities and based on Britishness, worked to uphold the imperial project. In the next chapter we will turn to Dominion commodity marketing and its role in the making of imperial sentiment.

2

Trading on Sentiment? Dominion Campaigns, Emotion, and the Cultural Economy of Empire Trade

When the British Empire Exhibition closed in 1925, the Dominions were not the only ones that wanted to keep its spirit alive.1 At the exhibition’s end, an eclectic assortment of metropolitan and colonial worthies – moved by Wembley’s imperial vision – met in London to establish the Self-Supporting Empire League. Chaired by the Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Jellicoe, and with members ranging from Sir  William Birdwood to Dame Nellie Melba, the league planned to reincarnate the show as a movable exhibition, designed to carry its ‘message into all parts of the country’.2 Enabling a peripatetic education in empire was just one of the league’s schemes. While the leftover exhibits awaited resurrection from storage in Wembley’s old Malta pavilion, the league planned branches throughout the empire to ‘lead consumers to demand empire produce’, and it held public meetings in Hyde Park that reportedly attracted large crowds.3 Despite its zeal, and its impressive connections, the Self-Supporting Empire League does not seem to have lasted long, and the proposed nationwide network of branches appears to have been limited to a single branch, run by gardening enthusiast and knight of the realm Sir George Holford, in Tetbury.4 Its travelling empire show, however, was more successful. With recycled exhibits stuffed into ten pantechnicon vans, and accompanied by twenty-three staff, ‘The British Empire Exhibition (On Tour)’ rumbled out of London just two months after Wembley closed. The first stop in a planned

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year-long itinerary was Southampton in December 1925, where a few eager shopkeepers supported its ‘buy empire’ message with empire-themed window displays.5 However, as the show travelled on, its advance operation became slicker: it compiled lists of empire-produce stockists, it ran window dressing competitions, and it roped in local dignitaries such as mayors and aldermen to publicise events. By January, the show had moved on to Bournemouth and then to Exeter, where 12,000  people attended the exhibition on its first Saturday.6 As was the case for Wembley, visitors may have been as attracted by the show’s entertainment options – including orchestras, palm readers, and a competition to win a car – as they were by the spirit of empire shopping. Still, plenty would also have visited stalls, bought samples, toured exhibits, or watched film shows designed to inculcate the habit of choosing empire first. Next came Cheltenham, where the local education committee assisted 1,000 schoolchildren to visit.7 By April, this alternative ‘Wembley on Wheels’ had completed its ‘most successful’ West Country run and had turned its attention to the Midlands and the North, reaching Liverpool in June.8 Although it began with a year-long itinerary, the eventual extent of the show’s travels is unclear. But the touring empire exhibition and its Self-Supporting Empire League – along with Wembley itself, of course – are just some examples of the many initiatives animated by renewed enthusiasm for empire trade in this era. They demonstrate the point made by John MacKenzie almost forty years ago: that imperial sentiment remained a potent force in interwar Britain.9 Yet, until recently, historians have been more interested in the high politics of imperial trade than in the sentiment that surrounded it. Tariffs have been considered to be more influential than trade shows, politicians more important than consumers, agreements more important than advertising.10 However, as detailed in the book’s introduction, growing interest in what economic historians have begun to refer to as the ‘cultural economy’ of empire trade gives imperial sentiment and its trappings new significance.11 Andrew Thompson and Gary Magee have applied the cultural economic approach to empire, arguing that culture – in this case, Britishness – played an integral role in British imperial expansion in the nineteenth century. In particular, they suggest that networks formed by migration help to explain the accelerating demand for British exports in settler societies around

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the end of the nineteenth century. Carrying a shared culture to the furthest reaches of empire, migrants formed ‘co-ethnic networks’, creating channels of trust and understanding through which the streams of commerce could flow.12 Others have traced an ‘empire effect’ in networks of finance and investment.13 Though most of the work in this vein is focused on the cultural economy of nineteenth-century empire, the same approach seems especially relevant to the interwar period, with its proliferation of leagues and organisations specialising in summoning up the empire spirit. Organisations such as the Self-Supporting Empire League explicitly aimed to make the economy conform to their own cultural imperatives. Indeed, the era’s widespread and deliberate articulation of imperial sentiment suggests that the current emphasis on culture’s role as economic handmaiden, facilitating trade, is obscuring a more dynamic interaction. As with all commerce, the cultural economy of empire trade was a two-way transaction. Trade networks did not simply benefit from existing sentiment: they could also produce it. In line with the argument that culture took on a more dynamic role, this chapter explores the production of imperial sentiment, charting the efforts made to stimulate it by Dominion commodity marketers. For while the Dominions benefited from some post-Wembley metropolitan enthusiasm, they quickly found that co-ethnic networks had their limits: there was no innate ‘British’ bedrock of sentiment to rely on. Instead, as this chapter argues, the Dominions discovered that imperial sentiment was dynamic, fragmented, and even uncomfortable at times. Taking advantage of any cultural economy of Britishness required work. Meanings around sentiment were not always shared or stable, and they certainly could not be taken for granted. But its status as contingent cultural construction meant that, though it could not be relied on, imperial spirit could be created. Along with their metropolitan counterparts, the Dominions became specialists in sentiment production. The idea of ‘producing sentiment’ smacks of insincerity, or at least of a certain amount of cold commercial calculus. But framing sentiment as contingent does not necessarily mean we should then dismiss the marketing deployment of the empire spirit as cynical. There is no doubt that commercial and even political expediency had a role to play in the proliferation of empire buying campaigns – even John MacKenzie’s landmark study was subtitled

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‘The Manipulation of Public Opinion’. Companies happily slapped empire labels on their products ‘where they thought it would boost sales’.14 But expediency does not adequately explain the missionary zeal of the league and its travelling empire, or their effects. Nor is it sufficient to assume that empire meant little to Dominion marketers or that their efforts to engender imperial sentiment were driven only by self-interest. Here, merging insights from the history of the emotions with the concept of the cultural economy offers new ways of understanding sentiment’s role. When Dame Nellie Melba and friends formed the Self-Supporting Empire League they were also creating what Barbara Rosenwein calls an ‘emotional community’, a formation ‘precisely the same as social communities’. People may belong to many such emotional communities and move in and out of them – Rosenwein’s example is the movement between tavern and law court – but each community has its own shared ‘systems of feeling’ that people adapt, adopt, or refuse.15 The league, and others like it, need to be understood as places where imperial sentiment was not just expressed but affirmed, developed, and produced. Further, those expressions could be self-reinforcing. William Reddy argues that emotional utterances are something like a feedback loop, influencing and altering the emotions they express.16 An emotion expressed is not a steady state; named emotions such as sentiment are instead containers for volatile compounds. ‘Emotives’ (Reddy’s term for this expanded concept of an emotion) are ‘instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions, instruments that may be more or less successful.’17 We might see the expansion of the empire spirit and the rise of empire groups as an example of emotives’ intensifying powers in action. Expression cultivated emotion: organisations such as the Self-Supporting Empire League and their Dominion companions created empire spirit at the same time as they displayed it. By directing our attention to what emotions do, Reddy shifts the focus away from measuring their authenticity towards considering their effect. One effect, Reddy argues, is that shared systems of feeling can form an ‘emotional regime’.18 That is, emotive expressions such as sentiment, easily categorised as vapid blandishment or cynical manipulation, are better understood as assertions of what was supposed to be the correct way to behave. Reddy suggests that any stable social state requires a set of normative emotions, as is often

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seen in official rituals and practices: ‘An open declaration of patriotism – swearing on a flag in an army – would be an emotive of this kind.’19 Through this analytic lens, the rise of displays of imperial sentiment, especially during the tumult of the interwar years, could represent an attempt at norm-setting, and one supported by a wide range of civic groups. As we will see, though enthusiasm for imperialism varied throughout Britain, for certain segments of the population ‘buying empire’ was a patriotic act.20 But crucially, whether it is described as Rosenwein’s emotional community or Reddy’s rather more dominating regime, these approaches suggest that sentiment is instrumental. So, like the cultural economy around Britishness, sentiment should be considered less as an outcome of imperialism than as one of its contributing forces. In this vein, Jane Lydon has recently argued for the role of empathy in ‘the establishment and maintenance of imperialism’, particularly between Britain and its Australasian colonies, charting its progress from nineteenth-century humanitarianism to the royal watchers of the 1990s.21 Emotion, Lydon claims, ‘underwrote the colonisation of Australia and continues to maintain imperial ties.’22 Sentiment is one of the powerful emotions involved in that process. Though it has often been treated as a nostalgic relic, sentiment was both produced and deployed to uphold the empire, notably in the economies of white settler colonies. Some of that may have been cynical, but sentiment’s authenticity in this case matters less than its instrumental role, which saw it invoked as part of a dynamic and contingent cultural economy of trade. By tracing the work of Dominion organisations, we can see how commodities were both entangled in a web of imperial sentiment and instrumental in producing it. We begin the chapter with some brief background on Britishbased organisations such as the Self-Supporting Empire League – both as crucial context for the Dominion efforts and as examples of the kinds of emotional communities or regimes the marketers would target – before turning to Dominion efforts to conjure up the imperial spirit. But while the main emphasis remains on the work of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, both metropolitan and Dominion organisations remained true believers in the power of empire marketing.

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‘e ve ry k i tc h e n a n e m p i r e kitchen’: m e tro p o l i ta n c o m m u n i t i es of sentiment Though tariff reform in pursuit of a united empire seemed a lost cause in the years immediately preceding World War I, by the 1920s the idea of some form of imperial economic unity gained fresh momentum.23 During this time, a rash of metropolitan organisations joined the regular cast of imperial evangelists such as the Victoria League, ready to promote various permutations of empire trade, imperial preference, and empire shopping.24 They worked to change the climate of opinion around empire shopping, and they can be considered as attempts to create a civic form of emotional regime. Some, such as the British Empire Producers Organization (BEPO), began earlier, but they found a new mission promoting imperial consumption. Founded in 1916 as a sugar lobby, the BEPO had come to see imperial preference as ‘the development of the family property for the benefit of the whole family’, and by 1924 it was campaigning ‘in favour of empire products’.25 That same year, a group known as the Empire Industries Association for the Extension of British Preference and the Safeguarding of Home Industries Organisation (EIA) emerged, and by 1926 it had launched a campaign almost as exhaustive as its title. Like the Self-Supporting Empire League, it started with public meetings, holding more than a thousand, with a special focus on free-trading strongholds in the Midlands and Manchester; ‘each Sunday in summer meetings were held in nine London parks’ as well.26 The EIA had its roots in the Conservative party, and by 1928 ‘protectionist sentiment was a dominant force’ within the party’s rank and file.27 Some manufacturers joined the imperially inclined producers and politicians, such as carmakers Austin and Morris.28 Others remained imperial apostates, wary of losing the benefits of free trade, but chemical magnate Lord Melchett was not one of them: when he formed Imperial Chemical Industries in 1926, ‘the choice of name … [was] a deliberate statement of policy’.29 By 1929 he had joined forces with Leo Amery to launch the Empire Economic Union.30 At the same time, press baron Lord Beaverbrook began a noisy empire free trade movement that would not only inspire his competitor Lord Rothermere to promote empire trade but also culminate in the creation of the United Empire Party.31

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Even an upstart American commercial organisation could be a hotbed of imperial enthusiasm. Victoria de  Grazia notes that the Rotary Club movement spread from the United States to Britain at this time, exporting a ‘new sociability’ that, she argues, helped overturn ‘the old regimes’ of consumption.32 However, if empire was a part of that ‘old regime’, it seems it was impervious to the arrival of this part of American marketing’s ‘irresistible’ advance. Not only did British Rotary develop its own distinct character (much to the disappointment of the American instigators), it also seems that these new clubs, far from overturning the old regime, offered it support, hosting empire lunches, empire concerts, and empire speakers, on subjects ranging from migration to trade and development along with empire shopping.33 Campaigning for imperial preference spread beyond communities of politicians and businessmen. As Frank Trentmann has observed, a new form of ‘consumer imperialism’ that valorised ‘buying empire’ as a patriotic duty developed after the war.34 Again, like a civic form of Reddy’s emotional regime, ‘consumer imperialism was about educating consumers to choose wisely’, and new organisations such as the Self-Supporting Empire League joined with older empire enthusiasts such as the Primrose League to achieve this.35 The Empire Marketing Board – with its focus on slogans such as ‘Empire Buyers Are Empire Builders’ – is the best-known example, but plenty of other lobby groups pushed the ‘buy empire’ barrow, such as the British Empire League and the British Empire Union.36 Some predated the better-known EMB’s activity: the first ‘Empire Shopping week celebrating Empire Day was inaugurated by the British Women’s Patriotic League in 1922’.37 As we might expect, given their authority over household consumption, women were central to the new consumer imperialism. Advertisers worked to recruit women into empire shopping campaigns, urging them to ‘ask in your daily shopping for empire produce’.38 But consumer imperialism inspired activism as well as advertising. Some women turned their domestic expertise to promoting the imperial cause, holding empire cake competitions, running empire-produce stalls and fetes, creating empire ‘surprise boxes’, and badgering shopkeepers to stock empire products.39 Aristocratic ladies and middle-class Conservative housewives stood at the forefront of the movement, propagating a civic regime around empire shopping. The ‘large and powerful Primrose

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League’ promoted shopping ‘as a way to unite “Home, Nation, and Empire’’ ’, while the motto of the League of Empire Housewives was ‘Every Kitchen an Empire Kitchen’ – a sentiment endorsed by the Duchess of York, who ‘pronounced that only “Empire Products” should be used in royal kitchens’.40 While offering education around empire shopping, these organisations also schooled emotions. At the same time, empire associations formed emotional communities for their own members. The pro-empire women’s group the Forum Club, for example, hosted ‘Buy British luncheons’, complete with talks on the benefits of empire shopping that could only have reinforced the sentiment that had forged the club in the first place.41 Preaching to the converted, however, is an important part of any civic regime. Indeed, cake stalls, empire balls, and those ‘Buy British luncheons’ need to be thought of as more than promotional activities. Acting as emotional feedback loops, these groups intensified the imperial sentiment they sought to foster. Still, these examples suggest that ‘buying empire’ was a highly stratified pastime and that, as a result, the emotional contagion of consumer imperialism may have remained endemic to the carriage trade. Certainly, it seems that some recognised this possibility: elite women sometimes supplemented the sociability of the pro-empire luncheon routine with ‘educating’ working-class housewives, while the Conservative women’s magazine Home and Empire fashioned its own working-class version: a didactic serial on the benefits of empire, starring charlady Mrs Maggs.42 It is unclear how successful these outreach efforts were: in the case of empire tea, at least, it is suggested that poorer women ‘knew nearly nothing about where their tea came from’ and, because they bought it locally, assumed it was British.43 However, the existing scholarly focus on upper-class activism should not obscure the involvement, albeit in different ways, of lower-middle-class and working-class women. Though they may not have discussed the merits of empire over tea, these women were the main customers of the rapidly expanding chain stores. Chain stores attracted a wide clientele, ‘lessening the gap in purchasing habits’ between classes.44 These stores formed important conduits for Dominion produce and their promotional campaigns, which may have been more effective than upper-class tutelage on the ‘lessons of Wembley’.45 The Dominions’ campaigns created another civic form

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of empire shopping’s emotional regime, although as we will see in the next chapter, the Dominions preferred to express imperial sentiment as ‘Britishness’. (Indeed, unlike the dismayed tea campaigners, Dominion marketers might have considered customers believing New Zealand meat or Australian butter to be ‘British’ as a sign of success.) Chapter 3 describes how these Dominion campaigns placed a strong emphasis on the links between empire shopping and family, and this may have resonated with working-class women’s belief in the ‘primacy of home and family’.46 Similarly, though empire shopping has been seen as the ‘middle class counterpart’ to working-class cooperative culture, the binary this implies is misleading: though they carried a wide range of produce, organisations such as the Co-operative Wholesale Society were also key distributors of Dominion commodities and campaigns.47 In fact, though empire buying might have carried elite connotations, Dominion commodities – frozen meat, for example – could have distinctly downmarket price points. Though research is lacking, these factors suggest that the new consumer imperialism – and its sentiment – could extend to lower-middle-class and working-class women, who had the option to include themselves through their shopping choices.48 The new consumer imperialism moved a number of women beyond just shopping for empire. Some also forged careers in this new space. The Self-Supporting Empire League’s travelling Wembley show, for example, was the brainchild of Mrs G.H. Atkinson. A colonel’s wife, Mrs Atkinson exemplified both the genteel zeal for empire and some of its respectable occupational possibilities: she was the founder of the British Empire Exhibition (On Tour) Company; instigator of the Self-Supporting Empire League’s loneliest emotional community, the Tetbury branch; and author of a book on empire endorsed by none other than Leo Amery. Other middle-class women found work lecturing their social ‘inferiors’, among others, on the benefits of empire-grown tea.49 But once again, consumer imperialism’s impact spread beyond the stereotypical upper-class enthusiasm for empire. Throughout the 1920s, growing numbers of working-class women chose retail work over domestic service, becoming ‘ “experts” in helping women to make informed purchases’.50 Some worked in the new chain stores, connecting ‘women consumers to women workers: Marks and Spencer, as it advertised itself, was the store that “introduces the girl who makes stockings to the girl who wears them” ’.51 So while middle-class and upper-class

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women have greater historical visibility, their working-class counterparts may have also been promoting empire, as experts behind the shop counter. Consumer imperialism’s career women, like its activists and shoppers, played a crucial role in the creation of imperial sentiment. Along with political and business communities, these groups helped propagate imperial sympathy through the founding of organisations that also functioned as emotional communities and by inventing, upholding, and responding to civic-styled emotional regimes. The response to these regimes – that is, how successfully they changed consumer behaviour – is hard to judge, but they remain object lessons in how a particular cultural economy might be cultivated, rather than inherited. And they did have one important, overlooked outcome: the blossoming of pro-imperial sentiment encouraged the formation of the Dominion marketing organisations.52 Growing interest in empire shopping weeks helped spur on Australia’s marketing efforts, while in its very first report the New Zealand Meat Producers Board ‘strongly associate[d] itself with the policy of Imperial preference and the ideal of making the Empire self-supporting in all essential commodities’, and it then went ahead and joined the British Empire Producers Organisation.53 Yet the Dominions quickly realised that metropolitan sentiment alone was not enough. To succeed in the metropole, they needed to create their own systems of feeling. Though their efforts have been overshadowed by the centre’s leagues and unions, the Dominions also mobilised emotions to forge a cultural economy of empire trade.

‘p u s h i n g t h e e m p i r e l i n e’: dominion m a r k e t e r s a n d e m p i re buyers Despite the best efforts of Conservative housewives, press barons, and politicians, the newly formed marketing organisations quickly found imperial preference to be more a principle than a practice. Initially, the salesmen of empire had to contend with the actual buying preferences of retailers and wholesalers – and here, it appears, sentiment could be in short supply. In 1926, Australian produce could be found in just 12,000–14,000 British shops, out of a total of approximately 200,000: roughly 7 per cent.54 The imperial origins of commodities concerned retailers and wholesalers less than price, quality, distribution, and supply. These buyers were, as one

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sales representative put it, ‘shrewd’.55 An Australian Trade Publicity (ATP) report gave the following diagnosis: ‘British people have been accustomed for generations to pick and choose from the best of every land … keen merchants … are constantly flooding Great Britain with the best goods of every kind that the world produces and no newcomer, not even the Australian, favoured as he is by a warm fraternal feeling, can hope successfully to attack the British market unless his goods are of good quality and of consistent quality.’56 Sentiment did not prevent Australian goods being ‘cold shouldered because of their unreliability’.57 Australian butter, with its variable quality and supply, was a notorious culprit. The Dairy Board despaired of competing with ‘the Dane’, who had ‘secured goodwill based on a lifetime reputation for consistent quality’.58 But the wellknown biscuit manufacturer Crawford and Sons also preferred to continue using ‘Medditeranean [sic]’ fruit as ‘Australian fruit did not seem so good’,59 and as late as 1933 an Australian sales report bemoaned the ‘prejudice which many traders have for the Californian Fruit’.60 Nor was this prejudice restricted to the wholesale trade: much to the bewilderment of an ATP sales representative, it seems cash-strapped consumers in the depressed areas of 1930s Lancashire and Yorkshire would not buy Australian fruit at any price: ‘I do not know where they get their money from, but at present they will only have the best that that money can buy.’61 Shopkeepers were not inclined to be sentimental about Canadian products either. When surveyed around 1927, Harrods complained that Canadian canned fruits were inferior to American ones, while Canadian hams were also of ‘very poor quality’.62 Retail chain Home and Colonial concurred; they had no use for ‘very inferior’ Canadian canned fruit, while a consignment of Canadian butter ‘went bad within a few days of receipt’.63 In a further blow to Anglo-Canadian trade relations, the buyer for John Irwin and Co., which had 150  branches, was ‘very scornful of Canadian pears’.64 The bad news did not stop at pears: ‘Mr Stafford frankly described our Canadian canned fruits as poor quality … [he was] rather lukewarm in reference to Canadian canned salmon … [he] would not consider Canadian butter … and Canadian cheese he described as being like leather.’65 A later survey of retailers suggested that ‘although there is of course no suggestion of ill-will towards Canadian products, we must recognize that we are not generally accorded preferential treatment’.66 Neither housewives nor the trade would

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be interested ‘in an empire product purely for its own sake: it must come up to the proper standard’.67 New Zealand had put a great deal of effort into improving product quality since the frozen meat and dairy export trades began at the end of the nineteenth century, and producer boards kept a sharp eye on any substandard products being presented as ‘New Zealand’ commodities.68 But problems persisted. Butter could taste stale or spoilt if improperly stored, though it was usually well regarded. New Zealand cheese, however, could run a poor second to its Canadian competition. Questioned in 1930, some importers complained of a ‘loose, crumbly’ texture, insipid flavour, and in one case ‘bad colour and bad appearance’. One summarised the situation curtly: there were ‘more complaints than ever before’.69 As late as 1939 the New Zealand Meat Producers Board warned that ‘the greatest possible benefit from our publicity can only be obtained when it is backed by “quality” in the products’.70 The discovery of hard-nosed British buyers such as Mr Stafford, more interested in quality than ‘warm fraternal feelings’, provides a Dominion complement to recent work on British exporters to empire markets. There has been a long-standing scholarly consensus that selling to pro-British colonial markets dulled companies’ competitive edge, ultimately hurting both Britain’s businesses and empire – an idea that fits neatly with wider arguments implicating empire in British decline.71 The Dominions in particular have been characterised as ‘bolt-holes’ for British manufacturers that struggled to compete elsewhere.72 Newer research, however, has challenged the assumption that Britain’s colonies acted as ‘featherbeds’ for poor British products, concluding instead that ‘empire markets were frequently demanding and difficult, and that penetrating them required a good deal of commitment and skill’.73 Dominion marketers, selling in the other direction, would have no doubt agreed. Though historians of the former Dominions have tended to overlook the complexities of selling to Britain in the twentieth century, metropolitan shopkeepers, just like their compatriots in the colonies, were no soft option for Dominion exporters. Even close kith and kin could reject leathery cheese. Consequently, Dominion governments committed considerable resources to improving export quality, with innovations such as agricultural colleges, model farms, and research institutes, along with grading and inspection schemes.

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But an exacting metropolitan market also meant that the Dominions could not simply rely on existing imperial sentiment to sell their produce. So just as technical colleges and inspectors improved quality, marketing organisations improved sentiment. Creating the empire spirit took work, and the new Dominion marketers used a variety of strategies to give empire’s rhetorical bonds of kinship commercial substance. Perhaps the simplest was personal sales calls. Though the extent and nature of sales activity varied, each Dominion employed representatives to promote their products and cultivate relationships with the wholesale and retail trades. Canada used the trade commissioner system, while the New Zealand Meat Producers Board had its first travelling sales representative in place by 1930, ‘continually visiting meat retailers’.74 Such personal contact was of course pragmatic, but it also helped to create a sense of community. A later report stressed that the board’s London head ‘has always maintained very happy, cordial and personal relations with all section[s] of the meat trade’ – the emphasis placed firmly on ‘personal’.75 Australia seems to have been the busiest Dominion on this front, with ATP representatives regularly making more than a thousand calls per month. These calls represented a thousand opportunities to cultivate the connections between Australia and the heart of empire. Salmond Fleming, a ‘high-class’ grocery firm in Dundee, was persuaded to ‘do the best we can to push Australian goods more especially now that we have some knowledge of the conditions and aspirations of the settlers. We shall certainly do the best that we can for Australia.’76 Australia also offered a more formal education in the bonds of empire: members of the Institute of Certificated Grocers could enter an essay competition on the topic of ‘selling Australian products to help British settlers; to strengthen the empire; and to provide more business for British merchants’.77 Australia’s approach to spreading the empire spirit blended community-building with education. Canada took this idea to an entirely new level: in 1930 they began to run tours to Canada for apprentice grocers, and in 1934 the high commissioner, Howard Fergusson, introduced eight travelling scholarships to allow British grocers between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five to visit Canada.78 That same year, the Canadian High Commission also inaugurated the ‘Maple Leaf Tour’, led by the head of publicity in Britain, D.G. Gerahty. Advertised as a ‘wonderful summer holiday’

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with ‘luxury’ accommodation on land and sea, the four-week tour was ostensibly designed to ‘enable those engaged in the British food distributive trades to obtain a bird’s eye view of the principal food producing industries of Eastern and Central Canada’.79 However, like the better-known educational tours designed to develop an ‘affection’ for empire, the ‘Maple Leaf Tour’ also aimed to inculcate an imperial spirit, this time among British businessmen rather than schoolboys.80 Consequently, the tours mixed business with pleasure. Visits to food producers throughout eastern Canada promoted the quality of Canadian produce, but social engagements aimed at fostering closer relations leavened the otherwise predictable round of educational factory tours. Some of these actively evoked Canada’s British ties: the tourists found themselves dining in London, Ontario, courtesy of Kellogg’s; and they visited Canada’s replica of Westminster, the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, where the Canadian prime minister, R.M.  Bennett, joined them for lunch.81 In keeping with the holiday atmosphere, and amplifying the personal connection, organisers encouraged businessmen to bring their wives along on tour and to social functions. By the trip’s end, it seemed Canada’s personal touch had paid off: the tourists placed plenty of orders – for everything from canned goods to Christmas turkeys – and the initiative was judged successful enough to be run again in 1935.82 Extravagant overseas trips worked for some of Canada’s customers, but even humble point-of-sale material such as posters and display cards could be used to build sentiment. Advertising, of course, aims to create an emotional connection, but here it seems the material itself, along with its messaging, also carried emotional weight. ATP claimed their sales collateral exerted ‘a constant moral pressure on the shopkeeper to stock our goods’.83 Retailers apparently welcomed the reminder: on receipt of his pack of Australian display material, the proprietor of Cave Austin and Co., at St  Leonards-on-Sea, sent his thanks for the advertising material: ‘It is always a pleasure to us to push your Empire lines.’84 After entering an ATP window-dressing competition, another retail store, Platts, enthused ‘that your publicity campaign will do much to encourage the public to buy Australian goods, for the good of empire’.85 The Platts response nicely illustrates the complex interweaving of expediency and emotion: not only did they hope to sell more, but they also hoped to do so for ‘the good of the empire’. We can also

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see the amplifying effect of a civic emotional regime here. Such campaigns – and the competition they engendered – chivvied other, less enthusiastic, shopkeepers along. During the 1927 New Zealand Dairy Board promotion in the Nottingham, Derby, and Leicester areas, reports indicated that ‘the few who were not enthusiastic at the outset were stirred to action … by the widespread movement around them’.86 The New Zealand Meat Producers Board also used such regional publicity ‘drives’, which not only incorporated existing stockists but ‘in many cases … forced retailers to stock our lamb who have never previously done so’.87 Whether cynical or sincere, sentiment expressed by one part of the retail community could spread to others. As the New Zealand Meat Producers Board noted: ‘Our material is displayed daily in every town and village throughout the length and breadth of the Kingdom. This is only possible by the good will of retailers … who are willing to make the fullest use of our attractive material.’88 Metropolitan business networks – the most obvious form of co-ethnic network – could also be tapped to help create a climate of sentiment. Canada worked with the Federation of British Industries, the Imperial Institute, and the Institute of Certificated Grocers, joining New Zealand in the Fellowship of the British Empire Producers Organisation.89 All three Dominions actively participated in the EMB, with Frank McDougall – Australian sultana farmer and indefatigable promoter of imperial causes – playing an especially prominent role.90 While such networks might be seen as purely functional, they were also, like the League of Empire Housewives, a form of emotional community, where sentiment might be both expressed and produced. Australian activity hints at how this worked. ATP staff marshalled the idea of empire to Australia’s commercial cause in an almost ceaseless round of Rotary meetings, Chamber of Commerce gatherings, and empire lunches and dinners. Members toasted the ‘trade and commerce of empire’ and listened to ATP speeches on such subjects as ‘Anglo-Australian trade’ and ‘Australian trade with the motherland’.91 Not all of these events were warmly received: according to ATP chief A.E. Hyland, free traders at one meeting in Wales were ‘not altogether in sympathy with my subject’.92 However, ATP continued its empire-building, incorporating events such as ‘Australia Night’ – a lavish event for grocers and their wives, complete with dancing held in ‘about the largest space in London’ – into

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the annual meeting of British grocery presidents.93 A year later, ATP hosted its own spectacular version of a pro-empire luncheon, billed as the ‘largest assembly ever gathered together in London of Australia’s customers’. It invited more than 460 guests to lunch, including the chairman of Selfridges, the Harrods food manager, and the director of Allied Suppliers (which controlled more than 3,000 stores, including the well-known Lipton and Maypole brands), along with representatives from key cooperative stores, railway companies, and hotels.94 Appropriately enough for a gathering designed to strengthen bonds with important buyers, the visiting prime minister, Joseph Lyons, raised a toast to ‘Australia’s Customers’.95 Lavish lunches, Rotary meetings, educational tours, and even humble point-of-sale material all played a part in the expression and development of sentiment around Dominion commodities. These activities helped bring importers, wholesalers, and retailers on board to stock and sell Dominion produce, especially those customers like Mr Stafford, who were less than enthusiastic about empire buying on its own merits. However, the Dominions also needed the support of consumers, so marketers developed strategies to build sentiment among shoppers. These campaigns undoubtedly benefited from the work of their British counterparts. But whereas campaigners such as the Self-Supporting Empire League promoted a generic empire spirit, Dominion marketers focused hard on particular products. In Dominion hands, nebulous promptings to ‘buy empire’ were translated into robust sales tactics that once again constructed and displayed the empire spirit. We now turn to constructing consumer imperialism Dominion-style.

‘d e ar b r i t i s h h o u s e w i f e ’: t he dominions, s e n t i m e n t, a n d c o n s umers In keeping with a cultural economy imagined around kinship, Dominion efforts to engender sentiment spread further than their commercial contacts. Their greatest effort in building consumer imperial sentiment was directed at British housewives. Advertising, discussed in the next chapter, became the most prominent channel for this, but the Dominions also employed a variety of other promotional strategies, which, just as with wholesalers and retailers, used personal connection to promote Dominion produce. On one level, this strategy simply recognised women’s key role as holders of

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the household purse. But demonstrations, talks, and recipes also worked to help reinforce a sense of wider imperial community. All three Dominions undertook in-store demonstrations, where consumers might sample potential purchases. In March 1935, the ATP ran fifty-two week-long demonstrations, ranging from large cooperatives in Birmingham to grocery stores in Glasgow and attracting thousands of customers. Sampling in-store meant that housewives could chat with ‘lady demonstrators’, creating a relationship aimed at closing the gap between empire product and potential purchaser. The direct approach worked: the Birmingham cooperative store, for example, sold an extra 500 pounds of butter.96 More elaborate demonstrations – including special empire stores complete with cooking displays and film shows – also boosted sales. Australia’s exhibition store in Glasgow, open during November 1933, distributed more than 35,000 samples to shoppers, part of a larger campaign that gave ‘excellent results’ according to the Australian minister of customs.97 These displays obviously promoted the idea of shopping imperially, but they did so less through education than by promoting a personal connection with the buyers. As interwar gas appliance retailers found, women demonstrators improved sales because they ‘established a “sympathetic bond” between the consumer and the company’.98 Demonstrations also doubled as entertainment, which helped foster goodwill. They became ‘cheap outings for housewives’, and almost any product stood to gain a little extra lustre simply by being a welcome change from the dull round of household duties.99 Displays and demonstrations offered a brief escape from the routine domestic grind, but other Dominion strategies carried their message of imperial community right into the heart of British homes. Following a broader advertising trend in the British food trade, all three Dominions created branded recipe books, often given to housewives at demonstrations. In this era, women often amassed large collections of free recipes as a way to add a little variety to the couple of basic cookbooks they used.100 At first glance, Dominion giveaways seem to offer a touch of cosmopolitan glamour, but in fact their recipes did not seek to play up the differences between colonial and metropolitan cooks. Instead they reinforced a shared culinary repertoire. Australia’s Economical Cookery featured ‘Iced Scottish Cakes’ on its front cover, and the excursions of its successor, The Kangaroo Kookery Book, into imported cuisine included an

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‘Australian Cheese Omelette’ and ‘Australian Boiled Eggs’.101 The New Zealand Meat Producers Board offered recipes for imported lamb, including lamb pie, various ways with lamb necks, and, for the adventurous, a lamb ‘surprise’.102 As these prosaic offerings suggest, novelty tended to be restricted to nomenclature, with most recipes simply being familiar dishes rebranded. Australia’s ‘Sydney Sultana Sponge Pudding’ looked suspiciously similar to spotted dick, while Canada’s Maple Leaf Canadian Recipe Book, first published in 1931, featured a ‘St Lawrence Tomato Soup’ and, in a nod to empire, ‘Kitchener Kedgeree’.103 Though not exactly gourmet – the Maple Leaf advised serving Canadian tinned spaghetti ‘just as it comes from its can’ – these publications were still popular. The Kangaroo Kookery Book went through several reprintings between 1932 and 1935, while half a million copies of the Maple Leaf had been distributed by 1933 and it was still being reprinted as late as 1940. Eventually, even Canadians wanted a copy: ‘requests from home led to the printing of a Canadian edition’.104 By offering recipes that emphasised a common heritage, the books gave substance to the sentimental idea of a broader British world of kith and kin. They also reinforced the emotional regime that existed around empire shopping. New Zealand lamb was ‘produced by Britishers for Britain’, The Kangaroo Kookery Book carried the subtitle ‘Help Australia to Help You’, and Canada’s high commissioner added a letter to The Maple Leaf Canadian Recipe Book to encourage ‘more links in the chain of distribution between the Canadian producer and the consumer’.105 While it is hard to imagine any consumer feeling especially compelled by these messages, Dominion cookbooks embedded a warmer emotional appeal. Australia aimed to assist its ‘countless friends amongst the housewives of Great Britain in the still more satisfying use of Australia’s food products’.106 The Maple Leaf took an even friendlier tone, encouraging its readers to respond to the recipes: ‘Dear British Housewife,’ it began, ‘It is hoped that this recipe book will help you first of all to rely more upon the Empire, particularly upon Canada, when making out your daily shopping list … Experiment on your own and tell me the result of your experiments. Criticise this little book as freely as you like, for it is only by criticism that we can give you what you want. Whatever you have to say, we shall be interested to listen.’107 It would be easy to dismiss the Maple Leaf ’s amiable entreaty as nothing more than empty advertising rhetoric. Yet its author,

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journalist Kathleen Bowker, genuinely hoped to create a community around empire shopping. The daughter of Canadian senator John Kirchhoffer, Bowker was a well-connected member of a transatlantic elite, comfortable mingling in the upper echelons of British society and with royalty. After the death of her financier husband, she moved to London, where, like other upper-class women, she found a new career as an expert in imperially inflected domesticity. Hired in 1930 by Canada’s Department of Trade and Commerce to write The Maple Leaf Canadian Recipe Book, Bowker began appearing regularly in the press and on radio with recipes for ‘Canadian favourites’, extending her empire expertise beyond her homeland to incorporate tips for other Dominion foods, including recommendations for South African oranges and hints for cooking with New Zealand butter.108 She would go on to become a minor celebrity, spruiking empire products and their outlets enthusiastically: ‘Everything I wear or use are first, of Empire origin, and secondly can be bought at James Howells Stores.’109 Media of various kinds thus brought Bowker into the heart of British homes, and once there she behaved like one of the family. A cross between a chatty kitchen confidante and a trusted aunt, she packed her own reliable empire recipes and ‘treasured’ family recipes gleaned from other housewives into advertorials styled as letters.110 These regular ‘Empire Choice’ columns, like her Maple Leaf letter, imagined an emotionally connected family of empire cooks: ‘When I write a letter to a friend, I have a very clear idea of what one friend – or one family – will like to hear. But writing to ten thousand friends at once! I am sure I will say the wrong thing to some of you. But if you keep reading this news of food and families, you are sure to find something … which is just what you like.’111 Bowker also connected with her empire kitchen community via radio. Her BBC broadcasts generated ‘thousands of letters’, while housewives crowded her Canadian cookery demonstrations in Cardiff, Bristol, and Plymouth in 1932.112 Emotional connections framed these personal appearances: writing the following year to promote an upcoming demonstration, Bowker recalled how ‘friendly’ everyone had been the last time and how much she was ‘looking forward to seeing some of my former friends and also making some new ones’.113 Radio broadcasts, demonstrations, and newspaper columns enabled Bowker to create a virtual network of empire shoppers. Her next venture attempted to give this community actual substance.

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In 1932, with the support of the Dominion high commissioners, she launched the Empire Homemakers Institute, on Lower Regent Street.114 ‘Run entirely for the sale of empire commodities’, the institute specialised in talks and cookery demonstrations dedicated to Dominion produce.115 It also included a cafe featuring Canadian foods, advertised as the ‘first empire restaurant in London’, and it was given a little extra imperial cachet by having Leo Amery officiate at the opening and the Canadian prime minister, R.B. Bennett, drop in for tea.116 Just as pro-empire clubs mixed imperial activities with emotional community, so too did the Empire Homemakers Institute. Bowker encouraged her followers to support the institute through annual memberships. She then invited members (and others) into her new Regent Street home: ‘Come and see us and eat an Empire meal at our café whenever you come to London.’117 This may have been a bridge too far – institute membership ended up discounted to a shilling – but Bowker herself remained a popular figure in both Britain and Canada, still attracting audiences later in the decade.118 Bowker’s work, and the wider empire kitchen community created through cookbooks and demonstrations, complemented other Dominion schemes developed to solidify the idea of an empire of kith and kin. All the Dominions performed and constructed kinship connections through carefully orchestrated public giving. Australia demonstrated its loyalty through presents of Christmas puddings and gifts of fruit to royalty; it expressed its sense of British kinship through donations of food to hospitals and charitable organisations such as Dr Barnardo’s.119 Even Canada succumbed to an occasional public relations gesture reifying the idea of a wider imperial family. In 1928, Canada’s head of publicity arranged for gifts of Canadian food to be given to ‘every married Warrant Officer, NCO and Private’ taking part in the Aldershot horse show. At the same event, every child under twelve received a Canadian apple.120 Such gifts amounted to more than tactical opportunities for customers to sample Canadian products: the act of giving performed the kin relationship and could engender warm feelings. Meanwhile, the New Zealand Co-operative Dairy Company fostered a similar sense of belonging with the Anchor Butter Club. Aimed at children, members collected Anchor butter wrappers, receiving badges and a monthly magazine in return. ‘Uncle Anchor’ sent them letters and birthday cards, and even organised club

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outings.121 New Zealand’s meat and dairy boards went beyond the creation of virtual family members, concentrating on schemes based on activating actual kinship ties. New Zealanders could nominate ‘Home friends’ or relatives to receive ‘presentation’ legs of lamb – by 1931 the board had distributed 20,000.122 The dairy board offered four  pound gift packs of butter, part of its plan to ‘introduce samples of NZ butter and cheese into as many homes in the UK as possible’.123 These samples merged pragmatic salesmanship with emotion, ‘vitalising connecting links between the two countries … not links between friends alone, but [also between] powerful though silent salesmen’.124 Yet the empire could always strike back. In 1934, the Australian prime minister, Joseph Lyons, made a speech announcing protection for the tiny Australian cotton industry. In the process, he sparked what may be history’s only boycott in favour of empire, as grocers in Bolton and Lancashire – on behalf of their customers employed in the cotton industry – retaliated by refusing to sell Australian goods.125 If Australian merchants would not buy British cotton, Bolton grocers would not buy Australian butter. The head of one large provisions dealer made it plain: ‘We have been loyal buyers of Australian produce up to now, but if the Australians will not take the cotton goods on which our retail customers depend for their living we have no alternative but to retaliate.’126 Claims of co-ethnicity were repurposed as weapons in a mini trade war. As another boycott supporter argued: ‘We have always wanted to trade with Australia and have looked upon the Australian people as brothers, but Australia is not reciprocating that brotherly feeling.’127 After backtracking on both sides, the grocers eventually suspended their boycott, but sentiment was not so easily satisfied, and the ‘quarrel’ lasted.128 Lancashire grocers declined to attend ‘Australia Night’. Months afterwards, ATP remained in damage-control mode, screening slides in sixty cinemas emphasising that ‘Australia is Lancashire’s second best customer’.129 Meanwhile, New Zealand quickly spotted an opportunity to emphasise their own kith and kin links, taking advantage of the situation to ‘tell the grocers what good friends of the Old Country [they] are’.130 Lancashire’s little trade war with Australia illustrates the instability of imperial identity in commercial relationships. Co-ethnicity was contingent, not congenital. In the case of Lancashire, Australia’s intemperate support of its tiny cotton industry jeopardised not only

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export earnings but also a pro-imperial sentiment that it had spent considerable time and money cultivating. However, the Bolton boycott was a rare misstep. All three Dominions realised that they could not rely on any ‘natural’ bonds of sentiment to sell their produce in the competitive British market; all three then worked assiduously to create those bonds instead. Their contribution to the interwar period’s developing imperial consumerism has long been overlooked, overshadowed by better-known metropolitan examples. But with the help of their British counterparts, the Dominions used educational tours, travelling sales representatives, ‘lady demonstrators’, gifts of lamb, ‘Uncle Anchor’, and even a couple of prime ministers to mobilise metropolitan imperial sentiment and sell more produce. In doing so, the Dominions built, rather than relied on, a cultural economy of empire. In concert with organisations such as the Self-Supporting Empire League and the League of Empire Housewives they fostered the new consumer imperialism. Expediency played a part: the empire shopping movement helped the Dominions to carve out a unique sales niche for their commodities that otherwise faced fierce competition from other producers. But reducing imperial sentiment to commercial pragmatism obscures its instrumental role. Emotions have historical effects. Sentiment may have helped sell products but it also helped to shore up empire. Dominion campaigns, then, reveal more than a forgotten episode in empire marketing: they reveal a continued commitment to the wider imperial project. The next chapter continues to investigate this commitment by analysing their construction of Britishness.

3

‘All-British’ Lands: Advertising and the Construction of Commodity Britishness

In May 1927 – just in time for Empire Day – the newly formed Australian Trade Publicity (ATP) committee launched its first metropolitan press campaign. The new season’s sultanas had arrived, and a burst of display advertisements extolled their virtues. Sweet, ‘flavoury’, and juicy, packed with ‘plenteous nourishment’, Australian sultanas were versatile, good for children, and ready in grocers’ shops now. Among all these virtues, copywriters did not overlook the empire link. The Dominion’s sultanas were ‘empire produce at its best’, and the advertisements even featured a special empire fruit cake recipe. For, as the copy made clear, Australian sultanas were a special kind of imperial produce, from a special kind of imperial territory. Unlike tea or tobacco, advertisers did not present sultanas as the exotic bounty of a distant colony. Instead, this empire produce was proudly ‘grown on British soil!’.1 And the arrival of Australia’s ‘British’ sultanas was just the beginning. Subsequent campaigns introduced Australian ‘British butter’, while Australian currants and raisins joined sultanas as ‘British fruits’ and Australian apples became ‘British to the Core’.2 One design, featuring a map of the Dominion, captured the spirit of ATP’s campaigns: selling apples and sultanas made Australia an ‘All-British’ land.3 Australia’s marketing metamorphosis seems to have captured the settler-colonial imagination. The ‘All-British’ advertising concept quickly became a Dominion-wide phenomenon. New Zealand made ‘British cheese for British shelves’.4 In retail posters, its lamb was ‘BRITISH to the backbone’, while the Dominion’s sheep grazed upon its ‘ENGLISH’ grass.5 The New Zealand Meat Producers Board

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even developed its own map-based design for marketing meat: a logo featuring a map of New Zealand labelled ‘British!’.6 The presence of Quebec made any British-styled map makeover for Canada problematic. Still, the small matter of French Canada did not stop the marketing roll-out of ‘British’ Canada: Canadian bacon made the ‘best British breakfast’, while Canadian apples, like Australia’s, were proudly ‘British to the Core’.7 Dominion commodity campaigns would persist in promoting ‘British’ Australia, Canada, and New Zealand for the best part of two decades. Such self-fashioning is, of course, at odds with their older nationalist histories, instead supporting recent research that emphasises the prolonged importance of Britain and empire in the former Dominions.8 Certainly, while headlines such as ‘Canadian Apples’ seem to promote individual, ‘national’ identities, copy lines such as ‘All-British food produced by All-British people’ suggest colonial nationalism remained a work in progress during this era.9 But the Dominions’ British boosterism was more than a measure of lingering colonial sensibilities: it demonstrates the dynamic and contingent nature of the imperial cultural economy. Just as we have seen with sentiment, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand understood that they could not rely on any ‘natural’ bonds of kinship to compete in the British market. Britishness was not simply a consequence of migration and settlement, even if advertisements sometimes liked to imagine that was the case. Instead, Britishness, like sentiment, could be created. Campaigns promoting ‘best British breakfasts’ and ‘British and best’ fruit were less the predictable outcome of co-ethnic networks than another Dominion attempt to create those networks. This chapter analyses the construction of Dominion Britishness through advertising, suggesting it was the product of two opposed yet interlocked processes. On one hand, Dominion campaigns constructed an inclusive form of Britishness, touting the commonalities between the former settler colonies and ‘Home’. Inclusivity is of course at the heart of the creation of co-ethnicity, and bald pronouncements about ‘All-British lands’ are obvious examples of the inclusivity strategy in action. Commodity advertising reshaped Dominion landscapes, populations, history, and even geography to make them seem more ‘Home-like’. ‘British!’ maps are small examples of this much wider transformational programme. On the other hand, adding in an element of Britishness was not the end

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of the process: at the same time, Dominion campaigns also made any non-British elements disappear. In this exclusionary strategy, Indigenous peoples and native flora and fauna made way for white farming Dominions. Images of yeoman settlers replaced First Peoples, ‘English’ grasses replaced indigenous species, ‘British soil’ replaced native earth. Reiterating the colonisation process, commodity marketing recreated indigenous spaces as ‘All-British’ lands. Dominion commodity campaigns, then, achieved in advertising what Patrick Wolfe has described as the fundamental logic behind settler colonialism in situ: the ‘elimination of the native’.10 Researchers analysing the contemporary marginalisation of minorities in popular media choose similar language, calling this process ‘symbolic annihilation’ and noting its power to ‘erase groups and individuals from public consciousness’.11 For the Dominions, however, annihilation was more than symbolic: marketing fruit grown in ‘British soil’ first required the expropriation of Indigenous land – a process simultaneously masked and restaged in promotions. Work on the imperial cultural economy must engage more fully with this crucial point. Scholars recognise the role of British co-ethnic networks in dispossessing Indigenous groups; but acknowledging that British expansion led to dispossession – and thus emphasising the consequences of co-ethnic networks – actually disguises their intent.12 As noted earlier, co-ethnic networks are, by their very nature, also exclusionary, so dispossession is a condition, not simply a consequence, of them. Current economic approaches overlook the powerful discriminatory dynamics at play in constructing imperial identities through trade in the interwar period. The rest of this chapter examines these two modes of articulating Britishness, arguing that twentieth-century Dominion advertising in fact offers an extension of what Anne McClintock identified, for nineteenth-century advertising, as commodity racism. This system brought imperial power and scientific racism together, then weaponised them via mass marketing. Advertisements for Pear’s soap or Bovril or tobacco brought ‘an organised system of images and attitudes’ into Victorian homes, playing a vital role in reinventing and sustaining Britain’s imperial power ‘in the face of deepening imperial competition and colonial resistance’.13 Dominion advertising would develop its own, quite specific system of images and attitudes, but this system would also support an empire, albeit one facing a different set of pressures.

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The analysis in this chapter follows the divide already identified, between those techniques that mobilised the Dominions’ similarity to the metropolis – the very epitome of constructed co-ethnicity – and those that sought to camouflage difference. Of course, these ideas, artificially separated here, actually worked together to create what I have called commodity Britishness: the deliberate construction of an exclusionary settler identity through advertising. Emphasis and erasure, presence and absence, similarity and difference, combined within and beyond the borders of individual advertisements to recreate former colonies as modern, white, and masculine farming Dominions. The code word for these attributes was ‘British’. For the former settler colonies, the nineteenth century’s commodity racism was reborn as the twentieth century’s commodity Britishness, and it would sustain and reproduce gendered, racist hierarchies of empire in new ways.

‘ 9 9% b r i t i s h ’: c o m modity b r i t i s h n e s s a n d i n c lus ion Creating a sense of shared Britishness was often, as we have seen, a painfully obvious process. Dominion produce was grown ‘by Britishers for Britain’ – by ‘your own kith and kin’ – and was even ‘picked and packed … by fellow Britons’.14 Advertising shamelessly summoned up the shades of kindred spirits past in the pursuit of Britishness: New Zealand attributed its meat-raising success to ‘the industry of British pioneers – your own fellow country folk’, while Canada, quietly omitting tens of thousands of non-British settlers specially recruited only a few decades earlier to open up the prairies, used its ‘Canada Calling’ campaign to tell metropolitan shoppers that it was settlers ‘from London, heart of empire … who have pushed back [Canada’s] frontiers and brought to fruitfulness her acres’ (a later campaign substituted Birmingham as home of the doughty pioneers).15 Canada even took its history of shared Britishness to the big screen with a ‘new sound film, packed with action’, released in 1939 for the British wheat trade and called, predictably, The  Kinsmen. Screenings of this ‘dramatic and absorbing story’ of wheat growing seem, mercifully, to have been confined to audiences of bakers.16 More recent history could be called upon too: campaigns occasionally mobilised the shared legacy of World War  I on the retail

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front. More than a million soldiers from Australia, Canada, and New Zealand served in the war, a reflection of the power of imperial ties that also formed a potent – and poignant – foundation for Dominion appeals to kinship.17 Surprisingly, though, given the scale of Dominion commitment to the war, and its recency, direct allusions were infrequent. This may reflect the fact that many of the campaigns appeared during another major shared crisis – the Great Depression – and, as we will see, advertising encouraged shoppers to ‘buy empire’ to wage a new war against foes such as unemployment. However, a few advertisements played directly on consumer consciences, reminding shoppers that returned servicemen, some of them resettled British soldiers, grew Dominion produce.18 Geography joined history in depicting shared Britishness: when not employed to create the Dominions as replica Britains, maps demonstrated the close ties between the Dominions and ‘Home’. Promotional material regularly reconstituted commodity chains as the very stuff of kinship ties, with festoons of apples or eggs drawn as links that bound former colony and metropolis together (plate 2).19 It helped that Dominion commodities themselves reinforced the idea of Britishness: lamb, bacon, apples, butter, and even sultanas were familiar British foods, not exotic produce of the dependent empire. Campaign slogans nevertheless laboured the connection with slogans such as ‘Australian food is all British food. Australia is an all British land.’20 Positioning Dominion products as suitable ingredients for traditional British cooking, such as puddings or fruit cakes, reinforced their homely familiarity. Australia claimed to have pioneered the interwar fascination with ‘Empire Christmas puddings’, having created a recipe featuring imperial produce. This conflation of Dominion produce and ‘Home’ cooking went on to be given the royal seal of approval in 1927, when the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) adopted the idea, publicising a recipe for the ‘King’s Christmas pudding’. For a time, it was ‘the most popular recipe in the world’. A pudding-hungry public inundated the EMB with requests for the recipe, which featured Australian dried fruit, Canadian apples, and New Zealand suet, among other empire ingredients.21 Versions of an empire pudding continued appearing sporadically in Dominion advertising until as late as  1938, when the newly established Canadian Wheat Board tried marketing a bread version called ‘Her Majesty’s Pudding’.22 But Australia’s commitment to

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selling dried fruit meant that ATP reigned supreme in this area of Dominion marketing: in 1932 they doubled down on the Christmas theme by putting a giant all-Australian Christmas cake on display at Australia House in London.23 Weighing three-quarters of a ton, the cake’s – and Australia’s – British cultural credentials were heightened by decorating it with a match in progress at the Sydney Cricket Ground, complete with a scoreboard reading ‘one up for England’.24 Indeed, Australian fruit, butter, and eggs could make familiar foods such as Christmas cake more British. Advertisements urged consumers to ‘put a Union Jack in your fruit cake’ by throwing in a handful of Australian sultanas, or to follow the example of the king and use ‘no other sultanas in their Christmas pudding’.25 Australian commodities therefore went beyond simply appealing to Britishness: in a creative twist, metropolitan shoppers could perform their own Britishness by ‘buying Australian’. In ATP’s hands, a ‘British shopping basket’ was one filled with Australian food.26 Similarly, campaigns reconstituted ‘empire buying’ in general as ‘buying Dominion’. Since 1926, the EMB had been working to stress ‘a vital mutual dependence between the Empire at Home and the Empire overseas’.27 Dominion advertising recast this vague sense of imperial solidarity as a direct dependence between the Dominions and Britain. Canada adopted the slogan ‘The Empire’s Larder’, though the Canadian version of empire in this case was limited to British housewives, who ‘should buy Canadian and help British Empire trade’.28 Such advertisements initially reflected the principle of imperial reciprocity, but the idea easily translated into slogans suggesting that empire shopping could help combat the effects of the Depression. The EMB urged shoppers to ‘keep the money in the family’ by choosing empire products.29 Slogans such as ‘Every pound you spend on Australian produce enables Australia to spend a pound more on British goods’ echoed this idea, constructing empire shopping as a form of economic self-help among the imperial family.30 To encourage consumers to ‘Help Australia to help you’, advertising once again constructed and naturalised bonds of kinship: ‘Australian business is a British family affair because Australians are British people.’31 For any doubters, Australia had statistics ready: ‘Buy from those who buy from you … Australia has a marked preference for British goods because  98% of the population of the Southern Dominion are the sons and daughters of the motherland with a genuine

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affection for the old country.’32 In the Dominion sport of competitive demography, New Zealand took a 1 per cent lead, claiming a 99 per cent ‘pure British population’, who were ‘most enthusiastically British’ and ‘bought more goods per head from Great Britain than any other [making] New Zealand BRITAIN’S BEST CUSTOMER’.33 Canada, with a large French population, had to make do with Ontario being ‘78% British’, although they bolstered such lacklustre numbers by emphasising their ‘pro-British tendencies’.34 Reciprocity, then, was another form of ‘buying British’, and it remained a common theme in Dominion advertising, even after the EMB’s demise in 1933. Notably, it formed a central plank in the ‘Canada Calling’ campaign, which did not begin until three years later, in October 1936. The first of these advertisements, targeting Glasgow, spun a web of interdependence: ‘Amongst the many things Canada buys from Glasgow are her woollens and tweeds, in return Canada’s Clyde-built ships bring home to Glasgow the finest produce her rich soils and sun can raise and ripen.’35 Later campaigns, amended to suit their audiences (Birmingham provided ‘iron and steel and machinery and a host of manufactured things’), continued to emphasise reciprocity. Similarly, ‘empire’ itself remained a useful term. It has been argued that, by the 1930s, tea advertisers had ‘discarded the imperial approach’ – a conclusion that fits with other studies that suggest empire was becoming outmoded in an increasingly interconnected world.36 But while that might have been the case for a globally sourced and traded commodity such as tea searching for new markets, it was not so for Dominion produce. Empire endured in Dominion campaigns. In 1935, Canada still claimed to be the empire’s larder, Australia still sold ‘glorious empire fruit’, and New Zealand continued its enthusiastic career as the empire’s dairy farm.37 A jubilee that year and a coronation in 1937 helped keep the term relevant. For the Dominions, with few options to sell their produce elsewhere, continuing to emphasise their imperial connection in the heart of empire remained a viable strategy.38 Creating ‘All-British’ lands in Dominion campaigns extended beyond bold typefaces, claims to kinship, and abundant exclamation marks. Commodity Britishness was also contrived in more subtle ways. Publicity downplayed the otherness of Dominion landscapes, emphasising ‘Home-like’ orchards and fields over the exotic outback or icy north. So naturalised have farming landscapes in white

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settler colonies become that such manipulation is easy to miss. Advertising films, discussed in the next chapter, played a major role in constructing these promotional landscapes, while press advertisements, window displays, and other sales material also worked to reimagine the Dominions as familiar British farms. Housewives buying New Zealand meat were encouraged to picture ‘a  scenic view which is both rugged and rural. Mountain backgrounds and wide tracts of rich green pasture lands; the latter very much akin to those of Britain.’39 Free postcards featuring photographs of ‘the Empire’s sunny sheep farm’ helped to reinforce this vision, as did shop window dioramas of rolling green pastures dotted with tidy farmhouses and brochures illustrated with neat farms.40 Australian advertisements often remade the whole continent as a fruit basket, featuring maps overflowing with apples and bunches of grapes, a process that swapped the Dominion’s diverse, strange, and sometimes hostile landscapes for a fruit-producing cornucopia. Others tamed and domesticated the countryside, illustrations of neat rows of vines and fruit trees alternating with images of pretty farms. Copy constructed some of these farms as not just familiar but familial: ‘thousands’ of British families grew the fruit British shoppers could – or, more accurately, should – buy, while still more fruit was produced by British ex-servicemen who had been helped by the Australian government to ‘make a home on the land’.41 The Dominions’ promotional habit of pastoralisation spread to Canada’s advertising, where it received a further twist. The ‘Canada Calling’ campaign was the biggest undertaken by any Dominion, and its sizeable press advertisements regularly reproduced photographs rather than relying on the cheaper artwork used by other Dominions. These photographs told a familiar story: though some featured touristic scenery such as mountains and rivers, the predominant image was of fields of grain – complete with ploughs and picturesque wheat stooks. But Canada also forged its rural identity in relation to Britain itself. Advertisements juxtaposed images of rural Canada with a particular British city: London, Manchester, or Glasgow, for example. In crisp black and white, Manchester’s City Hall or Glasgow’s George Square butted up against bucolic scenes of wheat fields, visually affirming the connection between colony and metropolis while reifying the old divide between the consuming metropole and its producer periphery anew (figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 The producer periphery and the consuming centre.

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From time to time, a little local colour was allowed to creep into the images of ‘Home-like’ farms, but this was less about Dominions creating their own unique national identity than about giving their products some identifiable difference when competing against other white Dominion producers. Australian butter, for example, which competed against New Zealand butter, adopted the kangaroo as a grading symbol. Australia’s most prominent symbol of otherness, the kangaroo was also occasionally pressed into service in other advertising. One example, ATP’s own Kangaroo Kookery Book, featured a tame cartoon version, complete with apron and modern kitchen. Cooking kangaroos, however, proved to be no match for the fighting variety. ATP put boxing kangaroos in the ring to promote Australian products, most spectacularly in a 1932 exhibition at Olympia, when Australia’s high commissioner, Sir Granville Ryrie, went a few rounds with one to promote Australian butter.42 (No winner was announced.) This outlandish icon shared space with a new, domesticated symbol of Australianness: Melba XV, the ‘wonder cow’, world champion producer of butter fat and star of point-of-sale material in shop windows throughout the United Kingdom.43 In these window displays, Australia was constructed not only as British but as rural. The same set of ideas would be set in motion in cinemas across the country in ATP-organised film shows that featured epics such as ‘The Romance of the Cattle Industry’ and ‘Dairying in Queensland’ and attracted thousands of British housewives and schoolchildren every month. Dominion farms were made ‘Home-like’ in another way, too. They may have been rural, but they were also modern. As an ATP butter pamphlet noted: ‘The old time farm methods … have gone.’44 New Zealand dairy farmers lived in comfortable homes, usually with electricity.45 ‘Radio and telephone [kept] the farmer in constant touch with current affairs,’ while his farm was ‘properly equipped with modern labour-saving machinery,’ which (it could not go without saying) was ‘principally from Britain.’46 The New Zealand Meat Producers Board went even further, proclaiming the rural-yet-modern status of the entire country: ‘Practically the whole nation is concentrated on farming pursuits’ and at the same time its people were ‘fully conversant with all the most modern methods of production.’47 Claims to a metropolitan-like modernity extended to food processing. New Zealand meat was processed in ‘up to date meat works run on highly efficient and scientific lines’ before being sent to

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England in similarly ‘up to date and speedy liners’.48 Canadian company Aylmer advertised itself as the ‘largest canning organisation in the British Empire’.49 Dominion factories also stressed their cleanliness, another important signal of modernity in this era.50 Canada upheld ‘the World’s most rigid standard of Purity’; Australian sultanas were ‘scrupulously clean’; New Zealand meat was ‘officially guaranteed pure’, and its creameries were ‘maintained at a high standard of cleanliness and hygienic conditions’.51 Of course, these visions of immaculate production should be seen at least in part as a pragmatic response to long-standing consumer suspicions over the hygiene and quality of processed food generally.52 They also reflect consumer culture’s increasing emphasis on ‘scientific motherhood’, or the professionalisation of the domestic sphere.53 Yet Dominion commodities’ claims to thoroughly modern cleanliness were also inextricably entangled with the construction of whiteness. Soap has been implicated in the construction and extension of nineteenth-century imperial power, and echoes of those earlier meanings, especially around race, remained.54 Further, by the interwar period, terms such as ‘purity’ also resonated with race-based discourses that were shaping national health and immigration programmes around the world. Australia’s federal director of quarantine made the link between whiteness, cleanliness, and race plain: ‘It is all very well to have a white Australia … but it must be kept white. There must be immaculate cleanliness.’55 As Alison Bashford argues, ‘Whiteness was not only a racial identification in this period, it also signified purity, hygiene and cleanliness.’56 However, Dominion marketing suggests that this signification worked both ways. If whiteness was linked with cleanliness in health discourses, in commodity advertising cleanliness signified a ‘white’ colony. Canada made the connection explicit with tag lines such as ‘The Name Canada Stands for Purity’.57 It is Australian advertising, however, that provides the best example of the complex interplay between commodity marketing, modernity, hygiene, and whiteness. One fruit promotion asked its audience to imagine a great modern building, in some cases looking out upon leafy orchards filled with busy fruit pickers. Wagons groaning beneath their luscious burdens come to the reception doors. White-clad troops of bonny girls sitting at long tables grade and prepare the fruit. Then all contact with

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human beings is over. Machinery steps in. Automatically glide along the gleaming, golden peaches, apricots and ivory pears to the cans glistening in their newness like silver caskets … Syrup … automatically enters the cans … Lids are automatically put on … then kept at a constant temperature … the cans travel slowly emerging at the other end with their fruit brought to the nicest point for your enjoyment.58 This extraordinary ode to canning brought Arcadia and Taylorism together, while gently blurring boundaries between industrial and racial hygiene, to produce a vision of modernity as stainless as the cans themselves. The bounty of a ‘leafy’ settler Australia is captured in ‘groaning’ wagonloads – an image of abundance translated from the land to its people as ‘bonny girls’ sort the fruit. Dressed in virginal white, the women are another kind of colonial harvest, evoking both the product and the promise of the ‘British race’, if only bodies and borders, like fruit tins, could be kept free of ‘contamination’.59 Meanwhile, their description as ‘troops’ seated at long tables reflects an orderly – almost automaton – Taylorism. Modern organisation is then partnered with modern machinery: ‘all contact with human beings is over’ as immaculate industrial processes finally bring the product to its consumer. This advertisement promoted Australian fruit, but the message from all the Dominions was the same: whiteness produced cleanliness, and cleanliness produced whiteness.60 As well as being spotlessly clean, Dominion commodities were also good for you. Joining other advertisers in exploiting contemporary interest in the new science of nutrition, the Dominions extolled the healthful properties of their food.61 New Zealand butter possessed ‘in abundance properties essential to the promotion and maintenance of bodily health and strength in young and old alike’. Australian apples were ‘a magnificent tonic’, recommended by doctors as being good for teeth and ‘wonderful for the skin’.62 A particularly optimistic advertisement suggested using sultana water to wash your face.63 Like the discourse around hygiene, nutritional science was not only a chance to win over the ‘ “professional” housewife’ but also an opportunity for Dominions to display their own mastery of modernity.64 Accordingly, Dominion marketers drew on the very latest developments in nutritional science: vitamins. Though just recently

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discovered – the word ‘vitamin’ was only coined in 1912 – manufacturers everywhere were quick to identify vitamins in a wide range of food products. Even dog biscuits were promoted using them.65 Dominion marketers also speedily added vitamins to their advertising – if not necessarily to their products – with the term appearing in some of the earliest campaigns.66 ATP promoted Australian fruit as naturally full of vitamins, while New Zealand dairy marketers called upon scientists not only to certify the vitamin content of their butter but also to connect it specifically with the particular bounty of New Zealand’s environment.67 In the same vein, advertisements regularly promoted Dominion commodities as ‘sunshine’ products. Dominion dairy advertising linked butter’s vitamin content with sunshine to give them a competitive edge over butter producers such as Denmark, who raised cattle in stalls over winter.68 But it also connected them with new metropolitan health fads: the New Zealand Dairy Produce Control Board promoted its butter by employing testimonials from the chairman of the Sunlight League, Caleb Williams Saleeby, and from Sir Bruce Bruce-Porter – sunlight enthusiast, vegetarian, and founding member of the New Health Society, a dietary reform group.69 In extolling the nutritional value of their products, the Dominions followed the example of organisations such as the Milk Marketing Board and brands such as Rowntree’s.70 However, as with cleanliness, Dominion engagement with the science of nutrition was more complex than a mere appeal to contemporary taste. Though sunlight leagues and dietetic societies seem harmlessly cranky now, such organisations also constituted part of a much wider, racially inflected movement to improve Britain’s national health. Though this movement had earlier roots, it gathered momentum through the interwar period, and by 1929 England’s chief medical officer, Sir George Newman, declared that building ‘a healthy race’ was one of the primary objects of government.71 The ultimate purpose was to ‘shore up the fitness of the British or Anglo-Saxon race as a precondition for defending and maintaining the British empire’.72 Dominion campaigns, emphasising health, both capitalised on and contributed to these aims. ATP, always quick to spot an opportunity, ran numerous campaigns in the 1930s emphasising health and fitness, linking Dominion food with this particular version of metropolitan health. Launched in 1936, ‘Australian apples for fitness’ included advertisements using a cartoon character dressed in gym

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gear and holding a set of dumb-bells aloft, picking up on the continuing popularity of the physical culture trend.73 A year later, the push for a stronger Britain inspired some extremely weak puns: advertisements paired pictures of Australian animals, such as the platypus, with captions such as ‘For a good bill of health’. Alternatively, you could ‘emulate’ the emu’s ‘bounding energy’.74 But later, in 1937, the British government launched a National Campaign for Fitness, and ATP campaigns now pitched the Dominion directly as a partner in Britain’s crusade. The campaigns of 1938 emphasised that ‘the drive for a fitter nation goes on’, even offering lesson notes to school teachers on the links between Australian fruit and national fitness.75 Appeals to the zeitgeist are, of course, at the heart of most advertising, but Dominion campaigns require more than pragmatic interpretation. Discourses on science, health, and cleanliness also worked to showcase both the Dominions’ modernity and their similarity to the metropole. Indeed, the deployment of advertising itself was an expression of their metropolitan nature. The Dominions worked with well-known British agencies such as Mather  & Crowther and S.H. Benson. (William Crawford, of leading agency Crawfords, also offered advice from time to time.) It has been suggested, however, that British advertising lagged behind the world leader in marketing, the United States. Scholarly debate around this issue is considered in some detail in chapter 6, but here it is worth noting that, as Stefan Schwarzkopf suggests, rather than develop a narrative of competition, it is more useful to consider advertising culture as a shared ‘translated dialogue’ between America and Britain.76 Indeed, Dominion commodity marketers exemplify the borderless nature of advertising innovation in this period. They may have worked with British agencies, but they employed a dizzying array of advertising approaches. Radio broadcasts, in-store demonstrations, intensive press campaigns, and even full-colour retail point-of-sale material that carried the Dominions’ message were all relatively new. Cinema advertising, which all three adopted, was still in its infancy, while aeroplane advertising, used by Canada in 1937, had been pioneered only seven years earlier and was still ‘gaped-at by everyone for miles around’.77 Such techniques not only helped them to reach consumers, they also demonstrated the thoroughly up-to-date nature of the Dominions themselves. Being modern was a Dominion virtue constructed both within and beyond the borders of their advertisements.

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These examples reveal the contours of the Dominions’ common strategy of inclusivity. They could not rely on ‘natural’ bonds of kinship to sell their produce, so they fashioned their own out of fruit and butter and lamb, and then promoted those products in ways that clearly identified them with metropolitan culture and values. Yet commodity Britishness was based on more than kindling the nostalgic warmth of kith and kin. Emphasising the Dominions’ co-ethnicity meant discordant, ‘un-British’ elements needed to be erased. We turn now to the second way in which Dominions constructed their commodity Britishness: the exclusion of difference.

‘te l l t h e m yo u wa n t britis h’: co m m o d i t y  b r i t i s h n e s s a nd exclusion It is unsurprising that, in colonies predicated on the ‘elimination of the native’, the first to be erased in Dominion commodity advertisements were Indigenous people. In reality – and only at enormous cost – First Peoples in all three Dominions had thwarted the settler logic of elimination, but in the world of commodity advertising, the fantasy of the Dominions as white men’s countries would prevail. Those statistical assertions of Britishness discussed earlier formed part of advertising’s disappearing trick: ‘99% British’ New Zealand actually had a growing Indigenous population of between 5 per cent and 6 per cent in the period 1926–36 – people who were unlikely to have been factored into the ‘99% British’ claim. It seems that not all the empire’s inhabitants could be reimagined as British ‘kinsfolk’. We can be sure that ‘98% British Australia’ did not include the aboriginal population, as the Commonwealth of Australia proscribed even counting its Indigenous population until 1967.78 Canada’s selective approach to percentages – ‘78% British Ontario’ – not only marginalised Indigeneity, but effaced other ethnic groups, including the substantial French minority and more recent arrivals such as Ukrainians. There were other techniques of erasure less obvious than unreliable statistics. Unlike tourism campaigns, which fetishised Indigenous people and culture, Dominion commodity advertising made little use of Indigenous motifs in its designs, and even less of Indigenous people. Contemporary touristic appropriation was also implicated in the expansion and expression of colonial power, and it had its own forms of erasure and effacement. But at the very least,

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tourism allowed that settler colonies were cultural pluralities. The world of commodity marketing – the predominant official mode of articulating Dominion identity in this era – made no such allowance.79 The Dominions, like their production lines, were spotlessly white. There are almost no examples of Indigenous peoples featuring in extant Dominion commodity advertising, a reversal from earlier periods and from contemporary local practice. In both of these other cases, settler colonies regularly plundered Indigenous culture to ornament consumerism: a New Zealand example is that of Taniwha soap; the Australian market featured Lubra boot polish; and Pontiac cars and Squaw-brand canned vegetables could be found in Canada.80 Still, one ATP advertisement for apples seems to be an exception.81 It features a drawing of an Aboriginal throwing a boomerang, and even offers some facts about boomerangs and their use. However, the figure itself is both generic and whitened, a crude human instance of the more general anglicising scopic regime in action, while the appropriation of Aboriginal culture – in this case, the commercialisation of a sacred object, the boomerang – works to further marginalise the importance of that culture.82 Similarly, though New Zealand promotions occasionally used Māori patterns, these appeared less in advertising than in exhibition spaces, where they became literally marginal, appearing as wall friezes or borders. In a typically cautious example of Dominion branding, the New Zealand Dairy Produce Control Board adopted a fern leaf as its symbol – different, but not provocatively so. Still, even this mild approach needed mitigation: ideas for 1931’s new point-of-sale material included an ‘attractive ivorine ticket’ with ‘the Union Jack and New Zealand ensign intertwined’.83 The New Zealand Co-operative Dairy Company, the most successful Dominion butter marketer, avoided the issue entirely by using the very British symbol of a fouled anchor – familiar from the Admiralty’s flag – along with a sailor boy to promote Anchor butter.84 Australia’s excruciating flirtation with native animals and puns remained a one-off. Marketers generally preferred using advertisements featuring anthropomorphic apples with legs over any images of Indigenous culture.85 Canada stuck safely with the maple leaf. In all cases, though, making use of a little local flora and fauna was always much more acceptable than incorporating local people. Further, constructions of racial affinity – a rather less neutral term than co-ethnicity – also worked to separate these contrived ‘white’

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Dominions from the ‘black’, or colonial, empire. This difference is clearest in the EMB’s work, so it will be discussed fully in a later chapter, but it was also a feature of Dominion-created campaigns. As we saw in the earlier section, commodity Britishness meant that Dominion rural spaces looked more English than exotic. But the same process also clearly differentiated those spaces from those of other empire producers. What we might call ‘colonial commodity landscapes’ – such as Indian tea plantations or African harvest scenes – bustled with labourers in promotional images, as tightly packed as bales of cotton or chests of tea. Dominion landscapes were, in contrast, depicted as empty spaces, home to livestock, a tidy farmhouse, and the occasional white settler. Even the sunshine was different. The Antipodean sunshine in ‘sunshine products’ was not the dangerously debilitating tropical kind once feared by Europeans as degenerative.86 Instead, via their commodities, the Dominions offered a sturdy Anglo-Saxon sun that could perk up ‘pale faces’ in Britain.87 The construction of racial difference was not limited to empire: marketers also used race to fend off competition from outside it. Advertisements invariably lumped together producers from countries as distinct as Russia, Denmark, Greece, and Turkey as ‘foreign’, even if they were also long-standing and familiar suppliers of food to British consumers. This was a venerable strategy: British distributors used it to promote Indian, rather than Chinese, tea.88 But in tea’s case, the mantle of Britishness cloaked the otherness of India – a defensive tactic. The Dominions went on the offensive, constructing the idea of foreignness in contrast to their own Britishness. Australian advertisements frequently and querulously demanded, ‘Why pay more for Foreign Butter?’89 Canada took a stand against alien apples, telling Boy Scouts that ‘green grocers and stores persuade you to take foreign fruit – tell them you want British’.90 These advertisements are reminiscent of what Roland Marchand calls ‘competitive copy’, typical of the Depression era, with their unflattering comparisons made as a consequence of desperately hard times.91 It may be that the times did influence the sharp comparative edge of Dominion copy, but the exclusionary tendency shown here certainly has more complex roots. For example, advertisements also capitalised on the discourse of cleanliness described previously, used here to imply that food from other, less ‘British’ sources might be suspect. Australian sultanas, for example, were ‘cleanest’ because

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they were ‘never touched by hand from the moment they’re picked till they reach the shop’ – a claim undoubtedly intended to inspire unease about the way Greek or Turkish fruit was handled.92 Foreign butter was another target: ‘The unhygienic methods of certain European countries are unknown in New Zealand.’93 A similar approach was also used to differentiate white colonies from black ones: Canadian condensed milk was ‘rapidly made ready for shining cans’ in ‘immaculate factories, untouched by human hands’, while the Indian tea it might later have been used with was, by contrast, routinely shown as harvested by hand.94 Gender joined race in differentiating Dominions from the dependent empire. It is hardly surprising to find that colonial commodity advertising for products such as tea constructed a feminised exotic other.95 The Dominions were instead distinctly masculine. Dominion advertising campaigns adopted the figure of the male settler as a key marketing symbol. Australia’s male settler first emerged as the central feature of ATP’s inaugural press campaigns for sultanas in 1927. In these illustrated campaigns, prosaic headlines simply announced ‘Australian Sultanas’, meaning that the graphics carried the advertisements’ symbolic weight (figure  3.2).96 Their message was clear: positioned centrally, the white male figure dominated the advertisement and also appeared to dominate Australia. The settler was posed, arms wide, standing in front of a map of the continent, its vast expanse from the coast of Western Australia all the way to eastern New South Wales easily contained within his outstretched arms. Figuratively, then, the white male settler stood for Australia. But as we might expect, the Australia he contained was also reconfigured, its diverse landscapes and peoples erased and replaced by images of bunches of grapes. The settler’s possessive gesture should then also be read as an expression of generosity, offering a verdant Australia’s produce to British consumers. In this way it offered an updated, consumer-friendly version of the much older imperial trope of male explorers ‘penetrating’ the virgin colonial landscape. With colonialism consummated, the explorer gives way to the settler, who now offers the bounty of the land’s fertility.97 Commodity Britishness’s settler masculinity was also updated in another way. Clean shaven, dressed in a collared shirt with an open neck, trousers, and a slouch hat, the settler was no longer the legendary rough-and-ready bushman on the frontier. Such depictions, just like anachronistic ‘natives’, belonged to the colonial past.

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Figure 3.2 Making a masculine Dominion: the settler figure and his bounty of sultanas.

Instead, like squeaky clean creameries and canneries, Australia’s settler embodied a modern, efficient version of rural manhood.98 Brand mascots such as the settler were similarly modern in themselves – a novel feature of interwar advertising designed to

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Figure 3.3 The Australian settler cut-out ready for ‘better class stores’ and his Canadian counterpart from the ‘Canada Calling’ campaign.

personify brand values and connect emotionally with consumers.99 Consequently, variations on the modern, white settler would go on to grace numerous butter and sultana advertisements. By 1932 he could be found in ‘the best class shops in the country’ as ATP developed ‘a new and striking display piece which represent[ed] an Australian settler, practically life size, standing behind a table carrying cut outs representing dishes of sultanas, currants, canned fruit, and butter’.100 However, there is some dissonance between the use of a male mascot and the very domestic nature of Australia’s produce – a dissonance heightened by the fact that one of Australia’s major competitors, California’s Sun-Maid Raisins, had created the highly successful Sun-Maid Girl to represent their brand. Advertisers did deploy men in food advertising, but usually as figures of entitlement and authority: women cooked for men, and for their approval.101 The settler figure fulfilled neither of these roles. Despite this, Australia was not alone in adopting the dissonant male settler symbol: Canada also developed ‘the masculine figure of a robust Canadian farmer’ for its later ‘Canada Calling’ campaign (figure  3.3).102 Stephen Constantine has suggested that, in this case, the development of a male symbol for British markets represented growing Canadian nationalism, but it is more likely that the opposite is true. Creating the ‘settler’ in Canadian and Australian advertising was relational, with expressions of settler masculinity

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deployed to distinguish white Dominions from the colonial empire. Just as Dominion landscapes were created as rural idylls rather than busy plantations, so the masculine settler figure contrasted with the feminised ‘native’ labourer. Some support for this idea comes from contemporary shifts in tobacco marketing, where other white settler colonies swapped images of Africans for images of settler-colonial men and introduced brand names such as ‘Digger’, a term connected with Australia’s World War I soldiers.103 But the life-like settler, at home in a ‘better class store’, reminds us that these masculine versions of the Dominions were not only produced in relation to the dependent empire. They were also constructed directly through the Dominions’ commodity relationship with Britain. In this relationship, the Dominions appeared as lands of producers and the settler figure embodied the idea of ‘Mr  Producer’. Britain, on the other hand, represented the land of consumers, and the archetypal consumer was ‘Mrs Housewife’. Consequently, Dominion advertisements both featured and targeted female consumers, and they could often be found nestling cosily in the women’s section of the paper. In a happy conjunction of the standard depiction of consuming women as homemakers and empire advertising’s wider obsession with kith and kin, Dominion advertisements imagined women as mothers, shown in kitchens or around the family dining table.104 Predictably, they carried messages about ensuring the family’s health and well-being, a strategy that is again reflected in advertising trends more broadly in this era. While Dominion campaigns generally depicted the positive results of ‘buying Dominion’, with smiling healthy children and happy families, they were also not above employing ‘negative appeal’ advertisements. A common advertising tactic, negative appeals played on consumer fears – in this case, of failing to create the healthy, happy family expected of newly professionalised mothers.105 Canadian wheat advertising – a late entrant in the Dominion’s commodity marketing effort, tasked with the impossible job of motivating consumers to ask for bread made with Canadian wheat – made ‘mother’ the ‘food expert’ and advised her to buy the most nourishing – not the cheapest – bread, to ‘tempt their appetites and build health and vitality’.106 Another advertisement chided mothers for buying bad bread, pairing an image of two smiling children with the warning: ‘Their health depends on you.’107

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More commonly, though, Dominion advertising extended women’s responsibility beyond the family to the health of the empire. At the height of the Depression, campaigns urged people to buy from the Dominions to ‘bring back prosperity’.108 Indeed, ‘family’ and ‘family of empire’ might be explicitly linked. The Depression added urgency to injunctions such as ‘Every housewife wants her husband to be in good employment with steady wages and so he will be if Britain’s factories are busy and prosperous. Help to make them busy and prosperous by increasing the buying power of their best customers – notably Australia.’109 These advertisements, mobilising conventional gender roles, went beyond simply selling empire produce. They also sold a particular imperial identity. Employing a spectacular collection of wonder cows, boxing kangaroos, settlers, sailor boys, and giant Christmas cakes, the Dominions used metropolitan commodity culture to fashion themselves as ‘All-British’ lands, capitalising on and constructing a cultural economy of Britishness. As with sentiment, Dominion marketers found that it was not enough to appeal to Britishness: instead, Britishness had to be created, meaning that discourses of kinship and belonging had to be mobilised. However, simply evoking the warm embrace of a shared cultural network is misleading. Co-ethnicity implies inclusion, but commodity Britishness equally required exclusion. The Dominion version of Britishness, for all its bellicose patriotism, was actually underwritten by mobilising exclusionary discourses of race and gender. Dominion marketing challenges the current picture of largely benign co-ethnic networks, instead making their role in constructing imperial hierarchies explicit. In the imperial context, it is not enough to simply note the presence of power: we need to unpack its operation. And here, examining the cultural work of the Dominions’ campaigns is revealing in another way. It reminds us that, in what is still commonly seen as the twilight of empire, new strategies for its maintenance and reconstruction, especially in the white Dominions, were still in play. The next chapter turns to exploring this process through one of the Dominions’ very latest strategies: film.

4

British to the Core: Trade Films, the Metropolis, and Dominion Identity

In May 1935, Lancaster’s film fans finally saw one of the year’s box office smashes at their local Palladium theatre. Full of ‘fighting, treachery, and thrills’, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer was loosely based on the biography of an English officer on India’s North-West Frontier.1 It was an imperial epic, Hollywood-style. Gary Cooper played the lead, transformed from English officer to Scottish Canadian to allow for his American accent, while footage shot in India was interspersed with scenes filmed in Lone Pine, California. The requisite imperial exotica was on display, including 350 turban cloths, 400 horses ‘capable of a fast charge’, ‘six water buffaloes’, ‘three sacred cows’, a ‘Bombay steam engine’, and ‘38 lbs of natural hair for beards and moustaches’, along with 500  ‘Hindus, Afghans, Sikhs and Arifidis’, 150  ‘Piyute [sic] Indians’, and several thousand assorted extras.2 Veteran English actors Ronald Coleman and Guy Standing, along with New Zealander Colin Tapley, provided some ‘British’ balance, but the film was still a little too Hollywood for some critics. As the Tatler critic sniped, ‘Nothing pleases an English film audience more than to see an Englishman get out of a tight corner, particularly if that Englishman is played by an American film star.’3 The reviewer for The Times sniffed at the ‘intrusion’ of American accents.4 But the public loved the film anyway. Americanised or not, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer brought a Kiplingesque empire to life, complete with ‘the tumult and the shouting, the sense that something valiant is being done’.5 It was Britain’s most popular film of the year, outperforming Fred Astaire’s Top Hat and inflicting a box office defeat on the Iron

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Duke.6 Even the critics abandoned their complaints as they too were swept away by the ‘rousing’ adventure, which showcased the ‘extraordinary bravery, discipline and skill which has enabled a handful of British soldiers to hold sway of the teeming millions of India’.7 The Lives of a Bengal Lancer was not the first movie to draw on imperial themes, but its runaway success inaugurated a series of similar epics – such as Sanders of the River and Gunga Din – that rehearsed ideas of a benevolent empire run by a single Englishman in a pith helmet.8 These films may have been, as Priya Jaikumar argues, the product of ‘imperial breakdown, market realignment and political revitalisation’, but as the image of a handful of British soldiers ruling teeming millions suggests, the version of empire they sold seemed rather more secure.9 Such films form what Jeffrey Richards has influentially called a ‘cinema of empire’: American- and British-made films of the interwar and post-war period that, in different ways, brought an imagined empire to the big screen.10 Richards suggests that these films gave a ‘glamorous celluloid life to the great folk myths of Empire’. (Hitler agreed: he thought that The Lives of a Bengal Lancer was excellent imperial propaganda, while, for the same reasons, Mussolini promptly banned it.11) Subsequently, historians have followed Richards’s lead in unpacking empire cinema’s role in reflecting, creating, and sustaining imperialism through the interwar period.12 Yet The Lives of a Bengal Lancer was not the only film selling empire at the Lancaster Palladium in May 1935. The cinema also ran one of the most successful Australian films of the decade. British to the Core – a short feature promoting Australian apples – was no epic, but as the title suggests, it was unquestionably an imperial production. Even the lead was the genuine imperial article: instead of using a stand-in soldier of empire such as Gary Cooper, British to the Core starred the Australian prime minister, Joseph Lyons. Complete with sound and, unlike the Bengal Lancer, even featuring a few moments of colour, it was made specially for the British market by the Australian government to introduce British shoppers to the ‘more important varieties of our apples’ while ‘stress[ing] the mutual advantages of trade between Britain and Australia’.13 And it had its own ‘teeming millions’, playing to more than 3.5  million British filmgoers during May alone. British to the Core was a particularly successful example of another of the Dominions’ metropolitan marketing techniques: the trade film. This chapter analyses such films, arguing that they formed

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a critical element in the Dominions’ development of commodity Britishness. Along with radio broadcasts, recipe books, and aeroplanes towing banners, films were a very modern way of both being ‘British’ and reaching British consumers. Though they are now forgotten, metropolitan filmgoers in the 1930s would have been very familiar with these films. Australia, for example, circulated them in Britain as shorts, courtesy of Paramount, from the beginning of the decade.14 Like British to the Core, these shorts promoted the benefits of empire trade in the supporting programme, appearing between a newsreel and a cartoon before the feature began. In 1934 there was An Apple a Day, which screened to three-quarters of a million people, and a newsreel starring Bill Woodfull, captain of the touring Australian cricket team, who appeared on cinema screens throughout Britain urging consumers – part of ‘one big British family’ – to buy ‘an empire mouthful’.15 Boxing kangaroos joined forces with cricketers in the newsreel division of Australia’s empire trade cinematic offensive, with Gaumont filming one such kangaroo brought aboard a ship in Liverpool to promote the start of the Australian apple season.16 However, trade films could be more than supporting features. They took on a starring role in special theatrical programmes targeted at housewives and shown in ‘high-class’ cinemas. Though it seems improbable now, these programmes were hugely popular: in 1934, the head of Australia’s publicity campaigns, A.E.  Hyland, ‘viewed with satisfaction what we now have come to regard as a usual sight [for their film shows] – over 2,000 people queued up way down and along the street waiting for the second house, special police regulating the traffic. This is good publicity.’17 (See figure 4.1.) With the development of the cheaper 16 mm film format, trade films also became staples of the growing educational film circuit. Nor was Australia the only Dominion to use films to market their commodities: New Zealand and Canada also inaugurated their own empire film campaigns in the metropolis at the same time.

th e d o m i n i o n s a n d e m p ire film These campaigns brought a different version of empire to British screens. Not a Kiplingesque version, where empire triumphed over treachery, but one in which British values appeared to have been effortlessly assumed. If the Bengal Lancer thrilled audiences with

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Figure 4.1 Queues for Australia’s film show in Blackburn.

empire’s resilience, Dominion trade films took that resilience for granted. There were no charging horses, water buffaloes, or fake moustaches here, just the same picturesque scenes of productive, familiar farming found in other advertisements. And again, like the rest of the Dominion campaigns, the sheer ordinariness of these films has acted as camouflage, making their imperial nature easy to overlook. The effectiveness of this camouflage is evident in empire film’s historiography. Writing almost fifty years ago, Richards excluded films made in the Dominions on the basis that ‘fully formed’ British imperialism was ‘the ruling of native peoples rather than the settlement by large numbers of whites’.18 The subsequent development of imperial histories has put paid to the possibility of pointing to of any ‘fully formed’ version of empire, yet something of that earlier attitude lingers. The field of colonial cinema, a recent extension of research into the empire genre, generally considers only the former dependent or ‘black’ empire – a limitation justified by the ‘different set of political and cultural relations’ found in the Dominions.19

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While there are of course very real differences – not least of which is the continued presence of the coloniser in the former Dominions – the net effect of this otherwise-reasonable exclusion has been to erase Dominion complicity in the construction of imperial cultural power through film. Instead, the cinema of empire’s influence in the Dominions, like the wider empire marketing impulse it belonged to, is largely imagined as centrifugal, emanating from the metropolis to mould the periphery’s screening practices through quotas or to skew the nature of the local film production industries, as in the case of Ealing Studios’ Australian Westerns, or else to cannibalise local cultures in search of exotic fodder for metropolitan audiences. Any colonial contribution – a Len Lye or an Errol Flynn – is framed as exceptional, mimicking classic Hollywood ‘born-in-a-trunk’-style tales of stars plucked from obscurity. Similarly, colonial audience responses have generally not been incorporated into studies of empire films’ impact.20 Like empire marketing, empire cinema remains a metropolitan phenomenon, not a peripheral one.21 Overlooked by the history of the cinema of empire, trade films have also been neglected by historians of documentary filmmaking. In these often nationally framed historical narratives, government-made short films appear as the artless prelude to a later era of more worthy non-fiction film-making, usually associated with John Grierson, the ‘father’ of the documentary movement.22 Instrumental in the creation of state-supported non-fiction film-making, including the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) and General Post Office film units, Grierson is unavoidable in any discussion of empire film.23 Cinema, he argued, was ‘the pulpit we should use for propaganda’, and his particular version favoured social realism as a means to educate the public.24 Grierson’s powerful vision of film-making as an ally in building the modern state spread throughout the empire, influencing the development of government film units in New Zealand, Australia, and especially Canada, where he helped establish the National Film Board, which he then headed from 1939. His legacy has undergone some re-evaluation recently as research has uncovered a richer history around documentary, some predating his movement and some in parallel with it.25 Yet the ‘Grierson effect’ – his wide-ranging influence on film production and the institutions surrounding it – remains problematic for the story of trade films from the Dominions in three important ways.26

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First, the emphasis on Grierson reinscribes the idea of a centrifugal cinema of empire, this time for the non-fiction format. While British influence – in particular, the development of imperially focused film bodies such as those of the EMB and the Imperial Relations Trust – was significant, the white settler colonies had been using film as their own propaganda pulpit almost since the technology’s inception.27 As with empire marketing generally, the Dominions were producers, not just recipients, of this form of imperial cinema, and their target market was Britain (along with the United States for Canada). Further, they did not wait for Grierson’s metropolitan evangelism to develop their own Dominion film network. Australia and New Zealand seem to have circulated each other’s short features from as early as 1910, and the two Dominions also worked with companies such as Universal and MGM to distribute their films around the empire and beyond from the 1920s.28 Canada was sending films to New Zealand and Australia by 1922.29 New Zealand’s publicity department also began consulting over film production with Canada’s Government Motion Picture Bureau after complaints about the quality of the New Zealand films shown at the 1932 Imperial Economic Conference in Ottawa. Showing commendable imperial spirit – especially after having had a hand in selecting the offending films shown at Ottawa – Canadian bureau head Frank Badgley was only too happy to help: ‘My only object is to be of constructive assistance to a fellow worker in the great intra Empire effort of making each us of better known to the other.’30 Second, the advent of Grierson’s particular and powerful vision of documentary still tends to act as a clear dividing line for historians.31 Films are either ‘before’ or ‘after’ Grierson. In older work, films from the ‘BG’ era form the musty (and therefore legitimating) precursors to his modernising vision, while newer work incorporates them as a deconstruction of the Grierson legend.32 Both approaches obscure analysis of earlier Dominion non-fiction films in their own right.33 Finally, the association of non-fiction with the high-minded aesthetic and ideological standards of documentary has tended to obscure the contribution of other non-fiction formats. Grierson himself was less than generous about Dominion non-fiction efforts: in line with his preference for social realism, in 1931 he called for Canada’s government pictures to ‘include more films with people and fewer with wildlife and trees’.34 He later reprised this criticism

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in his infamous ‘Face of a New Zealander’ speech, ‘advising the government there to abandon the scenics and trade films which had dominated their film production to that point’ in favour of more stories about people.35 His disdain lingers: it is ironically fitting that government short films, with their large international audiences, appear in Dominion film histories as dull warm-ups to features that garnered far smaller audiences, and they are otherwise dismissed as ‘routine and pragmatic’ or ‘ponderous’.36 The workmanlike presentation and quotidian content of these films, in a field with a strong emphasis on an auteur’s vision, serves to marginalise them further. Only the odd aesthetically pleasing example – such as Australia’s Among the Hardwoods, which was lauded as ‘a lyrical account of timber getting’ – escapes the critical condescension heaped on the rest: ‘More typical of [Australia’s] films are “Conquest of the Prickly Pear” and “Australian Eggs”, complete with drowsy organ music and non-stop commentary.’37 By the end of the 1920s, it is suggested, Canada made ‘little that was memorable’, and New Zealand’s efforts, when considered at all, fare little better.38 This chapter will not attempt to rehabilitate the aesthetic qualities of Dominion trade films, but, as with the other forms of advertising already discussed, it will argue for their powerful role in constructing and projecting a version of British imperialism created at its edges. In doing so, it follows growing interest in what have been termed ‘useful’ films: industrial, educational, promotional, and experimental productions that were played in a myriad of different settings, from libraries to factories, classrooms to aeroplanes.39 These diverse types hardly constitute a genre, but film was and is adopted in these ways because, like ‘a tool, it makes, persuades, instructs, demonstrates and does something’.40 Trade films made particularly useful tools: they worked to persuade consumers to buy more Dominion produce, and – like other, better-known imperial productions – they too reflected, created, and sustained a particular vision of empire. What follows will recover their forgotten history before turning to an analysis of the Dominions they created.

the d om i n i o n s a n d s e l l i n g by cinema For almost three decades before the 1930s marked the start of the golden era of empire film, the Dominions harnessed the power of this new technology to promote themselves in the metropolis. Early

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films promoted tourism and migration, forming the background against which the trade campaigns would begin. Canada’s campaigns began in 1898, when the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) sponsored farmer and lantern show entrepreneur James Freer to lecture in Britain on emigration to Canada, using Richard Hardie’s films of Manitoba.41 Australia also began exporting promotional films early. Queensland tried tempting British migrants with thirty short travelogues shown at the Greater Britain Exhibition in 1899, and the Australian-based impresario J.C.  Williamson may have sent films on shearing and wood chopping to Britain for entertainment as early as 1905.42 New Zealand’s early efforts were more modest. State-sponsored film began around the same time as in the other Dominions, galvanised by the government’s desire to record the visit of the Duke and Duchess of York in 1901. But migration was not an important driver for film in New Zealand, and much of the early activity seems to have been limited to local screens. However, it is likely that some of the country’s ‘local home movies’ were also ‘Home’ movies.43 A government cinematographer was appointed in 1907, who made, among other films, ‘scenics’ for the Department of Tourism and Health.44 In 1912 arrangements were made to send twenty-one films on a variety of topics to the High Commission in London. New Zealand’s Thermal Wonderlands, for example, ‘was probably sent … “to advertise New Zealand as a tourist destination” ’.45 Some of these films may have ended up on British cinema screens: around the same time, a deal was made with Pathé Frères to distribute New Zealand government film through their circuits.46 War interrupted tourism and migration activities, but it also generated a greater public need for information, which stimulated further government involvement in film-making. This stimulus, combined with the success of the early film ventures and the momentum of film as a new technology, meant that all three Dominions had established official film publicity operations by 1923. Canada led the way with the formation in 1918 of what would become the Government Motion Picture Bureau, providing an example that New Zealand and Australia quickly moved to emulate. Australia opened a Cinematic and Photographic Branch in 1921, and New Zealand appointed an official cinematographer in 1923.47 Indeed, just as with other advertising, New Zealand and Australia would soon outstrip Canada in the production of trade films for

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Britain. Part of the Department of Trade and Commerce, the Canadian film unit initially planned to make a series of ten films a year to distribute through Britain, the Dominions, and the United States. Within a year, Seeing Canada had ‘wide and popular theatrical distribution’ through Jury’s Imperial Pictures in Britain, along with ‘theatrical and non-theatrical releases elsewhere’.48 But Canada’s presence on British screens declined through the 1920s. Although the government bureau’s mandate was to support industry generally, it concentrated on making scenics instead, catering to a tourist boom, most of which came from south of the border and not from Britain.49 Seeing Canada had also, unexpectedly, become popular with Canadians themselves, which reinforced the focus on local scenic subjects. Celluloid Canada did not disappear in Britain entirely, though; instead, it changed venues. In 1928, a new system of non-theatrical distribution was organised, using the EMB (and later, the Imperial Institute), which, it was claimed, led to the ‘very wide distribution of a considerable number of our films in the UK’.50 Much of Canada’s future film publicity would be confined to educational venues and the 16 mm format. For Australia and New Zealand, however, trade films became arguably their most internationally successful productions until well into the late twentieth century. Their success reflected growing official commitment to film’s usefulness as a promotional tool. Australia’s film branch came under the control of its Department of Markets in 1930, and the focus moved to ‘general publicity and in particular to that dealing with the sale of primary products abroad’.51 Australian Trade Publicity (ATP) then organised theatrical screenings in Britain, reaching beyond the ‘nondescript, motley, and altogether unsuitable people’ that its head, A.E. Hyland, believed made up the previous audience of Australia House’s cinema.52 In New Zealand, the government’s publicity office worked with producer boards to make trade films, and the High Commission, in conjunction with the dairy and meat producer boards, organised screenings.53 However, the burgeoning trade campaigns also reflected the changing nature of cinema in Britain. Despite the Depression, audiences grew by 10 per cent over the 1930s, while theatre numbers rose even more dramatically. In 1926 there were an estimated 3,000 cinemas; by 1938 there were almost 5,000.54 Not only were they more numerous, the new cinemas were also bigger, with many able to seat thousands of patrons each session. And they were glamorous too:

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the new ‘dream palaces’ offered plush seats – instead of wooden benches – and attractive facilities such as cafes, along with technical innovations such as sound equipment. Marketers found they could exploit the obvious synergies between the luxurious venues and the prestige of the advertised products. But, just as significantly, attractive venues helped to broaden the audience.55 Movies had always attracted the working classes, but these new elements of sophistication helped to increase middle-class audiences too.56 Australia and New Zealand reached this growing audience with short features and, later, with special cinema shows. Almost two-thirds of cinemas remained independently owned (despite the development of circuits that consolidated British theatres into groups owned by one company), and Australia and New Zealand struck distribution deals giving them access to these theatres.57 In Australia’s case, an arrangement with Paramount seems to have made these independent theatres the backbone of its screening circuit, with trade films screening in almost every kind of theatre, from older and smaller venues such as the Parade Cinema in Margate to the modern Electric Theatre in Kent, which could seat 2,300.58 By 1931, almost 200 theatres showed Australian films, peaking a year later at 355. New Zealand’s distribution arrangements at this time are less clear. Initially, it seems that New Zealand films screened in venues that did not charge, as a way for the government to get around paying a general British duty on imported film: ‘This was naturally unsatisfactory because the public it was desired to appeal to were just those who attended the ordinary cheap picture halls.’59 It is not clear whether other Dominions simply paid the duty, but from 1926 ‘Dominion propaganda films’ entered free of duty and could play in regular theatres so long as the Dominion government concerned did not make a profit on them.60 A distribution company known as Community Services took on New Zealand films that same year, and, despite complaints about a shortage of films, up to fifty theatres a day screened New Zealand films by 1931, including titles such as Down on the Farm, Golden Grain, and The Meat We Eat.61 The shorts circuit gave New Zealand and Australian films a broad reach, although their impact is much harder to assess. The New Zealand Meat Producers Board considered that The Meat We Eat ‘undoubtedly forms a splendid medium of national publicity’, but conventional wisdom suggests that audiences tended to be unenthusiastic about short films.62 The London-based New Zealand News

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may therefore have been overreaching when it described The Meat We Eat as ‘both entertaining and instructive’ and even more so with its verdict that ‘when one imagines it sandwiched between an American comedy and one of those tremendous love dramas with which Hollywood surpassed its own records every week one can have little doubt about its effectiveness’.63 Yet the popularity of special film shows – the second way in which Australia and New Zealand used film to reach consumers – suggests that, however improbable it seems now, the New Zealand News might have been right. By the mid-1930s, films about apples, butter, and lamb had British audiences queuing around the block. Australia initiated the Dominion film show phenomenon. From 1931, ATP began hiring large theatres in ‘the chief provincial towns’ for special film programmes. They targeted housewives with mid-morning shows, distributing free tickets through local grocers and women’s organisations.64 ATP’s first show, in Cambridge in May, set the pattern. At 11  a.m., amid the Egyptian-accented art  deco splendour of the Central Cinema, a capacity audience of a thousand housewives watched the ‘Life in Australia’ show. Though the title recalled earlier work promoting migration, the show actually sold commodities. (And there were broad similarities between these two genres in any case.) Shorts such as Fruit Canning in Australia and Dairy Farming in Queensland mixed with ‘various films of general interest’. The centrepiece – a brand-new sound film specially shot for the Department of Markets, This Is Australia – was also a mixture, blending shots of industry with scenery. But should anyone have missed the point, a trade representative gave a short speech about Australian produce after the show and presented the departing housewives ‘with a recipe book and leaflets advertising these products’.65 ATP considered the inaugural show a great success, and ‘Life in Australia’ went on to grace the screens of the Hippodrome in Nottingham and the Picture House in Ipswich in May; in June the programme played to full houses in Sheffield and Leicester. By November, it was attracting capacity crowds in towns such as Bolton, Gloucester, Shrewsbury, and Lancaster. New films on dried and canned fruit expanded the line-up, along with Movietone newsreels of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Anzac Day, and Baden Powell’s review of Australian Boy Scouts. In ATP’s opinion, ‘all these shows were completely successful’, and it seems audiences agreed.66

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Favourable press coverage followed screenings: the Sheffield Independent found the films ‘highly interesting’, while in Portsmouth ‘exciting’, ‘beautiful’, and ‘interesting’ images were ‘well received by a large audience’.67 An audience member in Leicester even wrote to thank the committee: ‘My friends and I very much enjoyed seeing the film entitled Life in Australia, and I congratulate you on the construction and showing of this very interesting and educative [show?].’68 Buoyed by the response, Hyland rushed to book other large venues ‘in order to forestall serious competition from other interested parties’ – the other Dominions – ‘who will probably copy our methods’.69 The deepening Depression may have made free film shows even more attractive. At Ramsgate in May 1932, the theatre ‘was so full … that many people were obliged to stand’.70 The Ramsgate experience seems typical: between March and October that year, more than 185,000 people across Britain came out to see films on sheep, dairying, and timber felling, with Playground of the Sea Folk, a short film about penguins and seals, providing light relief. But these shows were just the warm-up. By May 1935, while millions saw British to the Core in their local theatres, Australia also hired out England’s largest dream palace: the Davis Theatre in Croydon, featuring Italianate Renaissance features and a restaurant complete with dance floor. There, in the presence of the mayor of Croydon and the chairman of the Australian Dairy Produce Board, it screened ‘the usual programme of films, illustrating the production of foodstuffs in Australia and life generally in the Commonwealth’. The show seems to have been a success: ‘We had an audience of about 3,600 composed of housewives and schoolchildren … The films were very greatly appreciated by the audience and at the conclusion small samples of Australian butter, lists giving the names and addresses of traders in Croydon and district stocking Australian products, recipe books and leaflets were distributed to the ladies.’71 Though it took a little longer than Hyland had predicted, New Zealand’s Meat Producers Board and Dairy Produce Control Board did take a leaf out of Australia’s promotional playbook eventually, joining forces in 1934 to create a film show to promote their products around Britain.72 Preston’s Theatre Royale played host to ‘over a thousand happy children’, many of whom had entered a Meat Producers Board colouring competition and who then sat through screenings of meat and dairy films as they awaited the prize-giving

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Figure 4.2 Even more publicity: front-page press reports of New Zealand’s movie competitions.

(figure  4.2).73 Mass marketing generally had begun to target children, but the New Zealanders took a particularly long-term view: at one event, the Meat Producers Board representative ‘pointed out that NZ was really a big farm for England, New Zealand lamb was by far the best [among the lamb] imported into England and he hoped that, when, in future years, they were doing the family shopping, they would remember that’.74 Despite a ponderous-seeming strategy, New Zealand’s Saturday morning children’s shows, like Australia’s matinees for housewives, were box office gold. In 1937,

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demand for children’s painting competitions and film shows meant that ‘it was necessary to engage three large cinemas in Middlesborough, North Shields and Newcastle-on-Tyne, where over 4,000 children were entertained’.75 A year later, New Zealand film shows took over venues such as The Regal in Hull, purpose built as a cinema in 1934 and with more than 2,500 seats. By 1937 – around the time it began to re-evaluate its wider marketing campaigns – Canada began to look again at its use of film. For most of the decade, Depression-era cutbacks meant that production had been constrained, especially for new sound films. Some trade films were made for Britain, including Alice in Apple Land, which circulated free of charge around theatres in 1931, but from the end of the 1920s, Canada still largely remained reliant on non-theatrical distribution, through the EMB, the Imperial Institute, and later the General Post Office.76 While this seems an admission of defeat – conjuring up images of bored schoolchildren and dull public meetings in church halls – enthusiasts considered non-theatrical distribution to be an innovative means of public education. Belief in film’s instructive power, expressed at the 1926 Imperial Conference, lay behind the establishment of the EMB’s film unit, and by 1938 twelve British agencies promoted imperial unity through film, all supporting non-theatrical films.77 The same conviction would go on to underwrite the establishment of film libraries and national film organisations in the Dominions. It is even argued that, in Canada, the emphasis in government circles on film’s educative role ‘led to the delimitation of film production to government realism’.78 Supporters saw the possibilities of turning frivolous film-going into a worthy learning experience, while alternative screening venues outside of commercial theatres could allow for shows tailored to suit housewives or workers, adults or children.79 Such audiences for Canada’s films in Britain were not insubstantial, with more than 500,000 viewers in 1932, and other Dominions happily supplemented their cinema shows with sessions in schools and Scout halls.80 But, numerically, these venues were no match for theatre audiences. Indeed, while Canada’s reliance on non-theatrical outlets may have had a respectable rationale, it also made a virtue of necessity. Canada’s films simply could not compete. A report initiated by the Canadian high commissioner Vincent Massey in March 1936 concluded as much: Canada was once ‘first among the Governments of the Commonwealth to appreciate the value of film

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as a medium, but its former proud position it has not recently maintained’.81 The senior Dominion had just seventy-two publicity films available, thirteen of which featured fishing.82 In accordance with the fashion for social realism, the report’s author favoured more emphasis on Canadian life. But even trade coverage was inadequate: ‘Among the more glaring omissions is the failure to provide, so far, a film on the large-scale wheat growing industry. When such a film is wanted it must be secured from the Soviet Union.’83 Canada’s film failures – not just in Britain but also in relation to the other Dominions – played a role in the later formation of the Canadian National Film Board.84 They also led Canadian marketers to start borrowing ideas from Australia and New Zealand. In 1936, ‘particular attention was given to films illustrating the basic industries and products of Canada for the purpose of trade publicity’, with ‘special films and film material … furnished’ for the ‘Canada Calling’ campaign.85 During April and May of that year, a cinema set up on the first floor of the Glasgow ‘Canada Calling’ shop screened ‘films of Canadian lumbering operations, fishing and hunting, scenic views of Canadian cities, prairie life and winter sports accompanied by an explanatory commentary’.86 Wheat was still obviously out of the question – Canada’s trade film on wheat, The Kinsmen, did not replace the Soviets until 1939 – but other films supported the campaign until war put an end to it in 1940.

d o m i n i o n f i l m s a n d i m p e r ial identities With combined audiences in the millions and a decade or more of exposure, trade films make an unconventional – but not insignificant – challenge to the conceptual boundaries of both empire marketing and the cinema of empire. Importantly, they reverse the usual flow of both histories to position the settler colonies as participants in, and not simply recipients of, metropolitan commodity culture. But the question remains: what kind of empire did these films construct? Not many trade films have survived to be viewed, but analysis of those that have indicates that, just as with other technologies of commodity Britishness, trade films created the Dominions as modern, white, British farms. The ‘All-British’ filmic farming Dominion evolved over time. Early films sometimes made a feature of colonial difference, with wild animals, wild scenery, and, occasionally, wild inhabitants. But

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some films – especially those aimed at migrants – also attempted to rehabilitate alien colonial landscapes for metropolitan audiences. Charles Urban, making films for the CPR, was under strict instructions not ‘to take [shots of] any winter scenes under any conditions’, as Canada was ‘thought of too much as a land of ice and snow’.87 ‘The image of Canada as a frozen wasteland … annoyed [company president] Van Horne to such a degree that no mention of snow would be made in any of the CPR advertising campaigns during his tenure or lifetime.’88 He may have been right: during earlier lecture tours some Britons seemed to believe Canada was so cold that cows would freeze then shatter.89 The ban lasted until at least 1930, and it ensured that CPR material only used Canada’s icier attributes for the Winter Carnival or to advertise ski holidays. But snow was not the only feature to be minimised: British audiences apparently also thought that ‘Indians attack[ed] so frequently that one needed “to be armed with a bowie knife tomahawk and 44  Winchester repeater” ’.90 The CPR’s later productions therefore adopted the same processes of symbolic annihilation found in other advertising. They avoided Canada’s First Nations peoples, ‘eliminat[ing] the Aboriginal presence in the agrarian West and replac[ing] it with a purely Euro-Canadian one of boundless prosperity’.91 Later government film, with its emphasis on scenic wonders, continued the process of cinematically clearing the landscape, with some stultifying results. Falling Waters, made in 1928, simply strung together ‘a series of static shots of waterfalls interspersed with ponderously poetic titles’.92 Once again, constructing the cultural economy of Britishness required exclusion. Australian and New Zealand film-makers had no Van  Horne to contend with, and rather less snow, but the scenic form tended to produce similar effects. Though a few films featured Māori and the distinctly unsettled landscapes of the thermal districts (and these themes were often combined), New Zealand productions generally took the form of ‘depopulated narratives of Fjord and Fishing, with an occasional diversion into industry film’.93 Australia, despite a predilection for films starring exotic fauna, also specialised in scenic views, suggesting at the very least that the formerly wild frontier was now tame enough for tourists. Afflicted with too much sun, rather than snow, Australia’s tropical regions’ reputation as potentially debilitating for Anglo-Saxons lingered, so they were reconstructed on-screen as suitable homes for sturdy yeoman farmers.94 The films

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of the 1920s suggested a vision of Australia that echoed the claim made by a Queensland politician twenty years earlier: ‘There’s not a bit of Australia that isn’t a white man’s country. There’s no enervation – as in Java, Singapore. It’s Australian, not tropical heat.’95 By the end of the 1920s, government film catalogues offered a dizzying array of subjects of varying vintage. Canada covered everything from Salmon Angling on the Restigouche to Lumbering in British Columbia and The Cradle of Confederation, while Australia offered gems such as The Romance of the Cattle Industry, Wild Life at Taronga, and the lifesaving classic Sons of the Surf. It is unclear which films Canada selected to play a part in their trade campaigns. However, New Zealand and Australian marketers in Britain became increasingly selective about which films they screened. They ignored extensive backlists, either because the topics were unsuitable or because the films were too old (which could make the Dominions look out of date), or both. Instead, frontier gave way to farm in shows curated to highlight the modern, British nature of the Dominions. A show in London in 1929, for example, organised for buyers of New Zealand meat, treated guests to a special screening of the newest meat film, The Meat We Eat, ‘supported by films on fishing, dairying and Auckland city’. Rotorua, with its geysers and Māori, offered the only deviation from the modern scenic paradise on show. Likewise, an early Australian show – playing in ‘the principal cinema theatres’ in Sheffield and Leicester in 1931 – included nine films alongside the new This Is Australia. Five featured canned and dried fruit while others featured sheep, wheat, and dairy farming. None of these films were new, but, combined, this mix of farming scenes and industrial processing created a modern pastoral: a rural but not rustic Australia, busy producing familiar commodities such as butter for metropolitan consumers.96 Later, Australia dropped films such as Ocean Booty, which depicted the very un-British pearl industry in Broome, while nature films such as Sanctuary of the Untamed and Australian Animals, with their retinue of wildlife oddities such as wombats and emus, also disappeared. So too did films of commodities such as bananas, sugar cane, and cotton – films made largely for local Australian audiences and irrelevant both to the British consumer and to the idea of a ‘British Australia’. No detail was too small in establishing Australia’s British credentials: at one promotional cinema screening, a short film of seals in the Melbourne Aquarium caused official concern

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because the announcer had ‘a pronounced American accent. It is an amusing little item from Movietone news but the American accent is undesirable and it will be cut out of all future shows.’97 Specially made trade films such as The Story of the Sultana, Australian Butter, Poultry Farming in Australia, and the freshly released British to the Core replaced those older, unsuitable movies, which were then retired to church hall and Scout screenings. The changes to New Zealand’s line-up are not as well documented, but they included the new Meadow to Market talkie from 1936.

p ro ce s s f i l m a n d t h e p ro c e ss of settling Commissioning new trade films made it much easier to construct the white settler colonies as modern, white, masculine, and British. Structure was key. Regardless of Dominion or commodity type, these films shared a ‘process film’ format. Common in industrial film-making, process films follow the transformation of raw materials into finished products – from meadow to market – in a narrative arc tedious enough to ensure they have not been subject to much academic scrutiny.98 However, the banal storyline, like so much of Dominion advertising, is deceptive. Settler-colonial trade films function as celluloid recreations of the settlement process, transforming space at the same time as they transform commodities. As milk becomes butter or cane becomes sugar, so too the land changes, from Indigenous homeland to civilised and prosperous Dominion. This successful transformation is clear right from the start, as the opening titles invariably invoke the new settler identity. The ‘New Zealand Government Publicity Department’ proudly presented The Milky Way, while ‘Australia’s Commonwealth Government’ brought audiences Australian Sugar (not to mention films featuring butter, and eggs, and wheat), its coat of arms emblazoned over the opening shots of handsome farming districts. Australian Pineapples, perhaps exotic enough to require a little further domestication, included in its opening sequence a stirring version of the future national anthem, ‘Advance Australia Fair’, played on the organ. Canada’s settler transformations, the titles announced, came courtesy of the ‘Government Motion Picture Bureau’.99 Just as with colonisation of the land, film’s titular possession would be followed by more substantive control. As the titles fade, establishing shots feature hardy white men coaxing empty landscapes into

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Figure 4.3 New Zealand reimagined as a British pastoral.

abundance. These landscapes are, of course, cleared of their original inhabitants; like the film programmes, advertisement campaigns, and colonisation itself, these films erase indigeneity in all its forms (figure 4.3). Australian apples grow, unproblematically, on ‘undulating country of great natural beauty’, while Canadian salmon, once harvested as an Indigenous food source, is transformed as a product of modern Canadian industry.100 Likewise, much of New Zealand’s ‘dairy produce comes from the fertile farmlands of prosperous Taranaki, whose smooth pastures are dotted with numerous creameries of the most modern type’.101 The prosperous present constructed here smooths over a troubled past: Taranaki was the flashpoint for the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s, when Māori alliances fought against the spread of settler and imperial control. But, with caution, the past could also be put to use. Australian Butter gives dairying a venerable heritage, beginning in 1788, while the Golden Fleece connects ‘the untiring efforts and continual experiments in sheep breeding by men like John McArthur’, an early pastoralist, to ‘the ancient Greek story of Jason’.102 These settler creation stories helped legitimate colonial occupation by pushing it back into the mists of time.

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Used sparingly, an Indigenous past could also be employed as a form of legitimation.103 New Zealand’s Meadow to Market seems to break the pattern of filmic terrae nullius, opening with Māori, seen in traditional costume, cooking over an open fire. However, they only appear as foils to progress, a quaint reminder of the journey away from savagery and towards civilisation, and they are speedily overwritten by ‘the story of New Zealand meat and its journey from sunny meadows to Homeland markets in modern British ships’.104 This seems to have been considered a winning approach. Towards the end of 1937, a new dairy film was being considered for Britain and the tourism board’s director of marketing recommended ‘strong historical background, Captain Cook’s landing, arrival [of the] first settlers bringing British customs and institutions’. Suggestions included the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, often re-enacted at imperial occasions to display British colonial enlightenment, along with equally romanticised ‘Māori wars’, but again only to show the progress from ‘pioneering days to present’. The rest of the film would then ‘follow [a] day on [a] dairy farm, general scenic shots [of] factory work from an unusual angle stressing cleanliness, health, natural colour, sunshine, government inspection and control from farm to shipment’.105 Just as in other advertising, film concealed the real effects of colonisation. But whereas print campaigns rendered it as a fait accompli – with expropriation hidden behind images of tidy farms – film replayed the process. The linear sequence of process film meant that colonisation could be reinterpreted and compressed, packaged away in a few frames of film while the audience’s attention was redirected to bucolic farming scenes. Similarly, the shift from farm to factory, mirroring the shift from ‘pioneering days to present’, was again more than just a logical extension of the simple process narrative. Processing food required the application of science, a potent marker of metropolitan-like civilisation. Trade films, like trade advertisements, capitalised on the power of the latest industrial techniques to position the Dominions as modern and white. Australian apple-growing may have been Arcadian, but once the fruit left the tree, processing became ‘as mechanised as a modern army’.106 Likewise, films stressed the scientific nature of processing. As milk became butter and while peaches were gently embalmed in cans of syrup, the films featured men in white coats, strolling past shiny steel vats or taking measurements with scientific instruments.

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Meanwhile, earnest intertitles and voice-overs reminded viewers that ‘all of these operations are supervised by skilled experts, but a final check is made by the vigilant government inspector’.107 In film, science was once again mobilised in the creation of Britishness. The Dominions’ application of rational surveillance systems allayed newer concerns about germs and older worries about processed food, and it also reminded viewers that not all imported food was created equal. Science and mechanisation helped to separate ‘clean’ food made in ‘modern’ Dominions from other imported food, signalling that their commodities, like ‘Home’ produce, could be trusted – unlike the food from foreign countries, and even that from dependent colonies. Hygiene, as we have seen in press campaigns, had the same effect. In Australian Butter, ‘cleanliness, scrupulous cleanliness’ was ‘the watchword of every Australian dairy farm’: ‘Cleanliness first, last, and always.’108 Perhaps recalling an earlier film featuring a worker in a stained apron, the New Zealand dairy representative in 1938 urged ‘the necessity of making sure that factory hands are clothed in clean white overalls before any shots are taken otherwise the result from the point of view of United Kingdom audiences is most unfortunate. Similarly, it is desirable to avoid that type of shot, which … is liable to create an impression of handling or too close personal contact with the butter during manufacture.’109 White coats, white overalls, and gleaming stainless steel offered new ways to implicitly reinforce the idea of ‘white’ Dominions. But whiteness could also be explicitly constructed. Australian Sugar repurposed the White Australia policy as a sales tool, with the film’s narrator musing, ‘I wonder if you knew that Australia is the only country in the world where cane sugar is produced and manufactured by white labour and under the white man’s conditions and rates of pay.’ Only a few decades earlier such work in a tropical environment would have been considered fit only for ‘natives’. However, images of ‘splendid specimens … of Australian manhood at its best’ cutting cane ‘taller than themselves’ in Australia’s tropical north reinforced the continued success of white settlement, offering British audiences reassuring proof of ‘white triumph over ecological adversity’.110 More commonly, though, the Dominions chose to emphasise Britishness over whiteness. In part this was implied: Solid Sunshine, which extolled the virtues of New Zealand butter, included ‘rural

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scenery that could easily be imagined as being within a short distance of Bath’, while The Meat We Eat was apparently a chance for filmgoers to ‘look at something really British!’111 But it was also deliberately articulated: The Milky Way, for example, reminded viewers that ‘New Zealand has long been known as “the Dairy of the Homeland” because she supplies Great Britain with the largest proportion of her imported dairy produce’.112 The new dairy film planned in 1938 contemplated the inclusion of figures for the number of British settlers in New Zealand, including ex-servicemen assisted by the government, while also emphasising the ‘approximately 99% British population’. Factory scenes were to include evidence of British goods, such as machinery and cheese wrappers, while scenes of goods being loaded would refer to British ships and seamen, with images of the ‘British ensign flying from the stern of the departing ship’.113 Australian films also proudly highlighted Britishness. Butter, one voice-over explained, was ‘an empire product for an empire table. Its manufacture employs approximately three-quarters of a million people and all of them are British.’114 Just as in press advertisements, films mixed Australian dried fruit into the quintessentially English Christmas pudding and even reimagined pineapples as part of a ‘colourful all-British production’.115 Completing the process film’s narrative arc, films often ended with shots of food being loaded onto ships bound for Britain, as voice-overs stressed the naturalised connection between the metropole and Dominion producers. The planned New Zealand dairy film proposed closing shots in England with pictures of ‘John Briton and his wife’, while Meadow to Market closed with images of ‘British-owned’ liners being loaded while the voice-over informed viewers that New Zealand meat was ‘British to the backbone’.116 In a prelude to that most successful interwar trade film British to the Core, 1933’s Australian Apples reminded audiences that the ‘fortunes [of Australian apples] are now in your hands. Australian apples are grown by Britishers. They are carried in British ships. May I suggest that you prove them British to the core.’117 We will never know how many British consumers took up that challenge, but it is clear that Dominion trade films brought another cinema of empire to life. Whether in dream palaces or church halls, throughout the decade they played in total to an audience of millions, making them, at least in terms of international releases, the unsung heroes of Dominion film-making until the late twentieth

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century. They also suggest new dimensions to the idea of the golden age of imperial cinema, otherwise dominated by metropolitan film-making. British to the Core and Meadow to Market did not offer the glamour or high adventure of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, but that was the point. White settler colonies imagined themselves as already successful examples of the empire project. Consequently, they constructed films and film programmes that swapped sacred cows for dairy cows and Indigenous pasts for settler presents. Using the prosaic language of process films they joined with other Dominion marketing efforts to reimagine their former colonial frontiers, even overwriting their own sense of ‘national’ difference to create modern, white, British farming Dominions. These meanings formed the essence of commodity Britishness, but they were not restricted to the Dominions’ own advertising: in the next chapter, we follow their production in the work of the Empire Marketing Board.

5

Bringing Another Empire Alive? The Dominions and the Empire Marketing Board

On New Year’s Day 1927, the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) released its first and best-known image: MacDonald Gill’s ‘Highways of Empire’. Gill’s image – a map of the world that ingeniously, if unusually, contrived to place Britain at its centre – made a suitably symbolic choice for a new government-funded agency specially created to promote empire trade. Plastered on an enormous billboard on Charing Cross Road, ‘Highways of Empire’ put Britain at the heart of a sprawling yet coherent empire, its abundant Dominions and dependent colonies all marked in the same vivid red and held together by dense ties of trade.1 This map, and a welter of publicity material produced by the Board over its six-year lifespan, was designed to ‘bring the empire alive’ for the British public and thereby persuade them to buy more empire produce.2 But for all its symbolism, Gill’s vision of a homogeneous empire was misleading. The EMB’s work brought more than one empire to life. Two years later, the Board released a poster series charting a different version of empire. In this new set of maps, the Dominions, not Britain, took centre stage, although once again cartography became the servant of ideology. Australia was enlarged and relocated to the middle of the Pacific.3 Canada, already a sufficiently impressive size, needed only a new projection to be given its turn as the centre of the world.4 Little New Zealand, however, needed all the help it could get. It was supersized and repositioned until it reached across the Pacific almost as far north as the equator.5 This version of New Zealand as a mighty ‘empire nation’ proved to be an ideological stretch too far for the poster committee’s secretary, who

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protested that, with the exception of Canada, the maps were based on no known projection and had been ‘simply faked to enlarge the particular Dominion concerned’.6 He had, however, missed the point. The EMB was making, not simply mapping, the empire. The rest of the committee ‘did not consider … that the absence of geographical correctitude was a material point’.7 Rather, the maps’ designs symbolised the Dominions’ central importance to Britain’s imperial project. They would go on to feature almost twice as frequently as any other colonies of empire in the Board’s posters, and more than Britain itself. ‘Home and Empire’ EMB-style was, more accurately, ‘the Dominions, Home, and Empire’. Displayed on massive hoardings in metropolitan streets, the British government’s version of empire marketing put the Dominions both literally and figuratively at the centre (plate 3). This chapter turns to the work of the EMB: the best-known example of empire marketing activity. But, like the Board’s map series, it makes the Dominions central. For though empire marketing has been dominated by studies of the Board’s work, it was a much wider phenomenon. As this book has argued throughout, this phenomenon was led by the Dominions, not the metropolis. Analysis of the EMB – an ostensibly British institution – strengthens rather than contradicts this argument. The Dominions had considerable influence over its genesis; they also presided over its demise, when, after enjoying six  years of advertising funded by British taxpayers, they declined to pay to keep the Board running. In the intervening six years they worked with their metropolitan counterparts to create a programme of advertising that not only gave the lion’s share of publicity to the Dominions but also complemented the identity they forged in their own commodity marketing. Using the wider empire as a backdrop, the Dominions could throw their distinctive imperial identity into relief, emphasising their cultural similarity to Britain while at the same time separating themselves from the dependent empire. In the Board’s advertising, as in their own, the Dominions formed, very deliberately, a different sort of empire. They used EMB campaigns to both borrow and produce forms of Britishness that were familiar, not exotic. As a result, the Dominions appeared as special members of the imperial family: they were Britain’s – and British – farming hinterlands.

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t h e d o m i n i o n s a n d the emb The Dominions’ central role in the EMB is immediately evident if we look at the way in which it was organised. The Board was formed largely as a concession to the ‘disgruntled’ Dominions after attempts to introduce tariffs failed.8 They had been promised preferential tariffs at the 1923 Imperial Economic Conference, but implementing them proved politically impossible: the public, scared that new tariffs would cause food prices to rise, reacted to the Conservative government’s proposed reforms by promptly voting them out of office. When the Conservatives regained power a year later, tariff reform was, unsurprisingly, off the table. Instead, the government sought a compromise to appease the Dominions, one that took an unexpected form: instead of introducing tariffs, the government formed the EMB. Funded by the British taxpayer, at a notional level of £1  million a year, the new board offered non-tariff-based preference in the form of research, marketing, and publicity for empire producers. All of the empire was included, but, in a further indication of Dominion importance, the committee fell under the auspices of the secretary of state for the Dominions. Having been instrumental in bringing the Board to life, fear of the Dominions’ wrath also postponed the Board’s first death sentence: in 1931, when the effects of the Depression led the government to cast around for cost-cutting opportunities, the Board was spared after arguments that abolition would ‘create inter-Imperial difficulties of a most embarrassing character’.9 Imperial politics dictated that something needed to be done to pacify the displeased Dominions, but it was imperial culture that dictated the form that peace process would take. Here, the creation of the EMB forms an obvious parallel with the Dominion commodity marketing organisations formed around the same time. Like them, the EMB was inspired by the British Empire Exhibition. As John MacKenzie has argued, exhibitions such as Wembley promoted imperial unity, with ‘propaganda to this end’ peaking with the creation of the Imperial Economic Committee and the EMB.10 Indeed, the groundwork for the otherwise-startling creation of the EMB was arguably laid even earlier, in nineteenth-century exhibitions that acted as ‘dress rehearsals’ for later ‘non-free trade preferences’.11 Though its origin story is most often contextualised by political and economic

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histories, the EMB, like the Dominion marketing organisations, was also a cultural creation, simultaneously constructed by and constructing a renewed imperial spirit.12 Once established, the Board functioned as a metropolitan/ Dominion joint venture. A quarter of the twenty-member executive board of this British government body represented the Dominions. They included R.S. Forsyth – the New Zealand Meat Producers Board’s man in London – and Canada’s chief trade commissioner, Harrison Watson, whose relationship with the Board was, surprisingly (given Canada’s stand-offishness in imperial affairs), ‘always close’.13 Australia was represented by Frank McDougall, an erstwhile sultana farmer who had parlayed his enthusiasm for imperial cooperation into a series of quasi-official roles on behalf of the Australian government. McDougall’s contribution went beyond representation: appointed to the Imperial Economic Committee, which was tasked with trying to give substance to the idea of non-tariff preferences, he had lobbied hard for the creation of the EMB.14 Should the Dominions’ prominence on the Board need further emphasis, the entire dependent empire was, by contrast, represented by one British official.15 This powerful publicity committee, charged with ‘bringing the empire alive’ in the public imagination, also brought Dominion and metropolitan representatives together. It co-opted Britain’s most prominent marketers, including Sir William Crawford, head of one of Britain’s largest advertising agencies, and Frank Pick (‘a patron of public art such as has not been known since the days of the Medici princes in Florence’), who is best known for marketing the London Underground. They were joined by the chairman of Harrods, Sir Woodman Burbridge, and key communications specialists, including Viscount Burnham, president of the Empire Press Union, and J.C. Stobart, the director of education at the BBC. ‘Later members of [the] publicity committee included two directors of the Co-operative Wholesale Society (one a woman to give a “woman’s point of view”)’ and representatives from the National Chamber of Trade and from the Gas Light and Coke Company.16 Metropolitan expertise was then leavened with Dominion experience. The committee’s head, Colonial Secretary William Ormsby-Gore, had agreed to take the job only if Frank McDougall joined him.17 McDougall then added a publicity committee role to his executive role, and he went on to play a pivotal part in overseeing Dominion interests and imagery, even going so far as to

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design his own poster series featuring New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia.18 D.G. Gerahty, Canada’s newly appointed director of publicity for the United Kingdom, joined the committee in 1928. Gerahty also made creative contributions: his 1929 innovation, the ‘Canada shop’, which was developed as part of his role as director of publicity, would become a key plank of the EMB’s promotional activity. New Zealand had no direct representation on the publicity committee, but R.S. Forsyth – who, along with his executive role, also sat on the committee – contributed a New Zealand perspective when necessary.19 Given this background, it is hardly surprising that the Dominions would also dominate the content of the publicity efforts. The EMB adopted all manner of promotional strategies – including educational films, shopping weeks, press advertisements, and even Christmas cards – but at the heart of their activities were innovative poster campaigns. It is these campaigns that form the central focus of this chapter. Using a sequence of five posters, these EMB campaigns worked a little like a cartoon strip, with each of the posters telling a part of the story in pictures or with copy and slogans. They appeared on specially developed poster frames, twenty feet long and five feet high, which were eventually erected at more than 1,700 sites in 450 British cities and towns. The Board produced around 100  five-poster sequences, and more than 30 of these were devoted to the Dominions. By contrast, the dependent empire was promoted a little under half as frequently. India, the jewel in the imperial crown, featured only four times.20 The Dominions might have expected more (as might India), for they contributed much more than 30 per cent of imperial imports, but their greatest competitor for poster space was Britain itself.21 ‘Home’ commodities, not those of the colonies or India, became the second most advertised group.22 This caused some Dominion rancour: the Board ‘felt it advisable to display … something other than posters devoted to Home agriculture’ when the Imperial Press Conference, with Dominion journalists in attendance, was held in London.23 More importantly, though, these ratios are evidence that the historiographical tendency to identify imperial consumption with the exotic can obscure as much as it illuminates.24 Empire in EMB posters more often took on a familiar, British-looking form, featuring ‘Home’ or, as we will see, the ‘Home-like’ Dominions.

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The Dominions, then, played an outsized role in Britain’s empire marketing efforts, commandeering committees and campaigns to promote their produce. But it could be argued that their dominance of the Board was a hollow victory, costing them little but gaining them even less. Among economic historians, the EMB has been consigned to irrelevance, considered at best ‘innocuous’ or more commonly as an exercise in futility.25 Certainly, recent research is not convinced that the EMB was effective in selling more empire produce, and contemporary opinions were similarly equivocal.26 The Board monitored sales figures, but found it difficult to attribute any increase directly to their advertising.27 An editorial in The Times, which was otherwise sympathetic to the Board’s aims, still noted that ‘publicity work is seldom susceptible of exact measurement, and critics have not been lacking to suggest that the posters of the Board, however ornamental as additions to the amenities of the streets, could have little practical effect on sales’.28 Those critics included even that most dutiful Dominion, New Zealand. An official New Zealand report described the Board’s posters as ‘ineffective as sellers of produce and of little practical value … The whole empire propaganda work is carried out from the political angle of impressing the Dominions with what it is doing rather than from the point of view of selling Empire produce.’29 This failure seems to have been a product of the Board’s lofty sense of purpose. Some board members ‘interpreted their mission as also having long-term ideological and educational aims. Immediate sales were not their only aim, and they tuned the contents of their posters and their distribution accordingly.’30 Such high-mindedness led to some disputes between the Dominion representatives and other committee members. The jaundiced tone of the New Zealand report followed the cancellation of one New Zealand poster series that had experimented with a greater emphasis on selling commodities by picturing piles of butter and cheese and mounds of raw meat against a bucolic, if generic, rural setting.31 These images were unacceptable to the chairman, William Crawford. He claimed that campaigns with too much emphasis on the product threatened ‘to destroy the whole character of the Board’s poster campaign’.32 New Zealand’s representative, R.S. Forsyth, ‘did not feel able to agree with the Sub-committee’s view’, but Crawford won this round.33 Metropolitan aesthetes did not have it all their own way though: bowing to Dominion pragmatism, the

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committee went on to approve a test series of posters designed to balance ‘the views of overseas representatives’ with the ‘standard of design and character which the subcommittee have endeavoured hitherto to maintain’.34 Yet, as ineffective as the Board might have been in selling empire produce, it seems to have been much more successful in selling the idea of empire.35 In the most detailed study of the Board’s work, Stephen Constantine concludes that this was its most important effect. He suggests that the EMB’s particular ‘idea of empire’ emphasised the existing metaphor of empire as family, reconstituting it as a ‘system of co-operative development bringing mutual benefits, in which the image of the family had a moral as well as an economic dimension’.36 A number of campaigns created this generalised version of empire and its purpose. Christmas in particular became a vehicle for vague slogans of unity and valiant attempts to represent that unity. Some of these attempts were hugely successful: as we have seen, the King’s Christmas pudding recipe, an EMB creation that featured ingredients from across the empire, became ‘the most famous recipe in the world’.37 (Conversely, the EMB’s attempt to portray imperial cohesiveness through the medium of the pudding in their film One Family went on to gross a mere £344.38) But such undifferentiated expressions of empire overlaid a more carefully structured one. In the advertising created by the publicity committee, the Dominions took on a particular cultural form that was quite distinct from that of other colonies. EMB campaigns constructed a specific Dominion identity, one that articulated in new ways the same ideas of inclusivity and exclusivity found in the Dominions’ own campaigns. Far from overshadowing Dominion commodity advertising, the EMB’s campaigns worked in harmony with it.

ma k i n g ‘ h o m e - l i k e ’ dominions The Dominion identity constructed in EMB advertising had several distinct elements. First, the Dominions appeared most commonly as farms, and only very rarely as the sources of other primary produce – forestry and fishing form occasional exceptions. This seems fitting: after all, the EMB was the bureaucratic embodiment of an older cultural construction, one in which empire was idealised as a potentially self-sufficient, reciprocal system of trade – a competitor to

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the emerging power of the United States and Germany. In this fantasy of empire as a ‘great interlocking economic unit’, Britain was the centre of both consumption and secondary production, while its peripheries were imagined as sites of primary production.39 However, though EMB advertising acknowledged this broad division, it carefully articulated a Dominion version of the interlocking unit. Dominion primary production was ‘British’. This was evident in many of the commodities themselves: wool, dairy produce, meat, apples, and wheat were all familiar products of ‘Home’ farms. Marketing imagery underscored this idea, smoothing the strange edges of diverse Dominion landscapes to make them more ‘Home-like’. In Australia, orchard scenes prevailed over outback settings, while New Zealand’s rough paddocks became pleasant pastures.40 Meanwhile, the Canadian cold, fleetingly recalled in a poster image of dog sledges, was tempered by expanses of golden wheat fields and blossoming apple trees.41 (Canadian orchardists might have approved of this reconfiguration, as they too worked to create a ‘self-consciously English atmosphere’ in British Columbia’s Cowhican and Okanagan valleys.42) The ‘virtual hinterlands’ of the metropole took cultural as well as economic form (plate 4).43 The familiar appearance of these farming hinterlands was likely to have been heightened by the almost exclusive use of British artists for EMB work. In keeping with the EMB’s ‘high-class’ approach, it commissioned well-known artists such as Clive Gardiner, Paul Nash, Dora Batty, and H.S.  Williamson to create the advertising campaigns. Some Dominion artists were considered, and Mike Cronin has explored the subversion of imperial meanings that occurred when the Board commissioned Irish artists to depict the Irish Free State.44 However, no Canadian or New Zealand artists were used, despite the Board considering New Zealander E. Heber Thompson, a well-regarded printmaker, along with designs by an artist resident in New Zealand, Richard Wallwork.45 It is unlikely, though, even with the Irish example, that the use of these nominally local artists would have made much difference. Thompson, while New Zealand-born, had trained in Britain and continued to work there.46 Wallwork, also an accomplished printmaker, was a British migrant who favoured fairy scenes over realism: one of his works, The Trio, ‘presented a group of rabbits playing musical instruments’.47 Neither seems likely to have produced a grittily realistic version of New Zealand.

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In any case, it was not always clear that a realistic portrayal was the committee’s main objective. They did take pains over some aspects of representation: one of the Board’s artists, H.S. Williamson, was sent to Australia House to watch a movie on farming before he created a set of pictures on wheat-growing, while the production of a Falkland Islands poster was delayed ‘subject to verifying the technical accuracy of the whale’.48 Yet the Board had no difficulty in dispensing with realism when it came to making the Dominion maps, and there are other indications that images needed to conform to the ideal, rather than the real. Scottish artist Keith Henderson, for example, decoratively posed pink cockatoos and koalas in Australian jarrah trees. When the compositions were criticised as ecologically inaccurate, the artist airily replied that they did not ‘pretend to be a portrait of any particular bit of an Australian forest’ and that they were meant to suggest ‘reserves of timber for the Empire’.49 However, it seems that images intended to actually depict Australia needed to pretend a bit harder. The Board contracted A.B. Webb, an English artist resident in Western Australia, to produce two series illustrating wheat, timber, wool, and fruit-growing.50 After Webb completed the first, the committee advised that ‘his previous designs were somewhat too thin and dull in quality and colour for poster work, and that he should, if possible, make his new designs stronger’.51 Whether ‘real’ Australia was insufficiently compelling, or whether technical reasons prompted the change, the landscape needed to be altered. Before sending the images to print, the Board employed another artist to redraw Webb’s wheat field.52 While posters enhanced the Dominions’ familiar farming features, they muted any signs of difference. This formed the second key element in the construction of a distinct Dominion identity, and it too is recognisable from the Dominions’ own campaigns. Consonant with the idea of white Dominions recently distanced from their colonial pasts, markers of that past, such as ‘native’ people and Indigenous motifs, were almost entirely absent from the Dominions’ EMB posters.53 Such an absence may seem surprising given the historiographical emphasis on the colonial habit of appropriating aspects of ‘native’ culture, flora, and fauna in order to create distinct national identities in settler colonies.54 But the only attempt at creating a distinctive identity based on indigeneity was limited to retail posters and show cards, on which each Dominion was represented by a native animal or plant. This campaign may not have done much to inspire

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sales: images of bison, kangaroos, and kiwis were hard to connect with products such as apples, sultanas, and lamb.55 In place of difference, the Dominions emphasised kinship links between the Dominions and Britain. Buying Canada’s ‘British Empire apples’ kept ‘the money in the family’, while ‘British men’ packed Australian sultanas.56 One advertisement suggested that some food came from actual family members overseas: ‘I may actually be eating stuff from their own farms or if not, it comes from their friends or from sons of my friends. Anyway, it’s all in the family as it were. I always like dealing with my own people. Everybody ought to do the same.’57 Though the EMB urged consumers to ‘remember’ that the empire was ‘filled your cousins’, some members of the ‘family’ of empire were clearly closer than others.58 The same British men who grew Australia’s sultanas also ‘worked in clean and healthy British conditions’ and earned a ‘British standard of wages’.59 ‘The Dominions share with Great Britain the idea of securing and maintaining a high standard of living’, meaning therefore that ‘food from Home or the Dominions is better and more wholesome than food from any foreign country which employs sweated labour and tolerates insanitary conditions’.60 Articulation of these shared metropolitan values reinforced the ‘Home-like’ nature of the Dominions. At the same time, by referring only to food from ‘Home or the Dominions’, the copy discreetly excludes Britain’s dependent colonies from sharing the same ‘high standards of living’. The EMB’s signature five-poster sequences offered a particularly generous canvas for the creation of the Dominions as familial and familiar ‘British’ farms. Gill’s generic ‘Highways of Empire’ may have been the first outsized promotional image, but the very first five-poster sequence was also the first to articulate the Dominion version of empire. Demonstrating that penchant for alternative geographic facts destined to be a hallmark of EMB promotions, the opening sequence, ‘Come Up, Come In, From Eastward’, conjured up not the far east of the mysterious Orient but a very, very far east that included Canada and New Zealand. Across three large panels, the Board partnered coruscating cornfields on the Canadian prairie and a New Zealand dairy factory metonymically labelled the ‘British Empire Dairy Factory’ together with a scene of British shipping in the English Channel, epitomising the idea of the Dominions as rural hinterlands of the metropole. Should these images not have been enough, two accompanying letterpress posters, explaining the

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quintessentially British nature of the produce, completed the fiveposter sequence. The men, and the herds, of the New Zealand dairy industry ‘came from Home’ – a formulation that overlooked the colonial reality of Chinese, Danish, American, and Māori dairying. Similarly, Canada’s wheat came ‘from the Old World’, its once wild and coldly inhospitable prairies reconstructed as extensions of Britain’s own fields.61 This extension was as much metaphoric as economic. Constructing Dominion farms as ‘British’ fields served both as a complement to increasing metropolitan urbanisation and industrialisation and as an alternative repository for Britain’s own essentialised identity as rural. England’s garden was relocated to the wide landscapes of the Dominions, where, reprising their earlier incarnations as settler utopias, they formed ‘the British citizen’s great inheritance … Immense areas still awaiting settlement by men and women of our own race.’62 The elision of the Dominions’ industrial and urban life enhanced this image. Cities appeared only once in Dominion posters, as part of a ‘March of Empire’ series, where, combined with the mighty Dominions’ maps, they were used as signs of progress.63 Even then, progress was predicated on the Dominions’ fundamentally rural nature. Accompanying posters detailed the growth of farm acreage, not factories, in Canada, while figures revealing a tenfold leap in agricultural production and an eightfold rise in pastoral and dairy production contextualised the rise of the Australian cities Brisbane and Melbourne.64 In a similar vein, the EMB’s ‘Map of Australia’ (modelled on a successful ‘Home’ series of agricultural maps) did not even note the location of state capitals, preferring to populate a pleasantly, if optimistically, green Australia with wheat, sheep, cattle, and a few desultory kangaroos.65 New Zealand, similarly, exchanged urban centres and industry for a map covered in drowsing cows and dairy factories.66 But while Dominion farms might evoke Britain’s own idealised pre-industrial past, they were not anachronisms. Dairy factories and farm machinery linked them with metropolitan modernity, acting as reminders that agriculture in the Dominions was a highly mechanised and productive industry. In pictures of Dominion dairy farms and wheat harvesting, ‘modernity and Britishness would coincide’.67 Crucially, as we will see later, farming technology also differentiated Dominions from the colonial empire, where productivity remained dependent on physical labour.

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The emphasis on rural – not industrial or urban – growth was also evident in a campaign devoted to the ‘interchange of trade’. In poster sequences titled ‘Empire Buying Makes Busy Factories’, the factories were British and the Dominions appeared, predictably, as rural, British-styled hinterlands.68 Naturally, highlighting Dominion farming reflected the EMB’s brief to sell more primary produce and to suggest to British consumers that, by buying that produce, they helped the rest of empire to buy British-manufactured goods. Yet such an approach reinforced the fantasy of empire as an interlocking economic unit, and with it a fantasy about the nature of the Dominions. Despite the fact that the Dominions were increasingly developing – and protecting – their own manufacturing industries, each sequence balanced images of Dominion primary production against images of metropolitan industry. These designs once again rendered Dominion landscapes as empty agricultural spaces and emphasised their interdependence with the industrialised metropolitan centre in Britain. The Canadian version showed the export of honey and apples, with British-built ships received in return.69 New Zealand’s set paired an improved Arcadia with metropolitan industrial modernity, juxtaposing a sheep station with British woollen mills drawn to ‘give the effect of importance and efficiency’.70 Australia, though busily developing its own steel industry, nevertheless appeared as a steel importer, with Australian dairy products exchanged for British steel (plate 5).71 The central poster in each sequence revealed the cultural implications of this form of imperial economics most clearly. Forming a graphic expression of James Belich’s ‘recolonial’ relationship, a map of the United Kingdom, ‘drawn to the same scale’, was overlaid onto a map of each Dominion. In the cases of Canada and Australia, the difference in size between the island nation and its continental possessions allowed Britain to be placed right at their centre – the heart of empire beating at the heart of each Dominion. Placing a map of Britain over a map of New Zealand intensified the effect, pulling the ties of trade so tight that the two places became almost one.72 Copy running across the twinned maps of New Zealand and Britain stressed economic integration by balancing the value of frozen meat exported with the value of textiles bought from Britain.73 Supporting posters reinforced the idea of cultural integration: distance was made to disappear in copy such as ‘New Zealand Serves

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our Table’ and ‘Direct from New Zealand’, while pictures of a British couple eating New Zealand butter and meat and of a New Zealand man wearing a suit of British wool highlighted the complementary and familiar nature of this Dominion hinterland.74 Unusually, the EMB tried the same approach for India, attempting to showcase the reciprocal trade of Indian tea for British cotton.75 But, as we might expect, Dominion-inspired techniques, designed to highlight a supposed shared Britishness, did not translate easily onto the subcontinent. The difficulties began with the design of the central map. Maps of Britain rested cosily in the bosom of the Dominions, but India’s geography – like its politics – proved less hospitable. Britain could not sit easily at its heart. For an organisation used to bending landscapes to its will, this should have been an easy problem to resolve. But recentring Britain in the EMB’s Indian sequence proved problematic. Skewing the map and then setting it at an angle to the viewer (a visual trick emphasised by the otherwise-inexplicable addition of a pot plant) made little difference: despite a desperate final attempt at balance by framing it all with a set of dull grey curtains, Britain remained out of place in the heart of India (plate 6). The surrounding posters made things worse. Although the entire sequence was titled ‘Empire Buying Makes Busy Factories’, they adopted a Dominion-style, empty-landscape approach, and with hindsight it is hard not to read them as a portent of things to come. Images included an eerily empty British cotton factory, as well as a deserted Indian tea warehouse with one tea chest overturned, its contents spilling onto the ground, as if both the subjects and the spirit of empire trade had fled. The decision to depict emptiness is puzzling, but it suggests a reluctance to create a visual equivalence between two very different sets of empire workers. Indeed, the final two posters resurrected cultural difference, pairing elderly British tea-drinking ladies with a couple of Indian merchants inspecting yards of cotton. Though the format was the same, the sequence did not replicate the complementary imagery found in the Dominion versions. Despite considerable effort, the EMB could not remake India’s imagined reciprocal economic relationship as a familiar cultural one. Imperial unity had its limits: despite posters extolling the empire family, there remained a clear separation between white Dominions and dependent colonies.

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‘b r i t i s h ’ d o m i n i o n s and the d e p e n d e n t e m p ire The Indian ‘interchange of trade’ set of posters highlights another way in which EMB campaigns worked to produce the Dominions as special members of empire. As we have seen in other Dominion campaigns, commodity Britishness also relied on being clearly distinguished from the dependent colonies, and specific EMB poster sequences provided a powerful new opportunity to promote that difference. Particular series, such as ‘The March of Empire’, were limited to the Dominions: the unsuccessful Indian ‘interchange’ sequence is the only exception in an otherwise all-Dominion series. And in keeping with the idea of Dominion difference, otherwise generic depictions of empire, such as trade routes, appeared in very distinct ways. On those mighty ‘March of Empire’ Dominion maps, for example, which celebrated the Dominions’ rapid growth, trade routes flowed out from the Dominions towards the centre and were contextualised with facts and figures symbolising their productive partnership in empire. EMB efforts to depict India’s trade routes looked very different. In the sequence titled ‘The Empire’s Highway to India’, the colony was less a partner than a possession. Illustrated travelogue-style, the five-poster sequence summoned up the imperial gaze, presenting images of Gibraltar, Malta, the Suez Canal, Aden, and Bombay from the point of view of a passenger standing against the rail of their cruise ship, watching their exotic empire slide by. The difference was even inscribed in the route itself: this strand of the empire’s highway flowed from the centre out.76 Likewise, though each five-poster sequence could combine images of different parts of the empire into one campaign, the Dominions seldom mixed with the dependent empire.77 Campaigns sometimes centred around a particular commodity type, such as butter or fruit. But these never brought Dominions and colonies together. Such exclusivity might be explained as a function of the commodity itself: ‘Empire Butter’, for example, was only produced by the Dominions.78 Yet, though separate campaigns featured Indian rice and Dominion wheat, no ‘Empire Grain’ series was ever created to link them. Commodities did not simply illustrate the ‘natural’ differences between the Dominions and the dependent empire but also worked to construct them.

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Similarly, though much of the empire produced fruit for the metropole, numerous campaigns carefully delineated the Dominions and the dependent empire as separate spheres. ‘Empire Fruit’ campaigns did not combine the exotic bounty of the ‘market garden of the tropics’ with the more familiar orchards of the white empire.79 The borders of Australia and New Zealand could be blended to form a generic ‘apple orchard of empire’, then drawn across time and space to sit alongside a picture of an English country market and a South African orange grove.80 But cocoa pods from Africa’s Gold Coast or pineapples from Malaya never sat alongside Canadian apples. As a further reminder of which of Britain’s imperial possessions were ‘Home-like’ and which were not, pictures of tropical fruit were never juxtaposed with an English market. A central poster of London was proposed for E. McKnight Kauffer’s sequence on Gold Coast produce, but this did not eventuate. Instead, a rather more neutral statistical poster took its place. Though boundaries between ‘Home’ and the ‘Home-like’ Dominions might blur, the dependent colonies remained distinct. The demarcation between white colonies and exotic commodities created other distortions. In EMB campaigns, empire sugar came from Mauritius and Fiji rather than from Australia’s own tropical market garden, Queensland. At first sight this is a curious absence. Australian sugar exports to Britain had increased substantially during the 1920s, stimulated by generous government subsidies, bounties, and protection schemes, which came at considerable expense to the Australian taxpayer.81 A little metropolitan-funded advertising might have further buoyed hard-won sales without adding to this burden. Yet sugar – even that produced by white men at great expense on specially encouraged, yeoman-style smallholdings rather than plantations – belonged to a different sort of empire: the dependent empire of the colonies, not the empire of the ‘great self-governing Dominions’.82 As we saw in the chapter on film, Australia would later go to considerable trouble to establish the ‘white’ credentials of their sugar. In the meantime, a proposed poster for Queensland sugar was replaced by more images of orchards and dairying.83 This policing of the racial boundaries of commodities worked both ways: a poster for Fijian copra was amended, substituting a white man with a native Fijian.84 There was one occasion on which commodities and their colonies might mix. As noted earlier, a number of campaigns promoted

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the general idea of empire trade and its benefits. This meant bringing the disparate elements of empire together, contravening, in some cases, the strictly delineated presentation of Dominion and colony. For example, a campaign based around the idea of ‘John Bull’s shops’, with windows full of produce, happily mixed ‘Home’, colonial, and Dominion commodities, while the famed Christmas pudding campaign literally mixed the empire up.85 However, scenes of ‘Home’ and the empire’s mandates, protectorates, colonies, and Dominions all jostled together appeared much less frequently in these generic empire campaigns than we might expect given the historiographical emphasis on the EMB’s expression of empire as family. Artists drew on a range of different approaches to express imperial unity and its benefits, many of which did not rely on actually depicting the colonies or the Dominions. Graphs, tables, and charts, such as those in the series ‘Raise the Empire Line’, emphasised empire’s trade through its different products, rather than its different places,86 while those places themselves could sometimes be reduced to little more than signifiers, such as flags, or a series of labels on nondescript parcels piled like generous tribute under an empire Christmas tree.87 Campaigns stressing the moral – rather than economic – dimensions of empire relied even less on place. The heroic work of empire-building, for example, was expressed through group portraits of famous imperial figures – from Cabot to Cook, Raleigh to Raffles – and was made contemporary by the inclusion of a picture of British dock workers.88 And perhaps solely for reasons of composition, the ghost of exclusion remained in other campaigns that sold the moral virtues of British imperialism. ‘The Service of Empire’ sequence – which, like others of its ilk, borrowed from the Bible as further proof of empire trade’s righteousness – depicted a series of people and animals bringing their produce to the British centre. The left-hand poster featured ‘native’ people, complete with exotic animals such as camels, while the central image was populated by draught horses, yeoman types, and an incongruous, but definitively Dominion-based, kangaroo. Designed to be read from left to right, the sequence places the Dominions ahead of the rest in a narrative of ‘progress’, culminating in the final panel: an English domestic scene surmounted by a Union Jack.89 Dominion difference appeared clearly within individual posters as well as between the panels of sequences. Illustrations of the

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dependent empire were ‘striking for the racial stereotyping’ they contained. With their ‘scantily dressed female rice growers’, ‘rather undernourished Ceylonese men scrap[ing] copra’, and ‘natives toiling whilst white officers lounged’, the EMB’s campaigns for the colonial empire could be considered almost a paint-by-numbers study in Edward Said’s orientalism, with depictions of ‘backward’ colonies serving to cast the metropolis as their natural superior.90 But the exotic othering typical in the imaging of such colonies could not be deployed for Dominions who were determined that they had transcended the ‘colonial’ state. Instead, the Dominions became the mirror image of the dependent empire. This meant they too were racially inscribed, gendered spaces, though analyses that either naturalise Britishness or limit empire’s cultural impact to the production of colonial difference have helped to camouflage this effect. The EMB’s British farming hinterlands, just like those created by the Dominions themselves, constructed Australia, Canada, and New Zealand as white and masculine, separating them from the dependent empire and emphasising their metropolitan attributes anew. White and masculine identities forged via commodity campaigns generally resonate with older nationalist interpretations of settler identity, such as the ‘man alone’ of New Zealand mythology or Australia’s ‘Coming Man’.91 Yet where those narratives find masculinity forged by the pioneering past, in commodity advertising it is a contemporary construction, produced by imperial hierarchies rather than by character-building colonial conditions and played out on metropolitan streets rather than colonial frontiers. Once again, the EMB, with its ‘all of empire’ approach, provided an opportunity to accentuate, rather than dilute, these distinct identities. Images such as A.B.  Webb’s ‘Flock of Merino Sheep’ or Frank Newbould’s ‘Mutton, Lamb, Apples’ sequence negotiated the boundaries of exotic colony and British Dominion in both style and subject matter.92 Featuring clean lines and a muted colour palette, the sequences depict a sense of calm abundance conjured from nearly empty landscapes. In both cases, men on horseback command landscapes thronged with snowy flocks of sheep. As white farmers rather than exotic plantation owners, they supervise sheep, not indigenes. Dominion marketing, as we have seen, imagined the Dominions as empty space, even erasing the settlement process. Similarly, for Canada, whose apples came from orchards that ‘stood

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where others had shaped the land for hunting and mixed farming’, EMB posters presented the recent imposition of settler agricultural ecosystems as naturalised, timeless verities, even while the process of ‘(forcibly) transforming areas where First Nations procured food into fields and fences of Euro-Canadian agriculture’ was still underway into the 1920s.93 Immaculately and invisibly cleared of their original native occupants, these vacant Dominion landscapes could stand in quiet contrast to the teeming activity depicted in the colonial empire. But where men did appear, as in Newbould’s image, they exuded authority and self-reliance. For Newbould’s farmer, though a man alone, was not an isolated example: Australian and Canadian orchardists also appeared as solitary masters of their domesticated landscapes.94 Productivity also looked different in these two spaces. Groups of manual labourers gathered the rice, tea, and sugar of the dependent empire, which was then carted away and loaded on the backs of other labourers.95 It has been argued that EMB imagery valorised the work of empire, effacing its exploitative nature. In word and image, the British dock worker, the native sugar cutter, and the Canadian lumberman were equally transformed into heroic empire builders. But whatever sense of shared dignity was meant to be conveyed by this portrayal of imperial labour, work in the white empire looked different.96 Dominion production appeared almost as immaculate as its landscapes. Many of the images of farms and commodities showed no workers, and those that did appear stood, as already described, alone in their landscapes. Production in the dependent empire, on the other hand, required a multitude of labourers – picking tea, harvesting tobacco, scraping copra. Some portrayals attempted to make this heroic: an early sequence on sugar cane and copra featured vaguely neoclassical allusions, including muscular torsos and classically styled drapery.97 But as Philippa Levine has argued for the Victorian empire, ‘lack of clothing and lack of culture and civilisation went together’.98 The idea that semi-naked members of empire were somehow inferior to those who were clothed is articulated in numerous sequences. White men, in the requisite tropical-styled European clothing, oversaw Nyasaland and Rhodesia’s tobacco workers; a captain in crisp dress whites watched sinewed black bodies load cargo in Colombo; and in Adrian Allinson’s ‘East African Transport’ – the most egregious example – white men assumed command over

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Africans carrying loads of cotton, coffee, and tobacco. One poster in this sequence exemplifies the infantilisation inherent in such imagery: a European plantation overseer, immaculately dressed in white from his trousers to his pith helmet, rests in a field, the scene angled so that he is literally talking down to an almost naked African child.99 Such a portrayal was unthinkable in the Dominion setting, where men not only controlled their own labour but always appeared fully dressed, in adult style, often in the unofficial Dominion dress uniform of long sleeves, trousers, and hat. Even when their work was the same, Dominion and dependent empires looked different. Australian forests, with their clean, hard edges, were felled by hardy men, dressed in their Dominion uniform.100 Their Nigerian counterparts wore only loincloths to fell mahogany, a hardwood made softer when depicted in the shades of a pastel forest (plate 7).101 Working men helped to differentiate the Dominion and dependent empires, and so too did working women. Colonial women often appeared as labourers, gathering cocoa pods or harvesting tea. In keeping with their image as masculine Dominions, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand posters rarely featured women at all, and when women did appear they played the role of consumers, not producers. Otherwise, the usual disciplines of Dominion representation remained in force. Colonial women worked in groups, while Dominion women shopped alone. They were, of course, also differently dressed and undressed. Though more common among images of colonial men, nakedness still acted as a signifier of ‘nativeness’ for women. Perhaps this is why the poster committee routinely left colonial women’s arms, shoulders, and backs exposed but considered ‘improving’ the female figure featured in New Zealand’s coat of arms by lengthening her skirt and adding a belt and sandals before she appeared in the ‘March of Empire’ series.102 Allinson’s East African sequence even included images of bare-breasted women: a long-standing trope for representing colonial peoples but one otherwise absent from EMB work. It is not clear why such images did not appear more often, but it would be a mistake to see it as the product of either enlightenment or prudery on the part of the EMB: the Board had demanded that changes be made to Allinson’s work (in particular, they asked for a whip to be removed from the hand of the white overseer) but these did not include a request to clothe the women.103 Rather, the EMB’s job was to make

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empire more palatable: removing whips sanitised the imperial project, while nakedness only proved its necessity. The special nature of the Dominions was communicated not just by the images but through the artwork itself. Though the EMB commissioned more than 100 sets of posters and used a wide range of artists, there is a clear distinction between the stylistic approaches to the Dominions and the dependent colonies. Depictions of the Dominions and their commodities tended to be naturalistic, using colours and styles intended to capture a ‘real’ landscape and the ‘real’ people who lived there. Occasionally, their sequences even included photographs. With a few exceptions, posters depicting ‘Home’ industries worked the same way. By contrast, imagery for the dependent colonies incorporated highly illustrative, even abstract, styles, while exuberant forms and colours replaced the muted tones and crisp lines typical of the Dominions. Though some realist images were used, the committee clearly preferred the exotic empire to look exotic too. While the imperial family’s Dominion workers came to life cleanly sketched against their vacant domains, the dependent empire’s workers became compositional elements rather than individuals, abstracted as patterns of twisted sinew or smudged into a softly tropical landscape.104 In E. McKnight Kauffer’s ‘Cocoa’, African workers are stylised black focal points in a colour-blocked landscape, and in Edgar Ainsworth’s depiction of a sugar plantation, backs bend as easily as canes: back-breaking work reimagined as a natural feature of a pliant, surrendering landscape (plate 8).105 Conveniently, the idea that white Dominions formed a special kind of empire did not rely on the public carefully decoding poster imagery. The Board developed press campaigns that clearly categorised the empire. In the advertisement ‘How many British Colonies can you name?’, readers were told that ‘everyone knows something of India and something of the great self-governing Dominions. But these are not the colonies.’106 Further press advertisements made the iconographic differences between dependencies and Dominions literally black and white. Colonial rice was advertised using an Indian woman, who proffered a bowl of rice towards the reader. At the same time, copy assured readers of the rice’s quality because it was ‘untouched by the mechanical aids required in other countries’.107 Naturally, the same campaign’s treatment of Dominion produce inverted these tropes. An advertisement for Australian

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dried fruit depicted two men, dressed yet again in that unofficial Dominion uniform. Pictured walking out of the frame, there is no sense of supplication in the men’s relationship with the reader, and quality in this case was assured because, conversely, ‘once picked, Australian dried fruits are untouched by hand’ (figure 5.1).108

b e yo n d t h e e mb While designed for a metropolitan audience, the EMB campaigns were surprisingly well-disseminated in the Dominions. Towards the end of the Board’s life, a collection of the posters toured the Dominions, but some time earlier the committee had decided to make limited numbers of certain posters available to Dominion schools.109 At least in Australia and New Zealand, it seems that demand exceeded supply.110 Meanwhile, major Australian daily papers published photographs of new poster sequences, meaning the images reached beyond an audience of bored school children.111 Some Australians may have seen the real thing, as arrangements were made to ship seven poster frames there in 1928, although a request from British Columbia for their own sets was deferred.112 In New Zealand, farmers kept up with developments through industry publications such as New Zealand Dairy Exporter, which had a circulation of 60,000, was sent free to every dairy farmer, and which regularly reported on EMB initiatives.113 However, EMB imagery was probably most in evidence in the Dominions during their own ‘Empire Shopping Weeks’. In Sydney, ‘large quantities’ of EMB posters along with ‘thousands’ of locally produced versions were distributed, appearing in railway stations and in shop windows. Myers Emporium in Melbourne even proudly displayed a mighty version of MacDonald Gill’s ‘Highways of Empire’.114 Some of the 2  million Canadians who visited the annual Canadian Exhibition of 1928 could experience the British version of these shopping weeks, along with a range of other EMB promotional material. Invited to participate, the EMB set up a replica of a London street decked out for Empire Shopping Week in their pavilion.115 Recent research suggests that these posters soon ran afoul of ‘buy local’ shopping movements.116 The point here, though, is not to establish the strength of the Dominions’ imperial sentiment or to claim that the EMB’s work was universally loved. Nor is it to argue that these images directly influenced Dominion identity (although

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Figure 5.1 The Dominion dress code: Australian sultana farmers at work.

they might have had some minor effect). Instead, their use in the Dominions suggests that the imagery was clearly acceptable to Dominion audiences.117 Given Dominion influence over EMB initiatives, that should not be surprising. The advent of the EMB coincided with

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the development of their own commodity marketing programmes. Though there is a tendency to see Dominion campaigns as having been fostered by the EMB, in fact they worked in a complementary fashion, with considerable cross-pollination of people, ideas, and campaigns. But by 1933, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand would no longer benefit from the EMB’s complementary marketing. Having extended imperial preferences to the Dominions via the Ottawa agreements in 1932, the British government no longer felt any obligation to fund the EMB’s propaganda work. Instead, it suggested that the Dominions might like to shoulder the cost of the organisation themselves. They declined, and their refusal has contributed to the legend of growing restiveness with the strictures of empire, especially as the increasingly empire-averse Canada led the opposition while Australia and New Zealand remained more amenable. Yet such interpretations have not been able to take into account the Dominions’ own marketing organisations. By the time the EMB was dismantled, the three Dominions had been running their own marketing organisations for years. As much as they might have liked a little more metropolitan support at no cost, they did not need it; nor did it make sense to pay for another, joint organisation when they were already funding their own. Whether with regret, in New Zealand’s case, or, as in Canada’s case, relief to be free of what some there perceived as imperial entanglement, the Dominions brought the era of the EMB to an end.118 But their own marketing activity, long overshadowed by the Board’s work, continued. When the EMB’s press advertisements, publicity films, and oversized posters finally disappeared, the Dominion campaigns remained – right at the heart of empire marketing.

6

‘Another Empire Link’: Advertising and Britishness in the Dominions

At just the same time as the Empire Marketing Board began masterminding its very first campaigns, another empire advertising business opened its doors in London. In July 1926, J. Ilott Ltd, New Zealand’s largest advertising agency, launched a London operation, taking temporary space in Sentinel House in Holborn and announcing its arrival to the metropolis’s marketing cognoscenti with a full-page advertisement in Advertising World.1 By January it had moved to permanent offices in Astor House in Aldwych, right in the heart of empire and close to the other Dominion marketers clustered around the High Commissions. But unlike the EMB and other Dominion organisations, Ilotts had not come to London to help promote Dominion products to British consumers. Nor was it interested in competing with British agencies for British business. Rather, Ilotts offered a different kind of empire marketing. Its new office aimed to assist metropolitan businesses wanting to sell their products to New Zealanders. As the copy in Advertising World assured its readers, the New Zealand market offered wealthy, discerning, and loyal consumers, waiting to buy British products, and Ilotts’ London office was ready to help British manufacturers take advantage of them: ‘When the time comes for you to undertake an aggressive sales campaign in New Zealand, you can have no better friend-on-the-spot than J. Ilott Ltd.’2 Over the next forty years, Ilotts went on to make many friends: when its London office finally closed in 1967, it still had fifty-four clients on the books, including Bovril, Benson & Hedges, Lipton’s tea, and Meccano, all of whom used Ilotts for their advertising, not in

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Figure 6.1 ‘Another Empire Link’: Ilotts campaigning for British clients.

London, but in New Zealand.3 The new office had become, as a further advertisement claimed, ‘Another Empire Link’ (figure 6.1).4 Ilotts’ London office illustrates another unexplored dimension of empire marketing: the networks forged by the Dominions to import British goods and the cultural effects those networks would have. So

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far, this book has considered the cultural role of exports from the former settler colonies, suggesting that the commodity campaigns that surrounded them worked to reflect and construct a particular form of Dominion Britishness and that this, in turn, played a key role in supporting and sustaining empire. Yet during the interwar era the Dominions were also importers, to varying degrees, of British products, and these goods also played a role in asserting a form of British identity. For an earlier period, Andrew Thompson and Gary Magee have speculated that British exports worked to refresh the cultural memories of migrants and to reconnect them with ‘Home’. Lawnmowers from Birmingham, cutlery from Sheffield, bicycles from Nottingham, and toilets from Staffordshire could evoke ‘the proximity, even romance, of Britain’.5 Similarly, Bovril or Lipton’s tea may have been potent talismans of migrant memories during the interwar era. Further, consumption has been implicated in a colonial ‘civilising’ process, with familiar goods helping to settle unfamiliar places.6 Rows of quotidian products on grocers’ shelves – along with lawnmowers, cutlery, and gleaming white Staffordshire porcelain – became another front line in the spread of imperial culture, acting as tangible proof of the Britishness of a migrant’s new home. However, while it is possible that a ‘can of Bristol tripe and a bottle of Worcester sauce’ also packed a taste of ‘Home’ for British migrants in among their ingredients, and so worked to stabilise colonial settlement, any auratic powers and the nature of any meanings these products evoked for settlers remain difficult to substantiate.7 Worcester sauce, for example, might remind you of your grandmother, but not necessarily of being British. Further, as John Benson noted in his study of British consumer society, being aware of a product’s British origins does not translate directly into a sense of ‘pride in being British’.8 This chapter therefore takes the same approach to the cultural impact of the Dominions’ British imports as previous chapters took to their exports: it focuses not on the meanings inherent in the products themselves, nor on migrant memories or the reactions of consumers, but instead on the networks these products generated and the meanings that marketers intended commodities to carry. Rather than speculating on the semiotics of products themselves or arguing for the importance of Britishness in creating consumer demand – as a co-ethnic approach might – the chapter looks instead

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at how that Britishness was framed. Like commodity marketers, Dominion advertising agencies both constructed and capitalised on a shared sense of British identity, not only in campaigns for British products, but also in promotional campaigns for their own advertising services. Such campaigns may have had a short shelf life. Recent work suggests that officially orchestrated empire shopping or ‘buy British’ campaigns met with little enthusiasm in the Dominions, implying that other, agency-driven campaigns might have suffered the same fate.9 But as we have seen in previous chapters, there are good reasons to look beyond such conclusions. First, any lack of support for organised empire marketing in the Dominions may not have translated into general consumer antipathy towards British-made products. Empire Shopping Weeks in the Dominions invariably ran into complaints from local industries pressing nationalist, ‘buy local’ agendas, but though these tensions surfaced in trade policies and pressure groups, their impact on shopping baskets is difficult to evaluate. Consumers could well have been indifferent to such high-stakes politicking when choosing between jams or cigarettes or sauces, while other kinds of preference – relating to quality, prestige, familiarity, or price – may have been more significant.10 Certainly, though Empire Shopping Weeks faded, and consumer, farming, and industrial groups lobbied over the impact of tariffs and the virtues of buying Dominion-made goods, agencies such as llotts kept on selling British products to Dominion consumers. Second – and perhaps related – the business of marketing Dominion imports, as with marketing Dominion exports, was never restricted to official iterations of empire marketing such as shopping weeks. Canadian department stores, for example, proudly promoted their ‘British identity’ throughout this era, keeping ‘Canadian attachments to Britannia alive and well’.11 Such promotions and their products formed part of the fabric of everyday consumption. In fact, as the final section of this chapter explores, campaigns did not necessarily even promote products as ‘British’ or ‘imperial’ – a reversal of the approaches used for advertising exports. This might seem to support the idea of empire’s fading relevance. Contrarily, though, as we will see below, it suggests the success of the imperial project: for both pragmatic and cultural reasons, marketers generally considered metropolitan and Dominion consumers to be practically identical. However, marketers held a very specific view

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of who those Dominion consumers were. In another example of the way consumption could work in support of imperial power, this iteration of empire marketing also excluded First Peoples. Finally, as this book has consistently argued, viewing activity on the periphery through the lens of the metropolis leads to blind spots. Empire marketing on the edge, just as in Britain, was only briefly metropolitan-led. Through the interwar period and beyond, its most consistent champions were Dominion advertising agencies. Their story begins below.

‘ a n ot h e r e m p i r e link’: d o m i n i o n  ag e n c i e s i n london Ilotts was not the only Dominion advertising agency that sensed an opportunity in opening a branch in London: by the interwar period, agencies from all three Dominions ran operations in the  metropolis. Canadian agency McKim – considered the first general service agency in the Dominion – led the way, setting up shop in 1913. Like Ilotts later, ‘its entire effort [was] devoted to the McKim-established British clientele and to assisting other traders to do export business with the Dominions’.12 Other Canadian agencies joined them. Toronto-based agency Smith, Denne & Moore advertised a London office on Southampton Row in 1927, while McConnell and Fergusson, ‘one of the best known agencies in the Dominion’, came to town ‘to act for British firms advertising in Canada’ in 1934.13 Powerhouse agency MacLaren arrived in London in 1938, initially to handle the Dominion’s ‘Canada Calling’ promotions.14 The agency appears to have outlasted that campaign, though, offering a ‘token service’ to clients through the turmoil of the war, then maintaining its London office into the 1960s, when it appears that it merged with a British-based agency, Dunkley and Friedlander.15 Australia too had representatives in the metropolis. The David Allen Australian Advertising Agency Ltd, a metropolitan-based joint venture, opened in 1926 after its directors, a mix of British and Australian businessmen, realised that a ‘special organisation was needed to successfully handle Anglo-Australian business’.16 Although this new agency, like MacLaren, began by supporting a Dominion export commodity campaign, it also intended to ‘watch the interests of British Advertisers in Australia’.17 Advertising entrepreneur Frank

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Goldberg, whose eponymous agency spanned Australia and New Zealand, opened a London office in 1926, creating a ‘connecting link’ between the Dominion and the metropolis and ‘preaching the gospel of greater co-operation between the Mother Country and her sons and daughters’.18 Goldbergs’ link proved precarious: as the Depression deepened, the firm retrenched until there was just one representative, lodged with the company’s accounting office, before it closed altogether in 1936.19 But others took its place. One of Australia’s most successful agencies in the period, Catts Patterson, also had a presence in London by 1926, initially based in the same Southampton Row as its ‘associated house’, Ilotts.20 It appears it went on to open its own office in 1935.21 Advertising archives are scrappy, and it is difficult both to identify all market entrants and to know how long they survived. There were undoubtedly other Goldbergs. It is also likely that these offices offered account management and sales rather than a full advertising service. Yet the presence of even a handful of Dominion agencies in London is significant. Advertising historiography is dominated by assumptions of American ascendancy (and by the archives of one agency: J.  Walter Thompson).22 These assumptions extend to the advertising histories of the former Dominions themselves, where the impact of the arrival of American agencies has overshadowed the international exploits of local firms.23 It is therefore worth noting that the eight Dominion offices mentioned above outnumbered the five branch offices opened by American agencies in London during this era.24 These Dominion operations may have been modest, but even the American titan J.  Walter Thompson had only fourteen staff and relied on two accounts – Libby’s canned goods and Sun-Maid Raisins – in London in 1925.25 These facts emphasise the strength of Dominion-led empire marketing initiatives and are another reminder that, as with film, the periphery’s active participation in the global expansion of modernity has been underestimated.26 Likewise, they suggest that the current emphasis on America’s pre-eminence in advertising and its global spread needs further revision.27 The British Empire is usually seen as increasingly irrelevant in the face of America’s ‘irresistible’ version of global commerce, yet for agencies such as Ilotts and McKim, imperial links provided a critical and successful part of their expansion strategy.28 In an era whose international advertising networks have been characterised

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as ‘erratic’, those links enabled Dominion agencies such as Ilotts and McKim to maintain a metropolitan presence for years.29 Nor were British branches the sum total of Dominion agencies’ international activity in this era: they also formed alliances with American agencies and dabbled in each other’s markets, all of which provide further examples of the myopia around American expansionism. Still, opening a London office was by far the most ambitious of the agencies’ endeavours. For a decade or so, imperialism enabled an international expansion of Dominion advertising that would not be repeated: in the post-war period, as empire declined, Dominion agencies often became the victims of globalisation rather than its agents, being merged with or sold to large international conglomerates. Dominion agencies expanded to London in two waves: in the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s. The same sentiment that fostered Dominion commodity marketing no doubt contributed to the first wave, and it is tempting to see the second wave as being propelled by the Ottawa agreements: some London-based agencies did occasionally reference the effects of tariffs and other economic policies.30 However, the gap between the two phases is better explained by the onset of the Depression. The downturn initially killed off agency expansion – in 1932 New Zealand agency Charles Haines, discussed below, was forced by its financial position to shelve plans to expand to London – but once the worst had passed, expansion into Britain offered the means for surviving agencies to recover more quickly. Long before the Depression, establishing links with London had made good business sense. British firms already advertised in the Dominions, using British agencies to place campaigns in Dominion media or placing the advertisements directly themselves.31 Either way, they cut local agencies out of the chance to earn commissions – a vital stream of revenue. Agencies arriving in London both before and after the Depression hoped to divert such business, although their pitches preferred to emphasise the benefits of local knowledge rather than the benefits of local commissions. Ilotts argued that ‘there are 13,000 miles’ between the two markets and ‘13,000 differences between the kind of advertising necessary to sell most goods in England and the kind of advertising needed to sell the same goods in New Zealand’.32 Dominion newspapers helped their cause. Some charged higher rates to overseas clients, meaning that local agencies could offer

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cheaper rates, while accreditation schemes also gave Dominion operations an edge. Designed to avoid advertisers defaulting on payments for space after their advertisements had run, accreditation meant publishers essentially approved some agencies as better financial risks than others and, accordingly, favoured them as purchasers, particularly of premium-price space. This benefited local agencies – and their London-based offshoots – as accreditation created a further obstacle to offshore interests purchasing quality space directly. Leading newspapers in Australia, for example, enacted an accreditation scheme during the Depression, and American advertisers in Australia found themselves ‘effectively forced’ to use a local agency.33 The impact of these changes on British firms has not been established, but it seems likely these considerations would have provided another incentive for British businesses to consider placement through a Dominion agency’s London representatives. Alongside the possibility of diverting existing work, Dominion agencies also looked to bring entirely new products to their markets: a pre-emptive strategy that worked not only to increase an agency’s business but also to lock out other agencies from competing should a British manufacturer ask for local pitches. In  the 1920s, George Patterson of Catts Patterson (and later of George Patterson Pty) roamed the world looking for new products to market: ‘Wherever there seemed to be a potential exporter to Australia with the ultimate prospect of the firm becoming an Australian manufacturer, there I went in search of clients.’34 Frank Goldberg was an acknowledged master of this technique, ‘carpetbagg[ing his] way around the large British firms to try to convince them … an advertising man on-the-spot could be just as useful as a salesman on a territory’ (figure 6.2).35 As part of these campaigns, Dominion representatives behaved as boosters for their respective Dominion, talking up the wealth and prospects of their market in an effort to attract manufacturers’ interest. In London, Goldberg aimed ‘to tell British advertising men and British producers all about Australia and New Zealand, to explain the magnitude and increasing possibilities of these markets and in short to show the splendid opportunities these countries present for the right kind of goods’.36 As with the competition for commission, it is possible that finding new opportunities overseas became even more important in the 1930s, as a way to replace local work, which

Figure 6.2 Frank Goldberg on a ‘carpetbagging’ tour. As with Ilotts, Goldberg also pictured his firm as a ‘link’.

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had dwindled during the depths of the Depression, and to overcome fierce competition among agencies for any remaining clients.37 Not all of this activity culminated in branch offices. Some Dominion operators pursued clients by maintaining a virtual presence in the metropolis, either by affiliating with a British agency or by touring regularly in search of new business. Australian agency Patons had an associated house in London (along with Edinburgh and New York), while Sydney-based agency Weston offered ‘responsible helpfulness’ to metropolitan clients through its London representative, K. Witherington.38 Canadian agency J.J. Gibbons also handled British clients, although it is not clear whether its representatives visited them.39 Frank Goldberg combined these strategies, bolstering his London office with regular visits. He toured first in 1926 and then – despite, or perhaps because of, his company’s reversals – again in 1932. He visited once more in 1936, when he secured £100,000  worth of new business.40 George Patterson toured Britain as part of a global business-scouting trip in 1926: this may have been why the company took office space on Southampton Row that year.41 Ilotts certainly seems to have tested the water this way, sending one of its employees on a tour of Britain in 1924, with others following once the office was established.42 Obviously, not all Dominion agencies worked their empire connections. But even absences reflect contemporary perceptions about the potential of British-based business. At least one Dominion agency spent these years agonising over its London strategy. Charles Haines – New Zealand’s oldest agency and one of its largest – never established a London branch. But it remained constantly poised on the brink of following its main competitor, Ilotts, offshore. Haines had several English clients, including Austin, and like other agencies its staff made regular metropolitan tours. The company’s principals, William Appleton and then Charles Haines himself, visited in 1927 and 1929, respectively, and in 1930 the firm resolved to send a director to Britain or America every eighteen months.43 But it dithered over opening a London office. In 1927 Haines determined ‘not to give further consideration’ to representation until 1928, when the decision was again deferred.44 In 1929 it considered a joint venture with Australian firm Patons, but again it hesitated, opting to wait for a report from Appleton’s tour. Its reluctance did not spring from any lack of self-confidence: management made it clear they were not ‘agreeable to any association

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unless “Haines” have the dominant interest’.45 Appleton subsequently vetoed the office on his return in 1930,46 but he remained interested in the British market, floating potential arrangements with the London office of US agency Dorlands and a year later with British company Samson and Clark instead. By 1932, however, its ‘financial position’ meant that a new office was not ‘opportune’.47 As the Depression began to lift, though, it became clear it was falling behind. In 1933, Appleton was back in London, looking for business and making headlines in Advertiser’s Weekly about the ‘revival’ of the New Zealand market.48 In September 1936, the management team noted with alarm the ‘amount of new business emanating from England being secured by Ilotts through their London office’: ‘We have no hope of being even considered in subsequent advertising campaigns.’49 Ilotts was an old hand at the tactic of securing ‘New Zealand distributors of British manufacturers through their London office’, which effectively cut Haines out.50 Despite this obvious lesson, a year later it was still muddling on, ‘investigating the benefits’ of establishing its own office and sending emissaries to London to ‘straighten out difficulties’ with existing British clients. Though it is not clear when Haines finally gave up on the London dream, it is likely that its protracted indecision ended only with the outbreak of war in 1939. For Haines, the attractions of a permanent presence in the metropolis endured, though opening an office to take advantage of them was endlessly postponed. A few British firms also gambled on the empire’s potential, either by opening a Dominion branch office, as Samson and Clark did in Australia, or by forging their own virtual alliances.51 British agency Travers Cleaver, for example, claimed to be ‘on the spot’ in Canada, thanks to an association with McConnell and Fergusson.52 Even advertising-adjacent businesses, such as publishers, began to position themselves as conduits to the Dominion markets. Dominion newspapers regularly advertised their services in Advertiser’s Weekly, extolling the virtues of Dominion markets.53 Like the advertising agencies – and perhaps to cut them, along with their commissions, out of the advertising placement process – some publishers even invested in metropolitan representation. Brisbane’s The Courier set up a ‘Trade Development Department’, with a Fleet Street address, while Canadian publisher Macleans went further, planning a ‘big British push’ in 1935. It took a ‘serious view of the future possibilities for British manufacturers in Canada’, appointing

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a London representative to induce ‘British national advertisers to make more use of the company’s magazines’.54 Australian multinational Gordon & Gotch also sought to make the most of its extensive network of Dominion publications, running various campaigns in the advertising press from its London headquarters.55 Like agencies, it too encouraged British manufacturers to advertise in ‘this prosperous friendly market’.56 The expansion into the metropolis of Dominion advertising agencies and allied operations demonstrates a persistent faith in this style of empire marketing. At the same time, it illustrates the dynamism of colonial ties. Dominion export commodity advertising forged one set of colonial relationships, constructing the Dominions as British producers. Dominion advertising agencies created another set, but with the opposite effect. In their search for new business they constructed the Dominions as sites of British consumption as well. Advertisers turned producer colonies into modern consumer markets, a transformation completed using the same approaches as used by their export marketing brethren. Ilotts, McKim, and others designed campaigns constructing the Dominions, and the agencies themselves, as thoroughly British.

‘e s s e n t i a l ly b r i t i s h ’: c ons tructing i d e n t i t y i n ag e n cy c ampaigns In 1926, Ilotts’ new London manager, W.L.  Chapman, wrote a lengthy article in a special ‘Overseas Markets’ section of November’s Advertising World. Headlined ‘The Dominion’s Plea: Here Is Money – Show Us the Goods’, it neatly captures the broad Dominion agency approach to the metropolitan market. Chapman began with a panegyric on New Zealand’s – and his own – essential Britishness: ‘Home! Home at last! Though I am of the second generation of New Zealand-born and my parents never saw England, this is Home. Perhaps this point of view will help the British manufacturer to realise the intense loyalty of New Zealand to the Motherland. And this loyalty does not stop at sentimental phrasing, flag-waving and speech making, but is expressed in our rigid preference for British-made goods.’57 Chapman’s emphasis on ‘Home’ was only increased by the use of a large, illuminated ‘H’ to ornament the column. However, having summoned up the Dominion’s British spirit, he then got down to business. Determined ‘not to labour’ New

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Zealand’s sentimental ties, in the remainder of the article he laid out a detailed case for New Zealand as a market. Quoting census figures, financial data, and trade numbers, Chapman augmented emotional arguments for New Zealand’s ‘intense loyalty’ with coolheaded statistical facts on purchasing power, population growth, and the Dominion’s preference for British imports. The combined potency of sentiment and rationality was clear: even with ‘enterprising foreign countries’ dangling attractive new products in front of it, New Zealand remained a ‘market worth holding’.58 Chapman clearly designed his article to capture new business, but in the process it also created New Zealand as a very British market, and this imaging spread beyond the promotional puff piece into a series of client-focused campaigns. In Ilotts’ creative hands, New Zealand was not a small colony on the other side of the earth, and nor was it simply a farming hinterland devoted to the production of lamb and butter for British consumers. Instead, the campaigns created the Dominion as an untapped opportunity. Advertisements appeared promoting New Zealand as a wealthy and sophisticated market, interested in ‘quality products’. ‘The New Zealand market is right. Your product is right,’ and, naturally, ‘Ilotts are right.’59 In one example, the agency chose to juxtapose New Zealand’s producer identity with the new consumer version. In a headline running under an image of cheese, butter, fruit, and meat, Ilotts proclaimed that ‘New Zealand does not want these’, but, as the subhead continued, ‘practically everything else that is sold in England will find a ready market in the Empire’s Wealthiest Dominion’.60 Indeed, New Zealand offered more than a ready market: in another advertisement – ‘the lesson of the swallow’ – Ilotts presented it as a natural extension of Britain. In this metaphorical lesson, the agency repurposed seasonal differences between the hemispheres as an opportunity for British manufacturers to quit unsold stock when ‘home demand declines’. A  12,000-mile distance between markets thus went from an impediment to an advantage, as the distant colonies of Australia and New Zealand were remade as markets that enabled ‘stabilisation of sales and uniform output the year round’.61 But beyond a pragmatic appeal based around seasonality, this approach communicated an essential similarity between metropolitan and Dominion markets. What sold at home would, with only a little seasonal tweak, also sell in the Dominions.

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Others shared Ilotts’ market-making approach. Charles Haines positioned New Zealand as simultaneously a rich market and the ‘Most British of all the Dominions’.62 Canada also vied for this title, as agencies presented the senior Dominion as a potential British bonanza. McKim assured manufacturers that ‘treasure is here’, thanks to Canadians’ ‘pronounced liking for British products’.63 A ‘special correspondent’ – undoubtedly someone with ties to the industry – agreed in Advertiser’s Weekly: ‘In considering the Canadian market, it should always be borne in mind that Canada is not a foreign field. Its population is largely of British origin … and the tastes of the people are mainly English.’64 In a full-page advertisement, McKim reminded British manufacturers that ‘Canada, 98% of British Empire descent and with one tenth of its people actually born in the British Isles, is linked to the Motherland and her products not only by birth and tradition but by inherited preference for British quality and design’.65 It did allow for some regional variation: the ‘large foreign born element’ of the prairie provinces made them ‘less British in tone’, while Quebec, inconveniently, was a little more ‘American’.66 But despite acknowledging these differences, McKim preferred to promote a widely shared Canadian Britishness. Writing in 1940, one of the agency’s directors concluded that those of ‘Anglo Saxon origin’ are ‘on the whole strongly British in sentiment, even to the point of passion. He has a deep respect for the “old Country” ways, customs, styles, and attitudes.’67 Australian advertising interests also constructed the Dominion as a fundamentally British market. In 1929, Gordon & Gotch ran a series of advertisements introducing manufacturers to some imagined ordinary Australians, such as ‘Kelly’ (see figure  6.3). Kelly was a ‘cousin of yours, but he lives in Australia. You’d like Kelly. He goes to business every day. Plays golf and tennis. Takes a keen interest in cricket and football. His outlook and tastes are essentially British although he lives in Australia.’68 Kelly was joined by Mrs Hegarty, who, though on the other side of the world, was just like middle-class British women and suffered from a lack of servants to help with housework. So, ‘being very British in outlook and tastes … [she] chooses British devices for preference’ to help with domestic chores.69 Meanwhile, the Rands, from Sydney, were ‘very much like the people next door to you’ and ‘near to us in habits, outlooks and tastes’. They too preferred British goods to ‘those of foreign origin’.70 Gordon & Gotch assured advertisers that when targeting

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Figure 6.3 Making a British market in Australia: Gordon & Gotch introduce cousin Kelly.

Australia there were ‘no great prejudices to overcome. No fundamental differences in taste to consider.’71 Constructing Australians as next-door neighbours, New Zealanders – even those two generations removed – as ‘at home’ in London, and Canadians as ‘linked to the Motherland’ was a long-standing marketing habit, first developed by English agencies such as T.B. Browne.72 Now, however, it was the periphery, not the centre, that was emphasising the essential Britishness of the Dominions. Different versions of this idea surfaced in other agency advertisements. Some promotions made the Dominions more metropolitan-like by highlighting their modernity. Frank Goldberg aimed to ‘dispel the notion New Zealand is a country in which business and advertising are still in their infancy’.73 Similarly, McKim trumpeted Canada’s rapid development: ‘When Mr Anson McKim founded Canada’s first advertising agency, 38 years ago, Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan were practically a wilderness, ruled by scarlet-tuniced “Mounties”. Now 2,000,000  people inhabit these Provinces, industry’s pulse throbs and wealth abounds.’74 Replacing ‘wilderness’ with pulsing prosperity effaced the colonial past and Indigenous presence in the interest of ‘progress’. In Canada’s case it also delicately redirected attention from the non-British origins of many of those 2 million people, recovering ‘foreign’ prairies for ‘98% British’ Canada.

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These advertisements reconfigured the Dominions as modern, British markets, and agencies themselves played a part in this transformation. For its first tour, in 1924, Ilotts sent a Mr  Clinkard to London, touting his impeccable metropolitan credentials. Formerly the advertising manager for Humber cars – among other British-based positions – he was, apparently, ‘almost as well known in British advertising circles as in New Zealand’.75 The Ilotts’ team also included ‘English artists and copy writers (men whose names you will remember)’.76 While this was of course designed to suggest that British manufacturers would be no worse off dealing with a local agent, it also portrayed the Dominion advertisers and the markets they represented as thoroughly up to date. ‘Were Ilotts moved to London it would rank high among the bigger, sounder, more versatile agencies,’ creating ‘advertising equal to any that you can receive in London.’77 The agency also looked the part: following its metropolitan competitors, who generated ‘symbolic capital’ by featuring their buildings in advertising material, the agency included pictures of Ilott House in its promotions.78 Agencies such as Haines and Pattersons also advertised for staff in British trade publications, which highlighted not only their British nature but also the continued importance of British-based (as opposed to American) advertising skills.79 Interestingly, despite their proximity to the United States, Canadian agencies also seemed to favour British staff: a 1931 census revealed that, while 7 per cent of workers in Toronto’s advertising industry were US-born, 24 per cent were British.80 Others, such as Goldbergs, appeared up to date by offering cutting-edge services such as market research: all were proof of its metropolitan-like modernity. Of course, though agencies pushed the Dominions as British, both they and the manufacturers knew that the reality was not quite so simple. ‘Foreign’ goods, especially from America, sold well in the Dominions. In Australia, American exports had grown from an estimated $36  million in 1910 to $200  million by 1927.81 Numerous articles in the advertising trade press chided British firms for not being as savvy as the Americans. A ‘Sydney correspondent’ claimed that too many ‘hopeless ideas are entertained by many British manufacturers who wish to exploit the market’. Americans, by contrast, were ‘wide awake’: ‘By every boat executives from the big corporations land to study conditions to see what is wanted, and to sense the feeling of the people.’82 Goldberg agreed: ‘The United Kingdom is

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Australia’s best market. More than 40% of their exports come to England but since 1923 the percentage of imports from the United Kingdom has dropped by 7% per annum and I believe that the fact that America has benefited by the same proportion proves the latter country is using sales promotion and publicity methods more suitable to Australia because the Americans have been studying the conditions closely.’83 The very familiarity that agencies cultivated also had its problems, as it led British manufacturers to think they could sell their products to places such as New Zealand ‘more or less as an afterthought’.84 (Such comments are reminiscent of long-standing debates about British manufacturers relying on the ‘featherbeds’ of empire markets in the late nineteenth century; these claims might find greater purchase in the interwar period.)85 While creeping Americanisation seemed to threaten British businesses, it provided a useful sales angle for Dominion agencies.86 Combining loyalty with opportunism, ‘Australian admen eagerly alerted British advertisers and manufacturers to the Americans’ arrival’, then offered their services.87 Who better to help overcome savvy American competitors than a Dominion agency ‘thoroughly acquainted with the field’?88 Whether to outsmart the Americans or simply to avert market failure, Goldberg claimed that the ‘fertile markets of the southern sea … needed an angle only an Australian or New Zealander can bring to bear on the subject’.89 Meanwhile, McKim adopted a more conciliatory tone, reassuring manufacturers that a perceived lack of British advertising in the Canadian market was ‘due to an imaginary “American” bogey’. In fact – it insisted – Canada had the ‘warmest of welcomes for British products’, particularly for those McKim had ‘assisted in establishing in Canadian esteem’.90 But it also advised that ‘the nature of the Canadian market demands an adaptation of the “Old Country” appeals and practices in advertising’.91 British products could not be simply dumped on the market, and neither could British advertising. As Gordon & Gotch proclaimed, ‘No door will open to the wrong key. No market will respond to the wrong approach.’92 Having positioned themselves, and their markets, as thoroughly British, agencies now made a play for themselves as local guides. Fluent in the Dominion ‘vernacular’ and the ‘peculiarities and preferences’ of their local markets, they offered a translation service, including the ‘downright, severely practical suggestions of experts who know the markets intimately, from personal experience’.93

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This change in tack suggests that Dominion campaigns for British products would need to be modified, with implications for the nature of the identity constructed through the campaigns. In pursuit of Dominion markets, a Dominion identity might have trumped imported Britishness: the romance of a Birmingham lawnmower or Worcestershire sauce might have been usurped by an earthy but authentic Dominion ‘vernacular’ version. In that case, consumption would play a role in eroding empire rather than supporting it, and the Britishness of this style of empire marketing might have faded as quickly as its official counterpart. Yet for all these agencies’ claims of ‘peculiarities and preferences’, an analysis of one company’s campaigns for British clients reveals a very different picture. Neither emphatically imperial nor narrowly national, Ilotts ran campaigns for British products in New Zealand that were, to all intents and purposes, identical to those run in Britain. Having constructed the Dominion as essentially British, Ilotts then advertised accordingly.

s e l l i n g to m o d e r n b r i t ish markets : i l ot t s ’ i n t e rwa r c a mpaigns Ilotts’ London office brought a wide variety of British goods to New Zealand consumers, from now-forgotten brands such as O’Cedar’s ‘Slip-on-mop’, Icilma beauty products, and Autostrop razors to hardy survivors of today’s supermarket shelves such as Lea  &  Perrins. But while Ilotts claimed an aversion to serving up advertisements ‘praised in the Aldwych and Publicity Clubs’ then ‘served up rechauffé six weeks later in Wellington’, its clients happily sent warmed-over campaigns down under.94 Comparing local iterations of campaigns with those that ran in Britain is revealing. Icilma ran identical advertisements for vanishing cream in the New Zealand and British press, assuring customers in both locales that their skin would ‘pass the critical test’ of the ‘eyes of true love’, no matter where that true love happened to be located.95 Butywave’s unique ‘Wavesetter’ offered to tame ‘obstinate’ locks into ‘a head of lovely wavy hair’ for readers of the New Zealand Herald as well as for devotees of Britain’s Sunday Mirror.96 Nor did O’Cedar mops choose to distinguish between metropolitan and Antipodean floors. The company wrote to Ilotts that it was ‘very glad to see’ the agency had ‘adhered almost completely to the English “copy” ’.97 Other clients also seem to have passed up the chance to

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tweak their ads to increase local appeal: Esson and Hogg endorsed Ilotts’ ability ‘to see advertisements appear in the right position’, rather than any of its creative work, while Tootal’s British advertising agents also thanked the ‘space-buying’ department, not the creative department. Some things did change, of course. Advertisements could require redesigning to accommodate different newspaper formats and differences in printing technologies. Photographs might be replaced with line art to improve reproduction, and advertisements might be resized from, say, a quarter of a page to a double column, to save money and perhaps to stretch a smaller, Dominion-sized, budget. Sometimes, advertisements incorporated minor copy or design amendments that reflected local market conditions: achieving Butywave’s ‘natural’ curls cost New Zealand women a couple more shillings than their metropolitan sisters.98 From time to time, there could even be occasion for creative variations for local audiences. Ilotts added British starlet Sari Maritza to New Zealand’s Butywave campaign, for example – possibly because of its contact with another British client who also co-opted her glamour to promote its products. But this was simply a minor local variation on an international theme. Despite agency arguments about local knowledge, these advertisers generally treated the Dominion market like the metropolitan one. There are a number of possible explanations as to why British advertisers took such an approach. The simplest is that they were, as that contemporary commentator suggested, ‘hopeless’ – a judgement in keeping with some economic analyses of British industry generally as being out of touch and uncompetitive in a globalising world. Yet recent work argues that the idea of British advertising as being behind the times is misplaced, with firms such as Crawfords offering cutting-edge creativity and providing new services such as market research.99 Further, some of the Dominion lookalike campaigns ran for years. Even the most inept businesses are quick to cut advertising expenditure if they cannot see results, so it seems unlikely that ‘hopeless’ campaigns would have continued running. Instead, there is some evidence to suggest these campaigns actually worked. On the back of its 1929 mop campaign, which was based on ‘English “copy” ’, O’Cedar’s reported ‘indications of increased business in New Zealand’, which it attributed ‘in a large measure to the advertising which is being done’; in 1930 it noted a

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‘satisfactory increase since you have been handling our business’, and by 1931 it felt ‘the advts [sic] are very good and should do much towards restoring our business to something approaching its former prosperity’.100 Results for firms such as Butywave and Icilma are not recorded, but their lookalike campaigns continued through the early 1930s, suggesting that they too saw ‘satisfactory’ increases. And there were undoubtedly other financial benefits to these campaigns, though ones unlikely to please local agencies: running the same advertisements in more markets reduced creative expenses, making the original campaigns more cost-effective. Here, culture may have trumped politics: for firms battered by the Depression, this arguably offered a more tangible economic benefit than the possibility of a greater market share gained via tariff changes. Some of the campaigns’ durability may also be attributable to the diffusion of broadly transferable ‘modern’ advertising techniques. Though the account in this chapter does not subscribe to the idea of advertising as a steadily evolving, increasingly persuasive and pervasive force, the interwar period saw some important changes in the nature of advertising practice.101 As the mass market expanded, advertisers responded by developing new ways of understanding and reaching consumers that were shared across markets.102 Though these processes have often been glossed over by both contemporaries and historians as ‘Americanisation’, the interwar period saw the widespread adoption of what Stefan Schwarzkopf suggests were actually globalised approaches to advertising.103 J. Walter Thompson (JWT) epitomised both the expansion and the developing standardisation of the industry, entering new markets with an evangelical belief in its own ‘methodical, almost quasi-scientific’ approach.104 Many practitioners believed, along with JWT, that good advertising could work anywhere, meaning that new formats, such as testimonials, could be reproduced endlessly, forming an advertising Esperanto of consumer attraction.105 Movie stars, for example, could be mobilised to sell soap in Australia just as much as in America. What appear to be warmed-up leftovers of metropolitan campaigns in danger of talking past local customers are instead instances of increasing consumer convergence. In many ways, Dominion consumers were like metropolitan ones, and advertising treated them accordingly. However, there was some debate over which type of metropolitan consumer they most resembled. There is evidence to suggest that, when it came to overseas influences, Britishness was more

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acceptable than Americanness. JWT’s London office quickly discovered that campaigns for American cars in Britain needed to ‘strike a “British” chord’, and it suggested that General Motors use retired brigadiers-general and lords to promote Buick models renamed ‘Empire’ or ‘Regent’.106 JWT’s Australian branch likewise played down its American origins, instead ‘drawing attention to the percentage of staff born in the British empire’.107 Local agencies also did not necessarily ‘Americanise’ themselves or their campaigns: Canadian agencies may have picked up US methods, but they did not consider it acculturation. Rather, they adopted ‘modern business practice’.108 Australian firms similarly ‘cribbed a few ideas’ from the Americans, but they too considered ‘such “cribbing” as examples of modernising’.109 Too much overt Americanness could drive customers away. JWT’s Australian art department retouched overseas designs to remove obvious American elements such as bow ties and knickerbockers. Less attention has been paid to how British advertising was handled in Dominion markets. However, analysis of one Ilotts campaign, considered below, reveals few attempts to expunge British traces. Equally, though, the strident Britishness typical in the advertising of export commodities was absent.110 Ilotts may have added ‘British made’ to its Butywave advertisements, but only in the fine print. Still, the residual impact of the Dominion preference for Britishness may explain why Illots’ serviced American brands such as Gillette via their London office right up until it closed in 1967. The consequences of globalised advertising mean that the miscellany of products on Ilotts’ list seems to be couched in the language and forms of a British-tinged generic consumerism. Campaigns for beauty products featured movie stars, those for condiments featured chefs, and those for household products promised sparkling cleanliness without the elbow grease – and all were presented in increasingly systematised ways. It is easy, then, to see New Zealand, like the other Dominions, as simply caught in the wash of a rising global tide of consumerism. Yet to do so is to overlook the particular relationship between white settler colonies and modernity. Because these colonies had always understood themselves to be ‘neo-Britains’, acquiring the trappings of modernity was more than a predictable outcome of their incorporation into imperial and global networks: it was a marker of their colonising success. So while these advertisements appear to exist in a kind of free-floating

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modernity – detached from everything but imagined consumer desires for hygienic homes, happy families, and clear complexions – they remain firmly anchored by, and to, their colonial context. Metropolitan campaigns both confirmed and constructed the Dominions as modern, white members of empire.111 Campaigns for Ovaltine exemplify the process. Though it now has a fusty reputation, at that time Ovaltine was a ‘modern’ product: an industrial powdered food supplement created from barley and eggs that could be mixed with milk and then drunk. One important consequence of advertising such a product in New Zealand is that it helped confirm the Dominion’s metropolitan-like status. So too did Ilotts’ approach, which was to simply tweak British campaigns. This meant New Zealand consumers were seamlessly enrolled in discourses originally envisaged as metropolitan. The product naturally played a part in shaping these discourses. Principally promoted as a modern health tonic, Ovaltine’s advertising – like the product itself – capitalised on contemporary concerns around diet and nutrition. Just as Dominion commodity advertising promoted butter or apples by incorporating the latest scientific advances in nutrition, such as vitamins, so Ovaltine’s copy harnessed the rhetoric of modern science to explain to Dominion consumers ‘why OVALTINE makes Milk a more perfect food’ or a ‘complete and perfect tonic food beverage’ for everyone.112 Full of nutritional information, these advertisements often addressed mothers, an approach that again formed part of a wider trend that blended science with ideas of citizenship to create a technocratic domesticity, or ‘scientific motherhood’.113 While much of the advertising simply promoted Ovaltine’s general health-giving properties, promising rosy-cheeked children and happy husbands, some specifically focused on its benefits for nursing mothers. From the start of the twentieth century, governments and volunteer organisations throughout the world began crusades to improve maternal and infant health, convinced that population ‘improvement’ and growth held the key to national prosperity. Ovaltine’s advertisements capitalised on these ideas, interpolating New Zealand within wider ‘modern’ trends. Indeed, New Zealand was home to one of the most zealous pronatal groups, the Plunket Society, and its work may have made New Zealand’s mothers a particularly receptive audience to Ovaltine’s claims. By the 1920s and 1930s, many of the Dominion’s women had ‘embraced the new child rearing literature’, which included information on proper feeding.114

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But advertisements claiming that ‘baby is always healthy and happy’ when mothers drink Ovaltine take on a particular resonance in the settler-colonial context. Within the empire, ‘promoting national increase among native-born British stock was elevated to a matter of “Imperial importance” ’, particularly as a bulwark against the threat of non-white immigration.115 Healthy ‘British’ babies were essential to a healthy British settler colony: a shrill 1917 Plunket Society promotional poster, asking ‘Do you want your nation to survive?’, argued that ‘the race marches forward on the feet of little children’.116 Though it had been designed for a different audience, in the New Zealand setting Ovaltine’s image of bonny babies implicitly connected consumption with the success of the settler project. If advertising copy used nutritional science to make Ovaltine a modern product, images accentuated the idea that drinking Ovaltine was a modern pastime. Sleek, Ovaltine-powered women played tennis and golf, while other fashionable women drank it cold at the beach.117 One series featured happy converts using the telephone (that signifier of modernity) to spread the news of Ovaltine’s benefits. Women rang their friends to chat about a ‘marvellous new discovery’, with one woman phoning her tennis partner to enthuse about the benefits Ovaltine would bring to their game: ‘I believe all tennis stars take it’ (figure 6.4).118 Advertising even evoked modernity’s dark side, promising to help those debilitated by sleeplessness, ‘over-busy thoughts’, ‘STRAINED NERVES’, exhaustion, and other plagues of modern life.119 Though imagery suggested that mainly women suffered from these ailments, Ovaltine also offered benefits to the ‘nervy’ child and to harried businessmen whose anxious states at work were the product of ‘food debility’.120 Ovaltine’s advertising thus did more than establish its product as modern – running the same advertisements in Dominion papers meant constructing New Zealanders as busy, modern consumers just like their counterparts at ‘Home’. They were also presumed to be British. Occasionally, Britishness was overt: news of a price reduction was figuratively heralded by a medieval page astride a white charger.121 But otherwise, because little changed in the advertisements, Britishness was assumed. Unlike short and strident ‘buy British’ campaigns that suggested a separation between the Dominions and the imperial centre, Ovaltine’s version of Britishness appeared quietly, in  rural and urban settings, in references to playing ‘games’ rather than sports, in clothing, and in domestic

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Figure 6.4 Making a modern Dominion: Ovaltine’s up-to-date advertising.

settings ‘featuring a British rather than New Zealand home’.122 Persistent and pervasive, this was a locally domesticated Britishness, its unremarkable presence confirming and creating New Zealand’s metropolitan-like status.

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British advertising in local newspapers made a further contribution to the creation of the modern Dominion. It confirmed New Zealand’s status as white. The happy families, sleepless housewives, and stressed businessmen in Ovaltine advertisements were all white. Indeed, with the exception of racist caricatures such as Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima, whiteness dominated advertising imagery generally in this era.123 One of New Zealand’s local products – ironically enough, a brand of soap that promised immaculately white results – exemplifies whiteness at work. The Union Soap and Oil Company had appropriated the Māori term ‘taniwha’ (water spirit or monster) as the brand name for its laundry soap at the end of the nineteenth century. But just as it claimed to whiten clothes, so the brand itself was whitened: by 1931 the Indigenous taniwha had been transformed, appearing as a mermaid next to illustrations of washing lines billowing with freshly laundered sheets.124 Such changes were deliberate. Advertisers and their agents were not blind to the presence of Māori: reflecting racism typical of the era, Frank Goldberg claimed British advertising agents were ‘faintly surprised that as a traveller from New Zealand I wasn’t black’.125 But, as Robert Crawford has noted for Australia, ‘Aboriginal consumers were ignored.’126 Indigenous people – particularly women, who were usually the main targets of advertising messages – were ‘perceived as beyond the reach of commodity markets that mobilised a racially coded aesthetics’.127 That racial code used consumption to differentiate modern white settlers from ‘primitive’ First Peoples. Liz Conor suggests that advertisers and settlers alike imagined Indigenous peoples to have few consumer desires, a marker of those peoples’ backwardness. The mistress of an Aboriginal maid claimed that ‘ “Topsy” only needed “warm garments, plain food and kind words, the wage being very small” ’.128 Those garments, like other consumer items, themselves became markers of racial difference. Some were suitable for Europeans while others were not. White visitors to the Canadian north ‘policed the boundaries of what they referred to as “Eskimo clothing” and “white man’s clothing” ’.129 Even when Western-style clothing might be encouraged, as a sign of civilisation, mastery remained a white prerogative. Indigenous people might use items incorrectly or, in the case of beauty products, simply fail to meet the ordained – and advertised – standard. Writing about a young Inuit woman, nurse Donalda Copeland described her cheeks as ‘smeared in face powder’, while her lipstick

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‘contrasted oddly with her sallow skin’.130 Copeland’s judgement typifies the exclusionary nature of commodity culture in settler societies. Indigenous people neither ‘occupied the space of the commodity spectacle nor were able to performatively enact a consumerist subjectivity’.131 Advertising had no room for ‘natives’. What really disappeared with products such as Icilma’s vanishing cream were First Peoples. Here, commercial art reflected life. During the interwar era, getting and spending was, in both imagination and reality, primarily the preserve of settlers. Indigenous participation in the consumer economy was marginal in all three Dominions. For Australian advertisers, this circumstance, combined with their view that ‘the Australian blackfellow is inferior by nature’, meant that ‘this class can at once be eliminated as not responsive to any form of advertising’.132 That had not always been the case. For example, Māori had actively participated in the emerging New Zealand economy, producing and consuming new products and services in the first decades of settlement. This did not mean the assumption of imported attitudes and culture: rather, as Nicholas Thomas warns, these early entanglements with imported modes of consumption reflected ‘local cultural and political agendas’, emerging from ‘existing political and economic forms’.133 However, by the interwar era, colonisation had, among its many malign impacts, relegated First Peoples in all three Dominions to the bottom of the socio-economic heap. This did not totally preclude Indigenous engagement with the world of goods. Though studies of Indigenous involvement with new forms of consumption are sparse, it is clear that, like the young Inuit woman choosing lipstick, Indigenous people remained active consumers within their means and for their own ends.134 But poverty made a very effective barrier to full participation in the expanding realm of consumption. Government policies also played a role, especially in Australia and Canada, where systems such as reservations also worked to inhibit easy contact with the consumer economy. Commodity culture’s colonising effects, then, were not simply representational. The white world imagined in advertising had a real-world correlate, and commodity campaigns reinforced it. Ilotts’ Ovaltine campaigns played a part in forming that imagined white world. Full of happy white families living ‘modern’ lives, they both constructed and reflected the idea of settler colonies as imperial success stories. Advertising effaced their past as wild frontiers

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and excluded Indigenous populations, transforming those colonies into modern Dominions full of consumers as eager to buy Butywave or Ovaltine as their metropolitan counterparts. It was a remarkable change that was accomplished, ironically, by being unremarkable: campaigns made for British consumers were, largely for pragmatic reasons, simply reproduced in local newspapers. But Dominion inclusion in what appear to be generic, globalised advertising campaigns was underwritten by the creation of new imperial networks. As David Ciarlo argues, ‘advertising’s empire was built in part on the advertising of empire’.135 Beginning in 1916, Dominion agencies made it their business to work with manufacturers to bring British products to Dominion markets. Whether through branch offices, agency alliances, or regular touring, Dominion agencies joined their better-known American counterparts in pioneering international marketing. To do so, they constituted themselves, and their Dominions, as thoroughly British. Like their commodity marketing brethren, the Dominion agencies during the interwar period worked in ways that supported and sustained the ties of empire along with the exclusion implied by those ties. They forged another link in the empire chain.

Conclusion: The End of Selling Britishness?

By the late 1930s, Dominion-led empire marketing was flourishing. Advertising agencies opened their doors in London to divert more British business to the Dominions. Their export-oriented counterparts also increased their activities. Convinced of the value of their promotional campaigns, and spurred on by competitors, all three Dominions upped their expenditure. In 1938 the New Zealand Meat Producers Board – concerned over Argentinian attacks on ‘the supremacy of New Zealand Lamb’ and over plans for British farmers to run their own ‘Home’ meat campaigns – agreed to ‘extending its advertising activities’.1 The Australian Dairy Produce Board worried about competition a little closer to home: without naming New Zealand, the board noted that ‘another British Dominion’ had spent £80,000 on butter advertising; the board then raised its own spending by 25 per cent.2 It had no doubts about increasing its budget: along with quality improvements, the board believed it was ATP’s advertising that ‘enable[d] Australia to hold its prominent position’ in the London market.3 Even the laggard Australian Meat Board managed to produce 60,000 pamphlets for the 1938 Glasgow Exhibition.4 Meanwhile, Canada, once behind in the empire marketing stakes, outpaced the other Dominions to become the biggest spender, with $350,000 allocated for the ‘Canada Calling’ campaign in 1939 – almost doubling 1938’s expenditure.5 The outbreak of war brought all this activity to a halt. Funds approved by Canada in February 1939 were being scaled back by September, and the ‘Canada Calling’ scheme would soon be abandoned.6 Australia’s and New Zealand’s organisations likewise curtailed their work. Wartime conditions made publicity redundant. British government control of food supplies, especially rationing,

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meant consumers were no longer empowered to choose New Zealand lamb or Canadian apples. Australian and New Zealand butter, for example, was divided by grade and distributed unbranded.7 However, the flow of Dominion commodities continued and even increased as Britain commandeered food supplies from all three Dominions. Rationing within the Dominions helped: though not short of food themselves, they considered reducing domestic consumption as another way to boost supplies to Britain and even continued rationing after the war in an effort to help Britain rebuild.8 Despite these curbs on their own consumption, Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders still found ways to show their support through food. New Zealanders sent 800,000 food parcels to ‘our Homeland in need’, and Canadian women instigated a ‘Jam for Britain’ campaign, shipping off approximately 2.5 million pounds of jam, honey, and maple syrup, much of it destined for ‘homeless victims of the Blitz’.9 The state of Victoria sent food parcels with Australia’s touring Ashes cricket team in 1948.10 Dominion commodities may no longer have been officially branded as British, but the war ensured they remained wrapped in ideas of kith and kin. As war and its aftermath receded, the Dominion marketing organisations began to prepare for a return to their commodity campaigning. They had good reason to: ‘For a brief period, Dominion dominance of the British food market continued, and even increased in percentage terms in a diminishing market. In 1948, New Zealand alone supplied over a third of Britain’s meat imports and over half its dairy imports, with Australia and Canada supplying about half of the rest, as well as 98 per cent of Britain’s wheat imports.’11 Though government controls on consumption continued, some Dominion operations had begun what they called background marketing, running low-key campaigns to raise awareness of their products before the resumption of normal consumer life. New Zealand, for example, erected billboards in London proclaiming the Dominion’s food for Britain as ‘your ration today, your choice in the future’.12 It seems that marketers assumed a continuation of pre-war activity, which fits with other interpretations of empire in the immediate post-war period: as John Darwin notes, ‘although Britain’s relative decline as a great power – by both strategic and economic criteria – brought an irreversible shift in the Dominion relationship, this took some time to become obvious’.13 The impacts of that irreversible

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shift in the Anglo-Dominion relationship varied according to time and place, but even James Belich, the most persuasive historian of that relationship, suggests that the old ‘Greater Britain’ had ceased to exist by the 1970s.14 It has been argued that, by the late twentieth century, a monolithic Britannic loyalism would be ‘something best avoided by marketers and advertisers’.15 This study does not look beyond the outbreak of war, and little is known about the resumption of marketing campaigns in the post-war period. But it has also avoided analysing Dominion Britishness through a ‘rise and fall’ lens. Indeed, its analysis of Dominion marketing during the interwar period cautions against such an assumption. For this period, at least, trade policies that may seem aimed at independence did not necessarily lead to a diminution in Britishness. Rather, this book has focused on the ways in which trade helped constitute a British identity. It began by redefining empire marketing, connecting it with other forms of the imperial commodity spectacle, and revealing the extent to which this powerful and enduring phenomenon was Dominion-led. Next, by considering the work of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand together, it became clear not only that empire marketing was Dominion-led but that their nominally ‘national’ campaigns in fact worked together to construct a sense of shared Britishness – called here ‘commodity Britishness’. Empire marketing Dominion-style was a collaborative creative enterprise, and it forged a distinct identity. This book has traced the forms of that identity through newspaper campaigns, empire shopping groups, short films, and giant billboards, trawling through a miscellany of commodity marketing and advertising ephemera, then uncovering the considerable cultural power it wielded. Crucially, it argues that these short-lived campaigns had long-lasting cultural effects. Paying attention to commodity marketing’s cultural effects has meant that this book has been less interested in using British identity as a gauge of imperialism, colonialism, or even decolonisation. While recognising the important tensions between sentiment and self-interest that have preoccupied political and economic discussions, it moves beyond these binaries to ask different questions. It builds upon and refines existing work on the cultural economy of empire, considering the ways in which commodity marketing produced a British identity, rather than simply benefiting from one. Sometimes collaborating, often competing, Dominion marketing

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campaigns combined to create and sustain a shared identity as modern, white, and masculine British countries. This shared identity belonged to a particular set of circumstances – a fact that reinforces the contingent nature of this form of imperial identity (and, by implication, other forms too). Britishness may have been widely shared, but it was never monolithic: rather, it was a mutable, fluid identity, capable of being repurposed and repackaged in a multitude of ways and in a range of places. Though largely constructed in the metropolis, commodity Britishness was a Dominion invention, not a metropolitan imposition. By producing Britishness, not simply relying on it, Dominion marketing legitimated the idea of white settler colonies and the empire they were part of. And this is perhaps the most critical argument. These long-vanished campaigns are an example of settler colonies’ subtle complicity in the extension of imperial power. Selling Britishness has drawn attention to the ways in which such power was both camouflaged and naturalised. While the construction of blackness in imperial advertising has long been historically visible, whiteness has hidden in plain sight, passing unnoticed in the form of a Dominion farmer or metropolitan housewife. These constructions of the nature of ‘Dominion-ness’ remained powerful, even when campaigns were not explicitly connected with terms such as ‘empire’ or ‘British’. Consequently, though obvious expressions of Britannic loyalism may have disappeared from later advertising, it is not at all clear that the underlying race- and gender-based elements did too. They may simply have migrated, as post-war campaigns exchanged empire for an updated settler-colonial version of nationalism. This possibility points to a further outcome of studying forgotten advertisements for apples or butter. It is now commonplace to suggest that the imperial careers of the white settler colonies lasted longer than their national histories once supposed. However, postponing the date of decolonisation is not, on its own, quite enough. There remains the risk that to do so simply pushes the pause button on the narrative of nationalism, which, having accustomed itself to a longer period of imperial entanglement, then recommences in the late twentieth century, offering an accelerated tale of increasing political, social, cultural, and economic liberalism. Attending carefully to the ways in which settler colonies harnessed other modes of modernity along with commodity culture in the formation of their identities may help to reveal continuing colonial tendencies in the

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present. Just as Britishness is not solely a gauge of imperialism’s power, so adoption of the paraphernalia of modernity – here, film, advertising, and marketing – should be read not just as an example of national maturity but also as a potential new pathway for older colonial habits to be expressed. This idea takes us back to where the book began. When Wembley’s gates closed, the cultural power of the imperial commodity spectacle continued: its spirit lived on in a new form, re-emerging in the Dominions’ new empire marketing campaigns. After more than a decade, these campaigns, with their cinema shows, boxing kangaroos, cookbooks, butter sculptures, lady demonstrators, press campaigns, and billboards, also came to an end. Selling Britishness has resurrected them. But it remains to be seen if, like Wembley, they have bequeathed their legacy to some other forgotten part of the settler-colonial past.

Notes

i n t ro d u c t i o n Coventry Herald, 5 November 1925, 4. Western Morning News, 2 November 1925, 5. Leeds Mercury, 2 November 1925, 1. The Times, 31 October 1925, 13. Uxbridge and West Drayton Gazette, 22 January 1926, 1. Daily Herald, 31 May 1926, 2. Horowhenua Chronicle, 10 December 1926, 5. The Times, 3 November 1925, 18. Hughes, ‘Kenya, India and the British Empire Exhibition of 1924’, 66. For a recent critique of the declinist model, see Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, esp. 594–5. 11 Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England. 12 Webber, The Anchor Story, 4; Report for April 1934, p. 6, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity Reports, A2910 430/1/99 Part 5, National Archives of Australia (NAA); ‘Canada Calling’, Advertiser’s Weekly, 10 December 1930, 399, OM(S) 05, History of Advertising Trust (HAT); ‘Woodfull Appeals for Empire Buying’, British Movietone, 21 May 1934, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZLEJolscF, accessed 6 May 2020. 13 Report for December 1931, p. 11, Australian Trade Publicity – Rulings (Reports), A2910 430/1/98 Part 4, NAA. For a different origin story, see O’Connor, ‘The King’s Christmas Pudding’, 127–55. 14 Hill to Director of Marketing Dairy Produce Export Division Wellington, 29 August 1938, Films – Dairy Industry (1937–9), AECB 8615 TO1/196 49/99, Archives New Zealand (ANZ); Report for May 1935, p. 19, Australian Trade Publicity – Weekly Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 10, NAA; Programme of the Scouts Council in Aid of Roland House Settlement, 8 November 1930, 252, OM(S) 8a, HAT. 15 Advertiser’s Weekly, 26 July 1929, 130. 16 There is a limited secondary literature on consumer marketing undertaken by these Dominions. For the Irish Free State’s 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

168

17

18 19

20 21 22

23 24 25

26

27 28

Notes to pages 6–9 involvement with the EMB and developing tensions, see Cronin, ‘Selling Irish Bacon’, 132–43. For more on the Irish Free State, see Ryan, ‘The Butter Industry in Ireland, 1922–1939’, 32–46; Moulton, ‘Not to Nationalise, but to Rationalise?’, 85–101. For South Africa, see Mather and Rowcroft, ‘Citrus, Apartheid, and the Struggle to (Re)present Outspan Oranges’, 156–72. Mather and Rowcroft, ‘Citrus, Apartheid, and the Struggle’, 156–72. For wine, see Regan-Lefebvre, ‘From Colonial Wine to New World: British Wine Drinking, c.1900–1990’, 67–83. Mather and Rowcroft, ‘Citrus, Apartheid, and the Struggle’, 158–9. Brewer and Trentmann, ‘Introduction’, 1. Other key works include Appadurai, The Social Lives of Things ; de Grazia and Furlough, The Sex of Things; Miller, ed., Acknowledging Consumption; Trentmann, Empire of Things; Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed; Strasser, McGovern, and Judt, ed., Getting and Spending. Strasser, McGovern, and Judt, ed., Getting and Spending, 409. For an overview of some of this work, see Burke, ‘Unexpected Subversions’, 469–90. Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists. For an example, see Hall and Rose, ed., At Home with the Empire. For links between free trade and British identity in the Edwardian era, see Trentmann, Free Trade Nation. Darwin, The Empire Project, 3. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, xvi. For the nineteenth century, see Allwood, The Great Exhibitions; Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851 ; Auerbach and Hoffenberg, ed., Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851 ; Crinson, ‘Imperial Storylands’, 99–123; David, The Great Exhibition; Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas; Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display; Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England; Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition. For the twentieth century, see Stephen, The Empire of Progress. For national readings, see Clendinning, ‘Exhibiting a Nation’, 79–107; Darian-Smith, Gillespie, Jordan, and Willis, ed., Seize the Day; Gentry, History, Heritage, and Colonialism, 159–88; Smith, ‘The History of New Zealand Exhibitions’; Thomson, ed., Farewell Colonialism; Renwick, Creating a National Spirit. For an excellent overview, see Beugelsdijk and Maseland, Culture in Economics ; also Amin and Thrift, ed., The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader. Amin and Thrift, ‘Introduction’, xii. Ward, ‘Sentiment and Self-Interest’, 92.

Notes to pages 9–13

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29 Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, 117. 30 Ibid., 6. 31 Ferguson and Shularick argue for an ‘empire effect’ in nineteenthcentury finance in ‘The Empire Effect’, 283–312. For a Canadian example, see Smith, ‘Patriotism, Self-Interest and the “Empire Effect” ’, 59–80; for a summary, see Attard and Dilley, ‘Finance, Empire, and the British World’, 1–10. 32 Dilley, Finance, Politics, and Imperialism, 5; Howe, ‘British Worlds, Settler Worlds, World Systems, and Killing Fields’, 699–701. 33 Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, 6; Magee, ‘The Importance of Being British?’, 344. 34 Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, 38. 35 McFall, Advertising, 14. 36 McLintock, Imperial Leather, 209, 220. 37 Robertson, ‘Bittersweet Temptations’, 166. 38 McLintock, Imperial Leather, 209. 39 Nevett, Advertising in Britain, 145. 40 Ibid., 145; Leiss, Kline, Jhally, Botterill, and Asquith, Social Communication in Advertising, 116. For American influence, see de Grazia, Irresistible Empire. 41 Leiss, Kline, Jhally, Botterill, and Asquith, Social Communication in Advertising, 115. 42 Nevett, Advertising in Britain, 145; see also Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 11–13. 43 For twentieth-century commodity racism, see Ciarlo, Advertising Empire; Hund, Pickering, and Ramamurthy, ed., Colonial Advertising and Commodity Racism; Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders. 44 Hund, ‘Advertising White Supremacy’, 27–36. 45 Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 14. 46 Best explored in Sinha, Colonial Masculinity. 47 For conflation, see Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity, 235–6. For an example (from a large literature) on contemporary citizenship, see Sales, ‘What Is “Britishness” and Is It Important?’, 123–40. 48 Darian-Smith, Grimshaw, and Macintyre, ‘Introduction’, 1. 49 For sustained explorations of these ideas, see Bridge and Fedorowich, ed., The British World; Darian-Smith, Grimshaw, and Macintyre, ed., Britishness Abroad. For Australia, see Schreuder and Ward, ed., Australia’s Empire; Ward, Australia and the British Embrace. For Canada, see Buckner, ed., Canada and the British Empire; Buckner and Francis, ed., Canada and the British World; Buckner, ed., Canada and the End of Empire.

170

Notes to pages 13–15

50 Darian-Smith, Grimshaw, and Macintyre, ‘Introduction’, 1. 51 For a detailed exploration in the Australian context, see CrozierDe Rosa and Lowe, ‘Introduction: Nationalism and Transnationalism in Australian History Writing’, 7–84. 52 This is a vast field. For a critical overview, see McFall, Advertising. Key historical studies include Marchand, Advertising the American Dream; Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance ; Sivulka, Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes. For advertising practice, see Leiss, Kline, Jhally, Botterill, and Asquith, Social Communication in Advertising ; Lury, Consumer Culture ; Williamson, Decoding Advertisements. For race and gender, see Andrews and Talbot, ed., All the World and Her Husband; Belisle, ‘Eating Clean’, 41–59; Belisle, ‘Anti-Black Racism in Food Advertising’, 14–27; Behnken and Smithers, Racism in American Popular Media; Cortese, Provocateur ; Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor ; Kern-Foxworth, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus; Scanlon, The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader ; Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings; Thompson, ‘ ‘‘I’se in Town, Honey” ’, 205–37. 53 For examples, see Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women; Hilton, Smoking in British Popular Culture, 1800–2000; Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders. 54 For an excellent example of this process in Canadian domestic advertising, see Hastings, ‘ ‘‘I Have Tried Your Tomato Chutnee [sic] and Found It Very Good” ’. 55 Drummond, British Economic Policy and the Empire, 1919–1939, 67; Higgins and Varian, ‘Britain’s Empire Marketing Board and the Failure of Soft Trade Policy, 1926–33’, 1–26. 56 Thackeray, ‘Buying for Britain, China, or India?’, 386–409. 57 Constantine, ‘Bringing the Empire Alive’, 200; Constantine, Buy and Build; Cronin, ‘Selling Irish Bacon’, 132–43; MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire ; Meredith, ‘Imperial Images’, 30–6; O’Connor, ‘The King’s Christmas Pudding’, 127–55. 58 For an excellent recent summary, see Rooth, ‘Retreat from Globalization’, 106–7. For an alternative view, see Boyce, The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalisation. 59 Rooth, ‘Retreat from Globalization’, 109. For an early analysis that stresses continuity, see Capie, Depression and Protectionism, 20. 60 Higgins and Varian, ‘Britain’s Empire Marketing Board and the Failure of Soft Trade Policy, 1926–33’, 1–26. 61 Ibid. 62 Rooth, ‘Retreat from Globalization’, 109. 63 Jacks, ‘Defying Gravity’, 36.

Notes to pages 15–18

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64 Hancock, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, 203. For Ottawa’s effects on the Dominions, see Pomfret, ‘Trade Policy in Canada and Australia in the Twentieth Century’, 118–20. 65 There is an extensive literature debating the effects of Ottawa, with some consensus that the Dominions were advantaged more than Britain. For recent re-evaluations, see de Bromhead, Fernihough, Lampe, and O’Rourke, ‘When Britain Turned Inward’, 325–52; Jacks, ‘Defying Gravity’; McKenzie, ‘Trade, Dominance, Dependence, and the End of the Settlement Era in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, 1920–1973’, 465; Pomfret, ‘Trade Policy in Canada and Australia in the Twentieth Century’. Older work includes Capie, Depression and Protectionism; Drummond, British Economic Policy and the Empire ; Drummond, Imperial Economic Policy, 1917–1939; Hancock, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs ; Rooth, British Protectionism and the International Economy. 66 For a useful summary of the EMB’s efforts in the Dominions, see Thackeray, Forging a British World of Trade, 78–110. 67 For New Zealand, see Barnes, New Zealand’s London. For a useful older Canadian account, see Hill, Canada’s Salesmen to the World. 68 Schedvin, Emissaries of Trade, 71. 69 New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, Agents Abroad. 70 McKenzie, ‘Trade, Dominance, Dependence’, 465. 71 Thompson, ‘Canada and the Third British Empire, 1901–1939’, 98; Bothwell, Drummond, and English, Canada, 1900–1945, 299; Hillmer, O.D. Skelton, 182. 72 Tsokhas, Markets, Money, and Empire, 3; Tsokhas, Making a Nation State, 108. 73 Drummond, Imperial Economic Policy, quoted in Ross, ‘Australian Overseas Trade and National Development Policy, 1932–1939’, 184. For a recent assessment, see McKenzie, Redefining the Bonds of Commonwealth, 1939–1948, 23. 74 McKenzie, Redefining the Bonds of Commonwealth, 27. 75 Thompson, ‘Canada and the Third British Empire’, 90; Ward, ‘Sentiment and Self-Interest’, 91–108; Belich, Paradise Reforged, 58–75; Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 206–9, 415–18, 442–51. 76 Ballantyne, ‘Race and the Webs of Empire’, 29. 77 Trentmann, Free Trade Nation, 231–40. 78 Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire, 264. 79 Ibid., 250.

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Notes to pages 18–27

80 See, for example, Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line. 81 Darwin, Unfinished Empire, 179.

chapter one 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23

The Times, 6 October 1925, 11; The Times, 9 November 1925, 17. Evening Star, 23 November 1925, 5. See also ‘The Lord Mayor’s Show’, British Pathé, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf8DmwLYzmg, accessed 13 May 2020. The Telegraph (Brisbane, QLD), 20 May 1925, 11. Newcastle Sun, 10 November 1925, 1. Auckland Star, 19 November 1925, 7. The Sun (Sydney), 10 November 1925, 1. Auckland Star, 19 November 1925, 7. Auckland Star, 11 November 1925, 7. The Times, 9 November 1925, 17. For Australian wine in the nineteenth century, see Regan-Lefebvre, ‘John Bull’s Other Vineyard’, 259–83. For the EMB’s influence outside Britain, see Thackeray, Forging a British World of Trade, 78–110. Stephen, The Empire of Progress, 4; see also MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 107; Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, xv. The Argus (Melbourne, VIC), 16 May 1924, 12. The Herald (Melbourne, VIC), 7 September 1925, 7. The Age (Melbourne, VIC), 12 June 1925, 6. Hill, Canada’s Salesmen to the World, 369. Weekly Times (Melbourne, VIC), 15 August 1925, 6. For Canada, see MacLaren, Commissions High. For Australia, see Pryke, ‘Australia House’; Bridge, Bongiorno, and Lee, ed., The High Commissioners. For New Zealand, see Raewyn Dalziel, The Origins of New Zealand Diplomacy. Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 206. Hart, A Trading Nation, 415–17. Dyster and Meredith, Australia in the International Economy in the Twentieth Century. Figures compiled from tables on pages 52–3, 149, and 150. See also Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 364–8. Figures compiled from New Zealand Official Year Books, 1919–39. Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 416. For the connection between the United States and Canada, see Emery, Norrie, and Owram, A History of the Canadian Economy, 320–1.

Notes to pages 27–32

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24 627, OM(S) 17, Canada, HAT; Gippsland Times, 14 March 1927, 6; Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 162–3. 25 For the disconnection of wheat from its point of origin through milling, see Fouser, ‘The Global Staff of Life’, 94–5. Exactly these factors led to the formation of the International Wool Secretariat in 1937, but a wool mark was not launched until 1964. 26 Figures from Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia 1936, 29. 27 Critchell and Raymond, A History of the Frozen Meat Trade, 279–80, quoted in Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 123. 28 Hayward, ed., Golden Jubilee, 28–9. See also Barnes and Higgins, ‘Brand Image, Cultural Association and Marketing’, 78–82. 29 Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 171. 30 Ward, A Command of Cooperatives, 56. 31 Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 173. 32 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, First Annual Report and Statement of Accounts for the Year Ended 30th June 1923, 8. 33 Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 158. 34 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Eighth Annual Report 1930, 12. 35 For a full account, see Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 157–68. 36 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Fifteenth Annual Report 1937, 9. 37 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Tenth Annual Report 1932, 8. 38 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Eleventh Annual Report 1933, 7. 39 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Thirteenth Annual Report 1935, 7. 40 New Zealand Dairy Produce Control Board, First Annual Report and Statement of Accounts for the Period of 12 Months Ended 31st July 1925, 9. 41 New Zealand Dairy Produce Control Board, Third Annual Report 1927, 8. 42 Yorkshire Evening Post, 16 December 1930, 10; see also Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 172. 43 Dairy Produce Control Board (Australia), First Annual Report of the Dairy Produce Control Board, 1926, 6. 44 Ibid., 7. 45 Australian Trade Publicity in the United Kingdom: For Cabinet, p. 2, Trade Publicity UK, A461 H323/1/2 Part 1, NAA. 46 Australian Trade Publicity in Great Britain, 13 March 1930, p. 2, Trade Publicity UK, A461 H323/1/2 Part 2, NAA. 47 Australian Trade Publicity in the United Kingdom, Department of Commerce Agenda no. 59, Commerce 1937/35, Trade Publicity UK, A461 H323/1/2 Part 2, NAA.

174

Notes to pages 32–6

48 Report for April 1935, pp. 5, 19, Australian Trade Publicity – Weekly Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 10, NAA. 49 Report for May 1935, p. 19, Australian Trade Publicity – Weekly Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 10, NAA. 50 Pinkstone, Global Connections, 96. 51 Dyster and Meredith, Australia in the International Economy, 155; Duncan, ‘The Australian Beef Export Trade and the Origins of the Australian Meat Board’, 191–201. 52 Poster 183, ‘Reject Lambs Pay No Dividend’, Photographic Negatives: Railways: Box Systems, VPRS 12903/P1, Item 533/12, Public Records Office Victoria, NAA. 53 MacLaren, Commissions High, 224; Hill, Canada’s Salesmen to the World, 347. 54 Hill, Canada’s Salesmen to the World, 347. 55 Department of Trade and Commerce, Thirtieth Annual Report of the Department of Trade and Commerce for the Fiscal Year Ending March 31 1922, 14. 56 For a recent summary, see McKenzie, ‘Trade, Dominance, Dependence’, 465; see also Thompson, ‘Canada and the Third British Empire, 1901–1939’, 90; Constantine, ‘Anglo-Canadian Relations’, 359–63. 57 Emery, Norrie, and Owram, A History of the Canadian Economy, 414; Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 412. 58 Department of Immigration and Colonisation, Report of the Department of Immigration and Colonisation 1919, 36. 59 Department of Immigration and Colonisation, Report of the Department of Immigration and Colonisation 1920, 23. 60 Ibid., 26. 61 Hill, Canada’s Salesmen to the World, 368. 62 Department of Immigration and Colonisation, Report of the Department of Immigration and Colonisation 1925, 21. 63 For a detailed summary of 1920s developments, see Constantine, ‘Anglo-Canadian Relations’, 367. 64 Department of Trade and Commerce, Thirty-Sixth Annual Report 1928, 28. 65 Hill, Canada’s Salesmen to the World, 352. 66 Department of Trade and Commerce, Thirty-Ninth Annual Report 1931, 45. 67 Department of Trade and Commerce, Thirty-Eighth Annual Report 1930, 32–3. 68 Hyland to Trumble, 29 May 1930, Copies of Miscellaneous Memos between Official Secretary and Director of Trade and Publicity,

Notes to pages 36–9

69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

88

89 90

175

Australian Publicity in the United Kingdom, A2910 430/1/98 Part 1, NAA. Constantine, ‘Anglo-Canadian Relations’, 366. Goodchild, ‘Building “A Natural Industry of This Country” ’, 74. McInnis, ‘The Changing Structure of Canadian Agriculture, 1867–1897’, 196. See also Emery, Norrie, and Owram, A History of the Canadian Economy, 310–20. Drummond, Progress without Planning, 34. Bliss, A Canadian Millionaire, 39–40. William Davies later became Canadian Packers. Bliss, A Canadian Millionaire, 52. Figures drawn from the Canada Year Book. McInnis, ‘The Changing Structure of Canadian Agriculture’, 195; Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 417. Department of Agriculture, The Statistical Yearbook of Canada 1903. McInnis, ‘The Declination of Canada’s Cheese and Bacon Export Industries’ (unpublished conference paper). My thanks to Professor McInnis for making this paper available. Higgins and Mordhorst, ‘Bringing Home the “Danish” Bacon’, 141–85. Acheson, ‘On the Study of Canadian Businessmen’, 107; Bliss, A Canadian Millionaire, 187. Emery, Norrie, and Owram, A History of the Canadian Economy, 416, 424. Figures from the Canada Year Book. Peak figures reflect wartime price inflation. Goodchild, ‘Building “A Natural Industry of this Country’’ ’, 254. Ibid., 284. Ibid., 298. Advertising Canada in the UK, Vol. 2 1–2, File 28804, RG 20 Vol. 203, Libraries and Archives Canada (LAC). Ormsby, ‘Fruit Marketing in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia’, 84; see also Farrell, ‘Experience with Provincial Marketing Schemes in Canada’, 610–26. For cheese, see Goodchild, ‘Building “A Natural Industry of this Country’’ ’, 282–5. For the Canadian Wheat Board’s origins, see Earl, ‘Orderly Marketing’, 329–50. Turner, ‘Federal Marketing and Price Support Legislation in Canada’, 594–609. For a brief history, see Perkin, ‘The Ontario Marketing Boards’, 968–79. Department of Agriculture, The British Market and the Canadian Farmer, 31. Ibid., 39, 42.

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Notes to pages 39–45

91 Advertising Canada in the UK, Vol. 2 1–2, File 28804, RG 20 Vol. 203, LAC. 92 Krueger, ‘Trials and Tribulations of the Canadian Fruit-Growing Industry’, 346–7; see also Murton, ‘John Bull and Sons’, 234–5. 93 It was organised by The Daily Mail, the British government, and British fruit-growing interests. Gloucester Chronicle, 10 September 1921, 2. 94 Department of Trade and Commerce, Thirty-Seventh Annual Report 1929, 42. 95 Department of Trade and Commerce, Thirty- Eighth Annual Report 1930, 44. 96 Department of Trade and Commerce, Thirty- Ninth Annual Report 1931, 46. 97 Ibid. 98 The best account is Hill, Canada’s Salesmen to the World, 359–65. 99 Ibid., 360. 100 ‘Canada Calling Campaign 1938’, Advertising Canada in the UK, Vol. 3, File 28804, RG 20 Vol. 203, LAC. 101 Department of Agriculture, The British Market and the Canadian Farmer, 7. 102 ‘Canada Calling Campaign 1938’, Advertising Canada in the UK, Vol. 3, File 28804, RG 20 Vol. 203, LAC, 103 Constantine, ‘Anglo-Canadian Relations’, 379–80.

c h a p t e r t wo Stephen, The Empire of Progress, 4; see also MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 107; Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, xv. 2 The Times, 3 November 1925, 18. 3 Advertiser’s Weekly, 26 March 1926, 530; The Times, 20 July 1925, 14. 4 Western Daily Press, 7 November 1925, 13. 5 Gloucestershire Echo, 16 January 1926, 4. 6 Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 19 January 1926, 7. 7 Gloucestershire Echo, 10 February 1929, 6. 8 Westminster Gazette, 6 April 1926, 2; Liverpool Echo, 29 May 1926, 1. 9 MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire. 10 For a significant if brief recognition of culture’s role, see de Bromhead, Fernihough, Lampe, and O’Rourke, ‘When Britain Turned Inward’, 348. 11 See Beugelsdijk and Maseland, Culture in Economics ; also Bennett, McFall, and Pryke, ‘Editorial: Culture/Economy/Social’, 1–7. 1

Notes to pages 46–50 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24

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28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35

177

Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, 6. See Ferguson and Shularick, ‘The Empire Effect’, 283–312; Smith, ‘Patriotism, Self-Interest and the “Empire Effect” ’, 59–80; Attard and Dilley, ‘Finance, Empire and the British World’, 1–10. Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire, 247. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, 842. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 105. Ibid. Ibid., 129; Plamper, The History of Emotions, 257–9. Plamper, The History of Emotions, 257. Some suggest there was little widespread interest in empire, most famously Bernard Porter. But for mixed views on empire shopping, see Pugh, We Danced All Night, 402. Lydon, Imperial Emotions, 2. Ibid., xi. Thompson, ‘Tariff Reform’, 1,033–54. Rooth argues that there was fresh momentum from 1925; see Rooth, British Protectionism, 42. Hendley, Organised Patriotism and the Crucible of War ; Bush, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power ; Katie Pickles, Female Imperialism and National Identity. ‘Editorial Notes’, Production and Export, April 1920, 1–5, quoted in Lee, ‘Imagining the Empire’, 139, 158. Rooth, British Protectionism, 42. See also Trentmann, Free Trade Nation, 325. Witherell, ‘Sir Henry Page Croft and Conservative Backbench Campaigns for Empire, 1903–1932’, 357–81; Garside, ‘Party Politics, Political Economy and British Protectionism, 1919–1932’, 52. Rooth, British Protectionism, 39. Ibid. Boyce, ‘America, Europe, and the Triumph of Imperial Protectionism in Britain, 1929–30’, 55. Rooth, British Protectionism, 55. De Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 25, 5. Ibid., 53. Rotary and empire examples include, for shopping, Western Daily Press, 1 June 1926, 5; for migration, Crewe Chronicle, 18 August 1928, 2; for development, Gloucester Journal, 26 May 1923, 1; for trade, Western Morning News, 12 October 1929, 11. For empire as bulwark against Americanisation, see Schwarzkopf, ‘Who Said “Americanization”?’, 40–1. Trentmann, Free Trade Nation, 229. Ibid.

178 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59

Notes to pages 50–4 Lee, ‘Imagining the Empire’, 356–7. Trentmann, Free Trade Nation, 230. The Tatler, 9 April 1930, xiii. Trentmann, Free Trade Nation, 231. Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire, 237. Ibid. Thackeray, Forging a British World of Trade, 80–1; Jarvis, ‘Mrs Maggs and Betty’, 133–6. Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire, 250. De Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 172. Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb, 108–9. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 133. Trentmann, Free Trade Nation, 232; Thackeray, Forging a British World of Trade, 85. See Winship, ‘New Disciplines for Women and the Rise of the Chain Store in the 1930s’, 23–45. Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire, 250–1. Giles, ‘Class, Gender and Domestic Consumption in Britain, 1920– 1950’, 19; Todd, Young Women, Work and Family in England, 1918–1950, 40. See also McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 109; Benson, The Working Class in Britain, 1850–1939, 24–6. De Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 172. See also Winship, ‘New Disciplines for Women’, 29–30. Sec. Australian House to Sec. Prime Minister’s Department, 30 December 1925, Trade Publicity – UK, A461 H323/1/2 Part 1, NAA. Ibid.; New Zealand Meat Producers Board, First Annual Report 1923, 8. Report for August 1933, p. 9, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 5, NAA; Advertising Australian Products, Interesting Report, pp. 1–2, Trade Publicity – UK, A461 H323/1/2 Part 1, NAA. Report for August 1931, p. 9, Australian Trade Publicity – Rulings (Reports), A2910 430/1/98 Part 4, NAA. Advertising Australian Products, Interesting Report, pp. 1–2, Trade Publicity – UK, A461 H323/1/2 Part. 1, NAA. Ibid., 4. Dairy Produce Control Board (Australia), Eighth Annual Report of the Dairy Produce Control Board for the Year Ending 30th June 1933, 13–14. Hyland to Trumble, 22 February 1930, Australian Publicity in the United Kingdom – Copies of Miscellaneous Memos between Official Secretary and Director of Trade Publicity, A2910 430/1/98 Part 1, NAA.

Notes to pages 54–7

179

60 Report for June 1933, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 5, NAA. 61 Report for August 1931, p. 9, Australian Trade Publicity – Rulings (Reports), A2910 430/1/98 Part 4, NAA. 62 Special Report $100,000 Scheme for Advertising Canadian Food Products in Great Britain, Mr E.D. Arnaud, Trade Commissioner Bristol, 15–16, File 2: Department of Trade and Commerce, RG 20 517. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., 32. 65 Ibid. 66 Department of Agriculture, The British Market and the Canadian Farmer, 6. 67 Ibid., 14. 68 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Eighth Annual Report 1930, 8. 69 New Zealand Dairy Produce Exporter, 27 September 1930, 42. 70 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Seventeenth Annual Report 1939, 13. 71 Thompson and Magee, ‘A Soft Touch?’, 689–717. 72 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism: 1688–2000, 155. 73 Thompson and Magee, ‘A Soft Touch?’, 690. 74 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Eighth Annual Report 1930, 12. 75 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Sixteenth Annual Report 1938, 9. 76 Report for April 1934, p. 4, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 6, NAA. 77 Report for January 1933, p. 6, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 5, NAA; Report for August 1933, p. 7, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 5, NAA. 78 Department of Trade and Commerce, Thirty-Eighth Annual Report 1930, 45; The Gazette (Montreal), 30 June 1934, 8. 79 453, OM(S) 8a, HAT. 80 Harper, ‘ “Personal Contact is Worth a Ton of Text-books” ’, 57; Pickles, Female Imperialism, 75–90. For educational travel as a part of the wider British world, see Pietsch, Empire of Scholars. 81 Winnipeg Tribune, 1 September 1934, 3; Ottawa Journal, 22 August 1934, 1, 7. 82 Ottawa Morning Journal, 3 September 1934, 1; The Gazette (Montreal), 3 September 1934, 6. 83 Report for August 1933, p. 7, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 5, NAA.

180

Notes to pages 57–61

84 Report for July 1934, p. 6, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 6, NAA. 85 Report for February 1935, p. 10, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 9, NAA. 86 New Zealand Dairy Produce Control Board, Third Annual Report 1927, 8. 87 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Seventeenth Annual Report 1939, 11. 88 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Sixteenth Annual Report 1938, 9. 89 Department of Trade and Commerce, Thirty-Ninth Annual Report 1931, 46. 90 For McDougall’s activities, see Hudson and Way, ed., Letters From a ‘Secret Service Agent’. 91 Report for January 1933, p. 5, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 5, NAA; Report for April 1933, p. 6, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 5, NAA. 92 Report for June 1934, p. 6, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 7, NAA. 93 Report for September 1934, p. 7, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 7, NAA. 94 Report for April 1934, p. 10, Australian Trade Publicity – Weekly Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 10, NAA. 95 Ibid. 96 Report for April 1935, p. 10, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity, A2910 430/1/98 Part 5, NAA. 97 Courier-Mail (Brisbane, QLD), 7 March 1934, 12. 98 Clendinning, Demons of Domesticity, 271. 99 Ibid. 100 O’Connor, ‘The King’s Christmas Pudding’, 135. 101 Director of Australian Trade Publicity, Economical Cookery ; Director of Australian Trade Publicity, The Kangaroo Kookery Book, 5, 7. 102 ‘New Zealand Meat: The Best in the World’, p. 9, Food Box 11, 1–20, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, University of Oxford (OU). 103 Director of Australian Trade Publicity, The Kangaroo Kookery Book, 14–15. 104 Driver, Culinary Landmarks, 283. 105 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, New Zealand Meat, 12–13; Director of Australian Trade Publicity, The Kangaroo Kookery Book; Bowker, The Maple Leaf Canadian Recipe Book. 106 Director of Australian Trade Publicity, The Kangaroo Kookery Book, 1.

Notes to pages 61–6

181

107 Bowker, The Maple Leaf Canadian Recipe Book, 2. 108 Aberdeen Press and Journal, 24 November 1931, 3; Western Mail, 16 May 1933, 7; Department of Trade and Commerce, Thirty-Ninth Annual Report 1931, 45. 109 Western Mail, 16 May 1933, 7. 110 Sunderland Echo and Gazette, 7 July 1932, 5. 111 Montrose Standard, 19 August 1932, 6. 112 Winnipeg Tribune Magazine, 19 November 1932, 6. 113 Western Mail, 16 May 1933, 7. 114 Western Mail, 25 May 1932, 9; Winnipeg Tribune, 15 June 1943, 15; Winnipeg Free Press, 12 November 1932, 11. 115 Montreal Gazette, 30 December 1933, 7. 116 Glasgow Herald, 29 October 1932, 8; Winnipeg Tribune, 19 November 1932, 34; The Sphere, 17 December 1932, 7. 117 Sunderland Echo and Gazette, 7 July 1932, 5. 118 Western Mail, 10 March 1937, 7. 119 Report for December 1934, p. 7, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity Reports, A2910 430/1/99 Part 9, NAA. 120 Hill, Canada’s Salesmen to the World, 357. 121 Webber, The Anchor Story, 4. 122 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Ninth Annual Report 1931, 10. 123 New Zealand Dairy Produce Control Board, Sixth Annual Report 1930, 11. 124 New Zealand Dairy Produce Control Board, Third Annual Report 1927, 9. 125 See Barnes, ‘Lancashire’s War with Australia’, 707–30. 126 Manchester Guardian, 14 August 1934, 11. 127 Manchester Guardian, 12 September 1934, 11. 128 Report for February 1935, p. 6, Australian Trade Publicity – Weekly Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 10, NAA. 129 Ibid. 130 Report for September 1934, p. 7, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 8, NAA.

c h a p t e r t h r ee 1 2

3

Liverpool Echo, 27 May 1927, 11. Nottingham Evening Post, 13 December 1929, 5; ‘Australian Dried Fruit for the Homeland’, Emigration Box 1, 10, a, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU; Hull Daily Mail, 7 May 1929, 6. Nottingham Evening Post, 3 May 1928, 9.

182

Notes to pages 66–70

New Zealand Dairy Exporter, 11 November 1931, 9. New Zealand Meat Producers Board, ‘Advertising New Zealand Meat at Home’, Tenth Annual Report 1932, n.p.; New Zealand Meat pamphlet, p. 3, Food Box 11, 1–20, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU. 6 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Eighth Annual Report 1930, n.p. 7 44, OM(S) 17, Canada 1928, HAT; 627, OM(S) 17, Canada, HAT. 8 Key studies in this now well-established field include Bridge and Fedorowich, ed., The British World; Darian-Smith, Grimshaw, and Macintyre, ed., Britishness Abroad. For Australia, see Schreuder and Ward, ed., Australia’s Empire . For Canada, see Buckner, ed., Canada and the British Empire ; Buckner and Francis, ed., Canada and the British World; Buckner, ed., Canada and the End of Empire. For New Zealand, see Belich, Paradise Reforged; Pickles, ‘Colonisation, Empire, and Gender’, 219–42. For the ‘Anglo world’ revision, see Belich, Replenishing the Earth. 9 Hastings and St Leonard’s Observer, 13 August 1932, 5. 10 Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 2. For recent critical appraisals, see Rowse, Veracini, and Johnson, ‘Forum: A Focus on “Settler Colonialism” ’; Konishi, ‘First Nations Scholars, Settler Colonial Studies, and Indigenous History’; Carey and Silverstein, ‘Thinking with and beyond Settler Colonial Studies’; Varacini, Te Punga Somerville, Warrior and Kēhaulani Kauanui, ‘Critical Forum: On the Uses of Settler Colonial Studies’. 11 Coleman and Yochim, ‘Symbolic Annihilation’, 1. See also Meyer and Royer, Selling the Indian: Commercialising and Appropriating American Indian Cultures; Hokowhitu and Devadas, ed., The Fourth Eye: Māori Media in Aotearoa New Zealand. 12 Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, 37–9. 13 McLintock, Imperial Leather, 209. 14 New Zealand Meat pamphlet, pp. 12–13, Food Box 11, 1–20, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU; ‘Alexandra Palace Guide’, 19, OM(S) 17, Canada, HAT; Western Morning News, 23 April 1928, 3. 15 New Zealand Meat pamphlet, p. 2, Food Box 11, 1–20, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU; ‘Canada Calling’, 98, OM(S) 05, HAT; ‘Canada Calling’, Birmingham Gazette, 1 July 1937, OM(S) 05, HAT. 16 ‘Trade Papers 1939’, OM(S) 10a, HAT. 17 Conventionally, historiography in the former Dominions has associated World War I with growing independence, but more recent work has emphasised the continued importance of empire. For 4 5

Notes to pages 70–3

18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40

41

183

short overviews, see Damousi, ‘War and Commemoration’, 289–313; Thompson, ‘Canada and the Third British Empire’, 97–8; Worthy, ‘A Debt of Honour’, 185–200. 137, OM(S) 8, HAT; 160, 176, OM(S) 8a, HAT. See, for example, ‘Australian Dried Fruit for the Homeland’, Emigration Box 1, 10, a, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU. Nottingham Evening Post, 26 July 1932, 3. O’Connor, ‘The King’s Christmas Pudding’, 149. S3821, OM(S) 8a, HAT. The Scotsman, 5 December 1938, 14. Report for December 1932, p. 7, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 5, NAA. Nottingham Evening Post, 23 November 1928, 6. Western Morning News, 10 November 1933, 5. Constantine, ‘Bringing the Empire Alive’, 216. The Gateway, July 1929, 87, OM(S) 17, Canada, HAT. Belfast News, 7 April 1933, 12. Hull Daily Mail, 7 July 1927, 8. ‘Australian Canned Fruit for the Homeland’, Food Box 1 (42), John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU. Western Morning News, 18 May 1928, 11. New Zealand Meat pamphlet, p. 8, Food Box 11, 1–20, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU. Advertiser’s Weekly, 377. 2, OM(S) 05, HAT. Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire, 264. See also Thackeray, Forging a British World of Trade, 78–110. Fruit Grower, 13 April 1935, OM(S) 8, HAT. Use of ‘empire’ was also affected by metropolitan legislation, including the 1926 Merchandising Marks Act and the 1935 Meat Marking Order. See Higgins and Varian, ‘Britain’s Empire Marketing Board’; Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 164. New Zealand Meat pamphlet, p. 3, Food Box 11, 1–20, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU. Cards 15a, 15b, Food Box 11, 1–20, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU; ‘The Empire’s Dairy Farm: Country Life in New Zealand’, p. 9, Emigration Box 3, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU. ‘Australian Dried Fruit for the Homeland’, Emigration Box 1, 10, a, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU.

184

Notes to pages 75–7

42 Sydney Morning Herald, 3 June 1932, 13. 43 Northern Advocate, 14 August 1924, 7. 44 ‘Australian Butter for the Homeland’, 1934, Emigration Box 1, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU. 45 ‘The Empire’s Dairy Farm: Country Life in New Zealand’, pp. 4, 6, Emigration Box 3, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU. 46 ‘The Empire’s Dairy Farm: Country Life in New Zealand’, p. 6, Emigration Box 3, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU. 47 ‘New Zealand Meat: The Best in the World’, p. 9, Food Box 11, 1–20, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU. 48 Ibid., 5–6. 49 The Grocer, 2 April 1938, 19. 50 Hall, ‘Selling Lysol as a Household Disinfectant in Interwar North America’, 55–6. See also Hoy, Chasing Dirt, 138–9. 51 27, OM(S) 17, Canada 1928, HAT; Hull Daily Mail, 12 October 1928, 8; ‘New Zealand Meat: The Best in the World’, Food Box 11, 1–20, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU; ‘The Empire’s Dairy Farm: Country Life in New Zealand’, p. 6, Emigration Box 3, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU. 52 French and Phillips, Cheated Not Poisoned? 53 Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb, 21; Apple, ‘ “They Need It Now” ’, 71. 54 McLintock, Imperial Leather, 207–31; Dyer, White, 76–8. For an extended discussion of whiteness in the Australian context, see Boucher, Carey, and Ellinghaus, ed., Re-orienting Whiteness. 55 Cumpston, ‘Tropical Australia: Discussion’, quoted in Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 139. 56 Bashford, Imperial Hygiene, 139. 57 516, OM(S) 17, Canada 1928, HAT. 58 ‘Australian Canned Fruit for the Homeland’, Food Box 1 (42), John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU. 59 For connections between race and food purity in Canada, see Belisle, ‘Eating Clean’, 41–59. 60 Aspirant Dominion Southern Rhodesia’s dairy industry epitomised this aphorism; see Hove and Swart, ‘Dairying Is a White Man’s Industry’, 911–25. 61 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body, 153. 62 ‘The Empire’s Dairy Farm: Country Life in New Zealand’, p. 14, Emigration Box 3, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU; 173, OM(S) 8, HAT; 175, OM(S) 8, HAT; 172, OM(S) 8, HAT. 63 O’Connor, ‘The King’s Christmas Pudding’, 141.

Notes to pages 77–81

185

64 Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb, 118; Apple, ‘ “They Need It Now” ’, 71. 65 Apple, ‘ “They Need It Now” ’, 68. 66 Kamminga, ‘ “Axes to Grind” ’, 89. 67 See, for example, ‘Australian Apples are Here in Plenty’ campaign, 1928, 4, OM(S) 8, HAT; ‘New Zealand Butter and Cheese’, Staffordshire Sentinel, 8 July 1927, 8; for science claims, see ‘The Empire’s Dairy Farm: Country Life in New Zealand’, p. 16, Emigration Box 3, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU. 68 Nottingham Evening Post, 22 November 1928, 3. 69 For British sunshine leagues, see Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body, 297–300; ‘The Empire’s Dairy Farm: Country Life in New Zealand’, pp. 20, 23, Emigration Box 3, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU. 70 French, ‘Modernity in British Advertising’, 452. 71 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body, 158. 72 Ibid., 7. 73 ‘Australian Apples for Fitness’, 119, OM(S) 8, HAT. 74 138, 141, OM(S) 8, HAT. 75 163, OM(S) 8, HAT. 76 Schwarzkopf, ‘ Who Said “Americanization”?’, 26. 77 ‘Is This the Right Way to Tell the Trade of Advertising Plans?’, Advertising World, February 1937, 49, quoted in Taylor, ‘Written in the Skies’, 756. 78 Statistics NZ, http://archive.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/ population/estimates_and_projections/historical-population-tables. aspx, accessed 12 March 2020. For Aryanism, see Rowse, ‘Notes on the History of the Aboriginal Population of Australia’, 315–6. 79 Tourism advertising remained relatively small-scale in the Dominions at this time, except for in Canada. 80 ‘Taniwha’ is a Māori term for a spirit, being, or guardian, powerful and sometimes malign, usually associated with water or caves. ‘Lubra’, as with ‘squaw’ for American First Peoples, is an offensive term for an Aboriginal woman. For Australian examples, see Scardamaglia, ‘Expanding Empire’, 10; for Canada, see Francis, The Imaginary Indian, 140–1; for New Zealand, see Wolfe, Well Made New Zealand; for the United States, see Steele, ‘Reduced to Images’, 109–28. 81 Fruit Flower and Vegetable Trader, April 1938, p. 580, 159, OM(S) 8, HAT. 82 Scardamaglia, ‘Expanding Empire’, 12–13. 83 New Zealand Dairy Produce Exporter, 26 September 1931, 30.

186 84 85 86 87

88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

Notes to pages 81–8 Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 174–5. 150, OM(S) 8, HAT. Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 73. Gloucester Echo, 10 September 1937, 11; for the rehabilitation of Australia’s tropical north, see Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 139–64. Fromer, ‘ “Deeply Indebted to the Tea Plant” ’, 534. Lancashire Evening Post, 10 February 1933, 6. Programme of the Scouts Council in Aid of Roland House Settlement, 8 November 1930, 252, OM(S) 8a, HAT. Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 304. Hull Daily Mail, 12 October 1928, 8. ‘The Empire’s Dairy Farm: Country Life in New Zealand’, p. 10, Emigration Box 3, John Johnson Collection, Weston Library, OU. Bowker, The Maple Leaf Canadian Recipe Book, 45. See, for example, Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders, 119–26. Liverpool Echo, 27 May 1927, 11. McLintock, Imperial Leather, 23. Murphy, ‘ The “Most Dependable Element of Any Country’s Manhood” ’, 72.2–72.4; Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders, 139–40. Hornsey, ‘ “The Penguins Are Coming” ’, 817. Monthly Report, September 1932, p. 11, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 5, NAA. Parkin, Food Is Love, 126–34. Constantine, ‘Anglo-Canadian Relations’, 379. Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders, 156–7. Parkin, Food Is Love, 22. Apple, ‘ “They Need It Now” ’, 1. Q3811, OM(S) 8a, HAT. Q3812, OM(S) 8a, HAT. Yorkshire Evening Post, 2 November 1931, 6. Western Morning News, 1 June 1928, 8.

chapter four 1 2 3 4 5

The Bystander, 6 February 1935, 13; Richards, ‘Boy’s Own Empire’, 145. The Bystander, 13 February 1935, 10. The Tatler, 13 February 1935, 8. The Times, 1 February 1935, 12. Ibid.

Notes to pages 89–93 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20

21

22

23 24 25 26 27

187

Sedgwick, Popular Filmgoing in 1930s Britain, 269. Lancashire Evening Post, 3 May 1935, 8. Wells, ‘Sun Hats, Sundowners, and Tropical Hygiene’, 74–5. Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire, 23. Richards, Visions of Yesterday, 2. Ibid., 4; Richards, ‘Boy’s Own Empire’, 154. See Chapman and Cull, Projecting Empire ; Grieveson and McCabe, ed., Empire and Film; Rice, Films for the Colonies. Report for May 1935, p. 19, Australian Trade Publicity – Weekly Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 10, NAA. Report for April 1931, p. 15, Trade Publicity, A2910 430/1/98 Part 3, NAA. ‘Woodfull Appeals for Empire Buying’, British Movietone, 21 May 1934, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZLEJolscF, accessed 6 May 2020. Report for March 1934, p. 12, Publicity – Australian Trade Publicity Reports, A2910 430/1/98 Part 6, NAA. Report for September 1932, p. 7, Australian Trade Publicity – Rulings (Reports), A2910 430/1/98 Part 4, NAA. Richards, Visions of Yesterday, 5. Grieveson and McCabe, Empire and Film, 3. Some studies of colonial engagement exist: for India, see Chowdhry, Colonial India and the Making of Empire Cinema; for some engagement in Australia and New Zealand, see Limbrick, Making Settler Cinemas; for the Pacific, see Landman and Ballard, ‘An Ocean of Images’, 1–20. For a recent study that considers peripheral involvement with early visual technologies, see deCourcy and Jolly, Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle. Trade films are subject to particular neglect. For government films, see Backhouse, Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau, 1917–1941; Druick, Projecting Canada; Hillyer, ‘ “We Calmly and Adventurously Go Travelling” ’; Weckbecker, ‘Governing Visions of the Real’; Bertrand Collins, Government and Film in Australia; Vickery, ‘ “Telling Australia’s Story to the World” ’. Evans, John Grierson, 27. Ibid., 28. Anthony, ‘John Grierson’, 203–4. Druick and Williams, ed., The Grierson Effect. Druick, Projecting Canada, 36.

188

Notes to pages 93–5

28 Messenger to Minister in Charge of Publicity, 18 February 1926, Films – Metro Goldwyn Mayer Limited, AECB 8615 TO1/194 49/18 Part 1, ANZ; Memorandum: Secretary Commonwealth Public Service Board by Department of Commerce, 23 July 1937, p. 45, Cinema and Photographic Branch – Original Organisation, 1931–39, A451 1950/4902, NAA; Cinema and Photographic Branch – Release of Films, A458 AH344/1A C, NAA; For New Zealand, see Films – Distribution in Australia 20th Century Fox, AECB 8615 TO1 195 49/30/1 Part 1, ANZ; Department of Tourist and Health Resorts Annual Reports 1902–1922, ABKB 7348/1/1a, ANZ; Newman, ‘The Image of New Zealand as Portrayed in the Films of the Government Publicity Office, 1922–30’, 13. For Australia, see Gaunson, ‘Australian (Inter)national Cinema’, 296. See also O’Regan and Leotta, ‘Reframing Early Australasian Cinema’. 29 Department of Trade and Commerce, Thirtieth Annual Report 1922, 22. See also Eamon, ‘Art and Commerce: A Marriage of Reason’, 14. 30 Badgley to Clinkard, 27 October 1933, p. 3, Films Canadian Criticism 1931–46, AECB 8615 TO1 196 49/94, ANZ. 31 Acland and Dorland, ‘National Dreams, International Encounters’, 4. 32 Druick, Projecting Canada; Weckbecker, ‘Governing Visions of the Real’. 33 Druick, ‘Grierson in Canada’, 115. 34 Evans, John Grierson, 49. 35 Hillyer, ‘ “We Calmly and Adventurously Go Travelling” ’, 1. 36 Bertrand and Collins, Government and Film in Australia, 71; Morris, Embattled Shadows, 163–4. 37 Shirley and Adams, Australian Cinema, 130. 38 Morris, Embattled Shadows, 167. 39 See, for example, Hediger and Vonderau, ed., Films That Work ; Stoeltje with Harsanyi, ‘Orphans 8: Made to Persuade’, 250–5; Wasson and Acland, ed., Useful Cinema. I am grateful to Minette Hillyer for this reference. 40 Wasson and Acland, ‘Introduction’, 4. 41 Morris, Embattled Shadows; Moore, ‘Ephemera as Medium’, 135. 42 Gaunson, ‘Australian (Inter)national Cinema’, 296; Pryke, ‘Australia House’, n. 54, 183. 43 Dennis, ed., Aotearoa and the Sentimental Strine, 6. 44 Pugsley, The Camera in the Crowd, 95–7. 45 Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision, www.filmarchive.org.nz, accessed 23 April 2007, quoted in Babington, A History of the New Zealand Fiction Feature Film, 29.

Notes to pages 95–8

189

46 Pugsley, The Camera in the Crowd, 113–14. 47 The Ontario Motion Picture Bureau predated the federal bureau by a year, but it did not produce its own films until 1923. Morris, Embattled Shadows, 134; Bertrand and Collins, Government and Film in Australia, 94. 48 Morris, Embattled Shadows, 134; See Weckbecker, Governing Visions of the Real, 48. 49 Morris, Embattled Shadows, 136. 50 Department of Trade and Commerce, Fortieth Annual Report 1932, 36–7. 51 Memorandum: Secretary Commonwealth Public Service Board by Department of Commerce: Cinema and Photographic Branch, 23 July 1937, p. 45, Cinema and Photography Branch Original Organisation, 1931–39, A451 1950/4902, NAA. 52 Hyland to Mulvaney, 11 January 1932, p. 4, Trade Publicity UK Part 2, A461 H323/1/2 Part 2, NAA. 53 Annual Report 1931, p. 4, Department of Tourist and Health Resorts Annual Reports 1b 1906–1954, Box 1, ABKB W4673 7348, ANZ. 54 Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace, 11–12. 55 James, Popular Culture and Working-Class Taste in Britain, 1930–39, 14. 56 Richards, ‘Cinemagoing in Worktown’, 147–8. 57 Report for April 1931, p. 15, Trade Publicity, A2910 430/1/98 Part 3, NAA. 58 Cinema Treasures, http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/40295, accessed 7 December 2016. 59 Evening Post, 9 August 1926, 3. 60 Ibid. 61 The Press, 11 September 1931, 12; Annual Report 1931, p. 4, Department of Tourist and Health Resorts Annual Reports 1b 1906–1954, Box 1, ABKB W4673 7348, ANZ. 62 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Tenth Annual Report 1932, 10; Swann, ‘John Grierson and the GPO Film Unit, 1933–1939’, 29. 63 The Press, 11 September 1931, 12; Annual Report 1931, p. 4, Department of Tourist and Health Resorts Annual Reports 1b 1906–1954, Box 1, ABKB W4673 7348, ANZ. 64 Report for May 1931, p. 15, Trade Publicity, A2910 430/1/98 Part 3, NAA. 65 Ibid., 16. 66 Report for November 1931, p. 4, Australian Trade Publicity – Rulings (Reports), A2910 430/1/98 Part 4, NAA.

190

Notes to pages 99–103

67 Sheffield Independent, 5 June 1931, 7; Portsmouth Evening News, 3 November 1931, 7. 68 Report for June 1931, p. 5, Trade Publicity, A2910 430/1/98 Part 3, NAA. 69 Report for August 1931, p. 4, Australian Trade Publicity – Rulings (Reports), A2910 430/1/98 Part 4, NAA. 70 Report for May 1932, p. 8, Australian Trade Publicity – Rulings (Reports), A2910 430/1/98 Part 4, NAA. 71 Report for May 1935, pp. 9–10, Australian Trade Publicity – Weekly Reports, A2910/1430/1/98 Part 10, NAA. 72 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Twelfth Annual Report 1934, 7. 73 Lancashire Evening Post, 13 April 1935, 7. 74 Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 22 February 1936, 13. 75 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Fifteenth Annual Report 1937, 8. 76 Department of Trade and Commerce, Thirty-Ninth Annual Report 1931, 36. 77 Druick, Projecting Canada, 37. 78 Ibid., 30. See also Acland and Dorland, ‘National Dreams, International Encounters’, 5. 79 Druick, Projecting Canada, 34; Dezuanni and Goldsmith, ‘Disciplining the Screen Through Education’, 304–9. 80 Department of Trade and Commerce, Forty-First Annual Report 1933, 40. 81 ‘Memorandum on the Use of Canadian Films in the United Kingdom’, p. 2, William Lyon Mackenzie King Primary Series Correspondence, J1, C-3691, Vol. 224, p. 918, LAC. 82 Ibid., 4. 83 Ibid. 84 Hill, Canada’s Salesman to the World, 405; Druick, Projecting Canada, 30. 85 Department of Trade and Commerce, Forty-Fifth Annual Report 1937, 37. 86 Ibid., 42. 87 Morris, Embattled Shadows, 35. 88 Eamon, ‘Farmers, Phantoms and Princes’, 22. Kipling’s Our Lady of the Snows, an ode to tariffs that makes no mention of snow except in its title, was one object of his wrath. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., 23. 91 Melynk, One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema, 23. 92 Morris, Embattled Shadows, 162.

Notes to pages 103–9

191

93 Hillyer, ‘ “We Calmly and Adventurously Go Travelling” ’, 13. 94 For the tropical north as ‘crucible’ for white male national identity, see Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 76. 95 Bedford, Explorations in Civilisation, 8–9, quoted in Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 76. 96 Report for June 1931, p. 15, Trade Publicity, A2910 430/1/98 Part 3, NAA. 97 Report for August 1931, p. 5, Trade Publicity, A2910 430/1/98 Part 3, NAA. 98 For background, see Anthony, ‘John Grierson’, 209; Sargeant, ‘GPO Films’, 48. 99 The Milky Way, F5215, Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision (NTSV Wellington); Australian Sugar, 8951, National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA Sydney); Australian Pineapples, 14053, NFSA Sydney. 100 Australian Apples, 7194, NFSA Sydney. 101 ‘Dairyland’: Cheesemaking in Taranaki, New Zealand Government Publicity Office, F8055, NTSV Wellington. 102 Australian Butter, 7195, NFSA Sydney; The Golden Fleece, 8096, NFSA Sydney. 103 Australia only began to employ this technique in the post-World War II period. See Dickenson, ‘The Past in Australian Advertising, 1906–2010’, 74. 104 ‘Meadow to Market’ synopsis, www.ngataonga.org.nz/collections/ catalogue/catalogue-item?record_id=66792, accessed 11 July 2017. 105 Memorandum: Duncan, Acting Director of Marketing to GM Dept Tourist and Publicity, 1 October 1937, Films – Dairy Industry (1937–9), AECB 8615 TO1 196 49/99, ANZ. 106 Australian Apples, 7194, NFSA Sydney. 107 Australian Pineapples, 8048, NFSA Sydney. 108 Australian Butter, 7195, NFSA Sydney. 109 The earlier film was ‘Dairyland’: Cheesemaking in Taranaki. Hill to Director of Marketing Dairy Produce Export Division Wellington, 15 November 1938, Films – Dairy Industry (1937–9), AECB 8615 TO1 196 49/99, ANZ. 110 Australian Sugar, 7192, NFSA Sydney; Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 148. Such advertisements continued into the 1940s; see Dickenson, ‘The Past in Australian Advertising’, 72–3. 111 Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 22 October 1932, 11; Bay of Plenty Times, 5 September 1929, 3. 112 The Milky Way, F5215, NTSV Wellington.

192

Notes to pages 109–14

113 Hill to Director of Marketing Dairy Produce Export Division Wellington, 29 August 1938, Films – Dairy Industry (1937–9), AECB 8615 TO1 196 49/99, ANZ. 114 Australian Butter, 7195, NFSA Sydney; Australian Pineapples, 8048, NFSA Sydney. 115 Concentrated Sunshine, 1374, NFSA Sydney. 116 Hill to Director of Marketing Dairy Produce Export Division Wellington, 29 August 1938, Films – Dairy Industry (1937–9), AECB 8615 TO1 196 49/99, ANZ; Ellesmere Guardian, 18 August 1936, 3. 117 Australian Apples, 7194, NFSA Sydney.

chapter five 1

‘Highways of Empire’, M. Gill, CO 956/537, The National Archives (TNA). Sudan and mandated territories, rather than the dependencies, were given a different colour in reproductions at the request of the Dominions Office. Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 3 March 1927, p. 4, CO 760/26, TNA. 2 Tallents Papers, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, File 25, 4, quoted in Constantine, ‘Bringing the Empire Alive’, 200. 3 ‘Map of the Empire’, Dora Batty, CO 956/103, TNA. 4 ‘Map of Canada and the Empire’, A.E. Taylor, CO 956/74, TNA. 5 ‘Map of the Shipping Lanes of Empire’, F. Taylor, B089/X8 2845194 LAC. 6 Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 29 March 1928, p. 4, CO 760/26, TNA; Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 10 May 1928, p. 3, CO 760/26, TNA. 7 Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 29 March 1928, p. 4, CO 760/26, TNA; Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 10 May 1928, p. 3, CO 760/26, TNA. In New Zealand’s case, they did add a frame. 8 Constantine, ‘Bringing the Empire Alive’, 197. 9 Thomas, Cabinet Report of Committee on National Expenditure, August 1931, Tallents MSS 5/10, quoted in Self, ‘Treasury Control and the Empire Marketing Board’, 171. 10 MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 107; see also Stephen, The Empire of Progress, 129. 11 Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, xv.  12 For an economic analysis, see Drummond, British Economic Policy and the Empire ; for the political, see Self, ‘Treasury Control and the Empire Marketing Board’, 153–82. The best integrated account remains Constantine, ‘Bringing the Empire Alive’.

Notes to pages 114–16

193

13 Hill, Canada’s Salesmen to the World, 354. 14 Self, ‘Treasury Control and the Empire Marketing Board’, 160–1; Way, A New Idea Each Morning, 70. 15 Constantine, ‘Bringing the Empire Alive’, 198. 16 Ibid., 198, 203. 17 Way, A New Idea Each Morning, 71. 18 His design was rendered by W. Grimmond, CO 956/546-550A, TNA. 19 Forsyth was also New Zealand’s representative on the Imperial Economic Committee. See Hudson and Way, ed., Letters from a ‘Secret Service Agent’, 235. 20 There is no complete record of the EMB’s posters, so these figures remain approximate, although they are based on the EMB’s annual reports, the minutes of the publicity committee, and the result of reconstituting as many original poster series as possible by working between the three major collections at The National Archives (UK), the Manchester Gallery and Libraries and Archives Canada. 21 For the period 1925–31, exports from the Dominions and India to the United Kingdom formed between 81 per cent and 85 per cent of imperial exports to the United Kingdom. The remainder was taken up by colonies, mandates, and protectorates. See Table 96, ‘Total Trade of the British Empire’, in Board of Trade, Statistical Abstract for the British Empire, 91. 22 Britain featured in nineteen poster sets. This does not include the series around the British Industries Fair, which was designed with a different purpose from the other sequences. 23 Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 29 May 1930, p. 2, CO 760/26, TNA. 24 See, for example, de Groot, ‘Metropolitan Desires and Colonial Connections’, 166–90. 25 O’Brien, ‘Empire Versus National Interests in Australia–British Relationships During the 1930s’, 569. See also Drummond, British Economic Policy and the Empire, 67. 26 Higgins and Varian, ‘Britain’s Empire Marketing Board’; Thackeray, ‘Buying for Britain, China, or India?’, 386–409. 27 Constantine, ‘Bringing the Empire Alive’, 220–4. 28 The Times, 2 June 1930, 15, quoted in Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 177. 29 Empire Marketing Board Report, 17 October 1930, Economic Affairs, Imperial Trade, EMB 1930–31, EA1 154/4/15 Part 1, ANZ. 30 Constantine, Buy and Build, 17. 31 EMB to the NZ Meat Produce Board, Carlton Studio, CO 956/229, TNA.

194

Notes to pages 116–19

32 Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 28 August 1930, p. 2, CO 760/26, TNA quoted in Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 178. 33 Ibid. 34 Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 11 December 1930, p. 2, CO 760/26, TNA. 35 Kothari, ‘Trade, Consumption and Development Alliances’, 43–64; Moore, ‘Selling Empire’, 263–83; Chan, ‘ “Remember the Empire, Filled with Your Cousins” ’, 105–18. 36 Constantine, ‘Bringing the Empire Alive’, 217. 37 O’Connor, ‘The King’s Christmas Pudding’, 148. 38 Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946, 34–5. 39 MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 118. For the role of commodities generally in producing Dominion identity in New Zealand, see Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 154–88. 40 ‘Gathering Apricots for Canning’, A.B. Webb, CO 956/193, TNA; ‘A New Zealand Dairy Farm’, F. Newbould, CO 956/306, TNA. 41 ‘Dog Teams in Canada’s North’, C. Paine, B086/X5 2845104, LAC; ‘The Wheat Harvest of Canada’, F.C. Herrick, B090/X1 2845214, LAC; ‘Apples and Honey from Canadian Orchards’, C. Pears, CO 956/133, TNA. 42 Demeritt, ‘Visions of Agriculture in British Columbia’, 38. 43 Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 208. 44 Cronin, ‘Selling Irish Bacon’, 132–43. 45 Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 22 February 1930, CO 760/26, TNA; Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 3 February 1928, CO 760/26, TNA. Austin Cooper, a Canadian, worked for the EMB but did not design any Canadian posters. 46 He trained at the Slade School of Art and the Royal College of Art. Ross, ‘New Zealand Prints, 1900–1950’, 79. 47 Ibid., 41. 48 Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 30 August 1928, CO 760/26, TNA. 49 The Times, 20 August 1927, 12. 50 For A.B. Webb’s EMB work, see Gooding, Sunshine and Shadows, 20. The relevant series are CO 956/51–6, TNA; CO 956/193–8, TNA. 51 Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 25 July 1929, CO 760/26, TNA. 52 Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 4 October 1928, CO 760/26, TNA. 53 There may be a Māori dairy farmer included in ‘The British Empire Dairy Factory’, F.C. Herrick, CO 956/3, TNA. 54 A few examples: for nature, see Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora; for Indigenous elements in Australian identity, see

Notes to pages 119–23

55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63

64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71

72 73 74

195

White, Inventing Australia; for New Zealand, see Gibbons, ‘Cultural Colonisation and National Identity’, 5–17. ‘Buy South African Dried Fruit, Buy New Zealand Lamb’, F.C. Herrick, CO 956/61, TNA. Western Morning News, 25 January 1927, 6; Nottingham Evening Post, 16 June 1927, 7. The Times, 22 December 1926, 9. ‘Remember the Empire, Filled with Your Cousins’, A. Cooper, CO 956/236, TNA. Nottingham Evening Post, 16 June 1927, 7. The Times, 14 February 1927, 18. Posters in this sequence are ‘Wheat Harvest of Canada’, F.C. Herrick, B090/X1 2845214, LAC; ‘The Wheat Harvest of Canada’, D. Batty, CO 965/1, TNA; ‘Ships in the Channel’, N. Wilkinson, B090/X4, LAC; ‘The Dairies of New Zealand’, D. Batty, CO 956/2, TNA; ‘Dairy Factory New Zealand’, F.C. Herrick, CO 956/3, TNA; ‘Come Up Come In from Eastward’, CO 956/4, TNA. The Times, 10 January 1927, 18. ‘Buy and Build’, CO 956/72–7, TNA; ‘Empire Buying Means Empire Building’, CO 956/101–6, TNA; ‘New Zealand’, B098/X3 2845340, B098/X4 2845341, A272/X2 2845001, A272/X2 2852303, LAC. ‘March of Empire’, CO 956/73, TNA; ‘March of Empire’, CO 956/102, TNA. ‘Map of Australia’, M. Gill, CO 956/521, TNA. ‘Map of New Zealand’, M. Gill, CO 956/302, TNA. Darwin, ‘A Third British Empire’, 86. ‘Empire Buying Makes Busy Factories’, CO 956/175–80, CO 956/133– 8, CO 956/145–9, CO 956/181–6, CO 956/187–92, CO 956/178, CO 956/179, CO 956/180, TNA. ‘Empire Buying Makes Busy Factories’, CO 956/133–8, TNA. Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 29 August 1929, p. 1, CO 760/26, TNA. ‘Empire Buying Makes Busy Factories’, CO 956/175–80, TNA. For Australia’s steel industry, see Tsokhas, Making a Nation State, 93–103. Belich, Paradise Reforged, 29–31. ‘1928 Export of Frozen Mutton and Lamb from NZ to UK’, CO 956/146, TNA; Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 182. ‘British Cloth in New Zealand’, H.S. Williamson, CO 956/145, TNA; ‘New Zealand Serves Our Tables’, H.S. Williamson, CO 956/147, TNA.

196

Notes to pages 123–8

75 ‘Empire Buying Makes Busy Factories’, K. Henderson, CO 956/181–6, TNA. 76 ‘The Empire’s Highway to India’, C. Pears, CO 956/688–93, TNA. 77 Australian jarrah appeared with Burmese teak and West African mahogany; CO 956/533–4, TNA. This early sequence also included an image of ‘Home Reafforestation’, K. Henderson, CO 956/462A, TNA. Canadian and South African tobacco also appeared with India and Africa in one letterpress campaign; CO 956/90–5, TNA. 78 ‘Always Empire Butter’, CO 956/290–4, TNA. 79 ‘Buy from the Empire’s Gardens’, CO 956/269–73, TNA. 80 ‘Apple Orchards of Empire’, G. Sheringham, B090/X10 2834280, LAC; ‘South African Oranges’, G. Sheringham, B099/X5 2845353, LAC; ‘An English Country Market’, F. Taylor, B095-11 2845052, LAC; ‘Oranges from South Africa’, B086/X10 2974157, LAC. 81 Pinkstone, Global Connections, 90–1. 82 The Times, 7 February 1927, 13. 83 Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 25 July 1929, p. 2, CO 760/26, TNA. No reason was given for the deletion. Queensland sugar did appear as part of a list in a letterpress poster. 84 Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 21 June 1928, p. 2, CO 760/26, TNA. 85 ‘John Bull and Sons’, H. Williamson, CO 956/682–6, TNA. 86 ‘Raise the Empire Line’, Service Advertising Studio, CO 956/25–9B, TNA; also CO 956/78–83, CO 956/139–44, TNA. 87 ‘Support the Empire and It Will Support You’, A. Cooper, CO 956/235–40, TNA; ‘A Happy New Year to the Empire’, A. Cooper, CO 956/509–13, TNA. 88 ‘Today Trade Builds the Empire’, F. Taylor, CO 956/529–30, CO 956/481–3, TNA. 89 ‘The Service of Empire’, J.K. Lawson, CO 956/296–301, TNA. 90 Meredith, ‘Imperial Images’, 33. 91 For frontier effects, see Phillips, A Man’s Country?, 1–42; Hogg, Men and Manliness on the Frontier, 54–84; Perry, On the Edge of Empire. 92 ‘Mutton, Lamb, Apples’, F. Newbould, CO 956/304, TNA. For detail on New Zealand, see Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 184–6. 93 Murton, ‘John Bull and Sons’, 227. 94 See, for example, ‘A Flock of Merino Sheep’, A.B. Webb, CO 956/55, TNA; ‘Apples and Honey from Canadian Orchards’, C. Pears, CO 956/133, TNA.

Notes to pages 128–31

197

95 See, for example, ‘Niger Steamer Loading Groundnuts’, G. Spencer Pryse, B098/X9 2845347, LAC; ‘Cocoa’, E. McKnight Kauffer, CO 956/499, TNA. 96 Constantine, ‘Bringing the Empire Alive’, 217. 97 See, for example, ‘Half the Empire East of Suez’, E.A. Cox, CO 956/116–20, TNA. 98 Levine, ‘Naked Truths’, 9. 99 ‘Colonial Progress Brings Home Prosperity’, A. Allinson, CO 956/212– 16, TNA. 100 ‘Felling a Karri Tree’, A.B. Webb, CO 956/53, TNA. 101 ‘Felling Mahogany’, G. Spencer Pryse, A272/X2 2845025, LAC. 102 Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 27 June 1929, CO 760/26, TNA. 103 It appears this sequence went too far for the East African trade commissioner. Though the reports do not specify his complaints, the committee felt it necessary to request changes in ‘one or two respects’, notably ‘in regard to the whip in the right-hand poster’. Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 8 May 1930, CO 760/26, TNA 104 My thanks to Piper Whitehead for this observation. See ‘Colombo, Ceylon’, K.D. Shoesmith, CO 956/13; ‘Mahogany Rafts on the Oluwe’, G. Spenser Pryse, B098/X7 2845345, LAC. 105 ‘Cocoa’, E. McKnight Kauffer, CO 956/499; ‘The Market Garden of the Tropics – Mauritius Sugar’, E. Ainsworth, CO 956/272, TNA. 106 The Times, 7 February 1927, 13. 107 The Times, 28 August 1929, 8. 108 The Times, 24 June 1929, 13. 109 Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 187. 110 Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 16 June 1927, p. 3, and 28 April 1927, p. 2, CO 760/26, TNA. 111 For example, the Melbourne Argus ran pictures of ‘Cattle Raising’, Gregory Brown, 11 January 1929, 7; ‘The Empire Stands for Peace’, 14 December 1929, 12; ‘Help Australia and Help Yourself’, 20 September 1930, 8. 112 Minutes of Poster Sub-committee, 12 April 1928, p. 2, and 12 March 1931, p. 2, CO 760/26, TNA. 113 Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 188. 114 ‘Empire Shopping Week’, Sydney Morning Herald, 14 May 1929, 10; The Argus (Melbourne, VIC), 25 May 1929, 17. 115 ‘Marketing Within the Empire’, The Times, 23 August 1928, 7. 116 Thackeray, Forging A British World of Trade, 89–93.

198

Notes to pages 132–9

117 Barnes, New Zealand’s London, 174–5. 118 Self, ‘Treasury Control and the Empire Marketing Board’, 173.

chapter six 1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23

Advertising World, May/June 1926, p. 181, London and United States Advertisements 1926–1927, MS-Papers-3913-8/22, Ilott Advertising Ltd: Records 1892–1984, Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL). Advertising World, May/June 1926, p. 181, London and United States Advertisements 1926–1927, MS-Papers-3913-8/22, Ilott Advertising Ltd: Records 1892–1984, ATL. Ilott, Creating Customers, 73. Advertiser’s Weekly (AW ), 27 May 1927, 329. Thompson and Magee, Empire and Globalisation, 24. Domosh, ‘Pickles and Purity’, 20. Trentmann, Empire of Things, 171. Benson, The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain, 1880–1980, 146. See Constantine, ‘The Buy British Campaign of 1931’, 89–93; Thackeray, ‘Selling the Empire’, 685–6. For two examples, see Barnes, ‘Lancashire’s War with Australia’ and Thackeray, Forging a British World of Trade, 92–3. Belisle, Retail Nation, 57. AW, 27 May 1927, 321. AW, 6 September 1934, 237; AW , 27 Sept 1934, 357. ‘History of MacLarens Agency’, c.1968, Business Files, F-4476-2, Archives of Ontario (AO). ‘MacLaren Advertising: Its Growth and History, 1922–1968’, p. 21, Business Files F-4467-2, AO. AW, 18 June 1926, 442. Ibid. AW, 21 May 1926, 270; AW , 17 September 1936, viii. Ilott(?) to Austad, 24 February 1931, Miscellaneous Papers re. the London Office 1927–58, MS-Papers-3913-8/05, Ilott Advertising Ltd: Records 1892–1984, ATL; AW, 24 September 1936, viii. AW, 19 November 1926, 307. AW, 19 September 1935, 361. Most notably in de Grazia, Irresistible Empire. National histories include Johnston, Selling Themselves ; Crawford, But Wait, There’s More ; Phillips, Sell! Tall Tales From the Legends of New Zealand Advertising ; Alsop and Stewart, Promoting Prosperity. For

Notes to pages 139–43

24

25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

199

the arrival of multinationals, see Dickenson, ‘Global Advertising Histories’, 321–32; Davis, ‘Negotiating Local and Global Knowledge and History’, 81–97; Crawford, ‘Opening for Business’, 452–72. West, ‘Multinational Competition in the British Advertising Agency Business, 1936–87’, 472. Those five were Dorlands, J. Walter Thompson, Erwin Wasey, Lord and Thomas, and McCann Erickson. They grew rapidly from this date, helped by accounts gained from New York. West, ‘From T-Square to T-Plan’, 200. For this tendency in the global south, see Woodward, ‘Consumer Culture, Market Empire, and the Global South’, 375–98. For recent critiques of the American-centric model, see Fasce and Bini, ‘Irresistible Empire or Innocents Abroad?’, 7–30; Nixon, ‘Apostles of Americanization?’, 477–99; Schwarzkopf, ‘Who Said “Americanization”?’, 33–100; Schwarzkopf, ‘Creativity, Capital, and Tacit Knowledge’, 181–97; Crawford, ‘Relocating Centres and Peripheries’, 51–73. De Grazia, Irresistible Empire. Dickenson, ‘Global Advertising Histories’, 321–32. For example, McKim, AW, 28 July 1932, 177; Gordon & Gotch, AW, ‘Overseas Marketing and Publicity’, February 1932, 30. Crawford, ‘ “Differences … in Dealing with The Australian Public” ’, 319. Advertising World, April 1926, p. 65, London and United States Advertisements 1926–1927, MS-Papers-3913-8/22, Ilott Advertising Ltd: Records 1892–1984, ATL. Crawford, ‘Selling or Buying American Dreams?’, 228. Patterson, Life Has Been Wonderful, 65. Goldberg, My Life in Advertising, 1912–1957, 15; Phillips, Sell! Tall Tales from the Legends of New Zealand Advertising, 30. AW, 11 June 1926, 386. Crawford, ‘Selling or Buying American Dreams?’, 228. AW, 15 March 1929, 468. Johnston, Selling Themselves, 42. AW, 24 September 1936, viii. Patterson, Life Has Been Wonderful, 65. AW, July 1924, xx; AW , 28 Jan 1927, 143. Minutes, 13 April 1926, p. 30, Minute Book 1924–1934, MS-Group-0945, Charles Haines Advertising Agency: Records 1907– 1972, ATL; Minutes, 3 May 1927, p. 56, Minute Book 1924–1934, MSGroup-0945, Charles Haines Advertising Agency: Records 1907–1972,

200

44 45

46

47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

Notes to pages 143–7 ATL; Minutes, 1 March 1929, p. 98, Minute Book 1924–1934, MSGroup-0945, Charles Haines Advertising Agency: Records 1907–1972, ATL. Minutes, 31 May 1927, p. 62, Minute Book 1924–1934, MS-Group-0945, Charles Haines Advertising Agency: Records 1907–1972, ATL. Minutes, 1 March 1929, p. 98, Minute Book 1924–1934, MS-Group-0945, Charles Haines Advertising Agency: Records 1907–1972, ATL. Minutes, 4 April 1930, p. 115, Minute Book 1924–1934, MS-Group-0945, Charles Haines Advertising Agency: Records 1907–1972, ATL. Minutes, 7 July 1932, p. 141, Minute Book 1924–1934, MS-Group-0945, Charles Haines Advertising Agency: Records 1907–1972, ATL. AW , 17 August 1933, 296. Minutes, 24 September 1936, p. 25, Minute Book 1935–1946, MS-Group-0945, Charles Haines Advertising Agency: Records 1907–1972, ATL. Ibid., 24. AW , 24 April 1926, 120. AW , 4 October 1929, 22. AW , 25 November 1927, 709. AW , 25 November 1927, 44. Cryle, ‘Gordon and Gotch, 1890–1940’, 45. AW , 30 August 1929, 354. Advertising World, November 1926, p. 73, London and United States Advertisements 1926–1927, MS-Papers-3913-8/22, Ilott Advertising Ltd: Records 1892–1984, ATL. Ibid. Advertising World, September 1926, p. 487, Inwards Correspondence, MS-Papers-3913-2/2, Ilott Advertising Ltd: Records 1892–1984, ATL. AW , 29 July 1927, 371. Advertising World , November 1926, p. 77, Inwards Correspondence, MS-Papers-3913-2/2, Ilott Advertising Ltd: Records 1892–1984, ATL. AW , New Zealand Supplement, July 1924, xxxix. AW , 30 December 1927, 537. AW , 30 September 1927, 711. AW , 27 May 1927, 231. Stephenson and McNaught, The Story of Advertising in Canada, 258–9. Ibid., 259. AW , 26 July 1929, 130.

Notes to pages 147–51

201

69 AW, 16 August 1929, iv. 70 AW, 30 August 1929, 354. 71 AW, 26 July 1929, 130. 72 Thackeray, ‘Selling the Empire?’, 670–80. 73 AW, 9 July 1926, 66. 74 AW, 30 September 1927, 711. 75 AW, July 1924, xx. 76 AW, 30 December 1927, 558. 77 Ibid. 78 Haughton, ‘The Advertising Agency Office in London, 1900–1950’, 72. 79 AW, 1 November 1929, 200. 80 Johnston, Selling Themselves, 64. 81 Crawford, ‘ “Differences … in Dealing with The Australian Public” ’, 321. 82 AW, 30 December 1927, 560. 83 AW, 11 June 1926, 386. 84 Goldberg, My Life in Advertising, 15. 85 For Empire as ‘shelter’, see Cain, ‘Economics and Empire’, 45. For a revision, see Thompson and Magee, ‘A Soft Touch?’, 690–1. For British ‘failure’ generally, see Crafts, ‘Long-Run Growth’, 11–17; for competitive weakness in the interwar period, see Crafts, ‘Long-Run Growth’, 22. 86 For Australia, see Crawford, ‘Selling or Buying American Dreams?’. 87 This was a complaint also levelled at American manufacturers and advertising agencies. See Crawford, ‘ “Differences … in Dealing with The Australian Public” ’, 320. 88 AW, 30 December 1927, 560. 89 Ibid., 552. 90 AW, 27 May 1927, 321. 91 Stephenson and McNaught, The Story of Advertising in Canada, 246. 92 AW, ‘Overseas Marketing and Publicity’, February 1932, 30. 93 AW, 30 December 1927, 552; AW, ‘Overseas Marketing and Publicity’, March 1932, 52. 94 AW, 30 December 1927, 558. 95 Daily Herald, 24 June 1932, 5; New Zealand Herald (NZH ), 15 October 1932, 19. 96 The Press, 7 May 1932, 2; Sunday Mirror, 29 November 1931, 11. 97 O’Cedar Limited, 25 April 1929, MS-Papers 3913-2/1, Correspondence Files 1926–1930, Ilotts Advertising Ltd – Records 1892–1984, ATL.

202

Notes to pages 152–6

98 The Press, 7 May 1932, 2; Sunday Mirror, 29 November 1931, 11. 99 Schwarzkopf, ‘Creativity, Capital, and Tacit Knowledge’, 181–97. 100 Hunter to J. Ilotts, 31 March 1930, Inwards Correspondence, MSPapers-3913-2/2, Ilott Advertising Ltd: Records 1892–1984, ATL; O’Cedar to Ilotts, 4 November 1931, Inwards Correspondence, MSPapers-3913-2/2, Ilott Advertising Ltd: Records 1892–1984, ATL. 101 See Liz McFall, Advertising ; Schwarzkopf, ‘The Subsiding Sizzle of Advertising History’, 531. 102 Leiss, Kline, Jhally, and Botterill, Social Communication in Advertising, 68–76. 103 Schwarzkopf, ‘Who Said “Americanization”?’, 26. See also Nixon, ‘Apostles of Americanization?’, 477–99. 104 West, ‘From T-Square to T-Plan’, 199–217. 105 Crawford, ‘ “Differences … In Dealing with the Australian Public” ’, 321, 325. 106 Schwarzkopf, ‘Who Said “Americanization”?’, 41. 107 Crawford, ‘Opening for Business’, 458–9. 108 Johnston, Selling Themselves, 60. 109 Crawford, ‘ “Differences … In Dealing with the Australian Public” ’, 323. 110 One study of advertising in a New Zealand nursing journal, unsurprisingly, noted evidence of British patriotism during and directly after World War I. See Krisjanous and Wood, ‘ “For Quiet Nerves and Steady Poise” ’, 34. 111 This point is often missed in recent work on consumption in former settler colonies. For an otherwise excellent study that normalises ‘white’ consumption, see Crawford, Smart, and Humphery, ed., Consumer Australia. 112 NZH, 31 July 1931, 4; NZH, 7 August 1931, 16. 113 Apple ‘ “They Need It Now” ’, 71. 114 Bryder, A Voice for Mothers, 74. 115 Mein Smith, Mothers and King Baby, 1. 116 Bryder, A Voice for Mothers, 3. 117 NZH, 23 January 1931, 5; NZH, 8 December 1931, 16; NZH, 20 January 1931, 3; NZH, 10 February 1931, 4. 118 NZH, 23 February 1931, 16; NZH, 10 February 1931, 4. 119 NZH, 25 March 1931, 15; NZH, 28 September 1931, 13; NZH, 5 August 1935, 3. 120 NZH, 10 April 1935, 5; NZH, 20 August 1935, 17. 121 NZH, 3 June 1931, 16.

Notes to pages 157–62

203

122 Krisjanous and Wood, ‘ ‘‘For Quiet Nerves and Steady Poise’’ ’, 38. 123 For Aunt Jemima in the Canadian setting, see Thompson, ‘ “I’se in Town, Honey” ’, 205–37. 124 NZH, 7 February 1931, 19. 125 Goldberg, My Life in Advertising, 15–16. 126 Crawford, But Wait, There’s More, 57. 127 Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 12. 128 Ibid., 184. 129 Belisle, Purchasing Power, 8. 130 Rutherdale, ‘Packing and Unpacking’, 129. 131 Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 184. 132 Crawford, But Wait, There’s More, 57. 133 Thomas, Entangled Objects, 88. For New Zealand, see Petrie, Chiefs of Industry; Vincent O’Malley, The Meeting Place. 134 For New Zealand, see Stevens, ‘Muttonbirds and Modernity in Murihiku’. See also Hokowhitu and Devadas, ‘Introduction’, xxxiii; Bird, ‘Savage Desires’, 62–98. 135 Ciarlo, Advertising Empire, 5.

conclusion 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9

New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Sixteenth Annual Report 1938, 8. Australian Dairy Produce Board, Fourteenth Annual Report of the Australian Dairy Produce Board for Year 1938–39, 11. Ibid. Australian Parliament, Annual Report of the Australian Meat Board, 1937, 35. Hudd to Parmalee, 16 February 1939, Advertising Canada in the UK, Vol. 3, File 28804, RG 20 Vol. 203, LAC. Parmalee to Hudd, 5 September 1939, Advertising Canada in the UK, Vol. 3, File 28804, RG 20 Vol. 203, LAC. Australian Dairy Produce Board, Fifteenth Annual Report of the Australian Dairy Produce Board for Year 1939–40, 6. Mosby notes that rationing was even popular in Canada because it kept inflation low and ensured equitable distribution. Mosby, Food Will Win the War, 85. Canada’s voluntary women’s associations, along with the popular press, also promoted ‘buying British’ in this period. See Broad, A Small Price to Pay, 24–5. New Zealand Commerce, 15 September 1946, 38, quoted in Thackeray, Forging a British World of Trade, 111; Mosby, Food Will Win the War, 123.

204

Notes to pages 162–3

10 Thackeray, Forging a British World of Trade, 111. 11 Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 472. 12 New Zealand Meat Producers Board, Twenty-Sixth Annual Report 1948, 29. 13 Darwin, Unfinished Empire, 375. 14 Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 472. 15 Thackeray, Forging a British World of Trade, 168.

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Index

Page numbers with (f) refer to figures. advertising. See marketing and advertising advertising agencies: about, 6, 20, 134–51, 160–1; Americanness, 154– 5; archives, 139; British agencies and ads, 140, 158; Britishness, 145–51, 154–7; Depression’s impact, 140, 143–4; Dominion vs. UK ads, 151–4, 160; effectiveness, 137, 152–3; finances, 141; globalisation, 140, 153–4, 160; modernity, 141, 149, 153–4; networks, 141–3; newspapers, 140–1, 144; Ovaltine marketing, 155–60, 157(f); services, 139, 149, 152; shared strategies, 41–2, 79; US relations, 139–40, 149, 160; WWII’s impacts, 161–3. See also marketing and advertising advertising agencies, Australia: about, 20, 134–9, 145, 149–50; agencies, 41, 138–9, 142; Britishness, 147–8. See also Australia, marketing; Goldberg, Frank (agency) advertising agencies, Canada: about, 20, 41–2, 134–8, 145; Britishness, 147; shared strategies, 41–2, 79. See also Canada, marketing; McKim (agency) advertising agencies, New Zealand: about, 20, 134–8, 145; agencies, 41, 138–9; comparison of UK vs. Dominions, 151–2; Ovaltine

marketing, 155–60, 157(f). See also Charles Haines (agency); Goldberg, Frank (agency); J. Ilott Ltd. (agency); New Zealand, marketing affect and emotional communities, 47–53, 56, 58, 63, 65. See also imperial sentiment Africa: black workers, 82, 86, 128–30, 197n103, plate 7, plate 8; commodities, 125, 129, 130, 196n77, plate 8; posters, 128–30, 197n103, plate 3, plate 7, plate 8; South Africa, 6, 62, 115, 125, 171n65, 196n77 agencies. See advertising agencies Amery, Leo, 49, 52, 63 apples. See Australia, commodities, fruit; Canada, commodities, fruit Appleton, William, 143–4 Atkinson, Mrs G.H., 52 ATP. See Australia, marketing, Australian Trade Publicity (ATP) Australia: co-ethnicity, 9–10, 58–9, 71–2, 87; demographics, 71–2, 80, 109; economics of empire, 16–17, 53, 71–2; imperial sentiment, 9–10, 19, 23–5, 56–9; independence, 16–17, 183n17; Indigenous peoples, 80, 106, 159–60; migration, 95; modernity, 76–9, 121–2; tourism, 95, 186n79; trade statistics, 26, 27, 53, 149–50, 162; trade wars, 64–5;

232

Index

whiteness, 76–7, 82–5, 85(f), 108, 131; WWii’s impacts, 161–3. See also advertising agencies, Australia; coethnicity; films, Australia Australia, commodities: about, 26–8; British-prone, 27–8, 31–3; cleanliness, 76–7, 82–3, 120; competitiveness, 41, 54, 75; cotton, 64–5, 104; pineapples, 105, 109; quality and reliability, 54–6, 75–7, 120, 130–1; raw vs. processed, 26–8, 75–6; seasonality, 146; steel, 122, plate 5; sugar, 105, 108, 125; timber, 94, 95, 119, 129, 196n77; wheat, 27, 104, 105, 119, 124; wool, 27, 95, 119, 173n25 Australia, commodities, dairy and poultry: butter, 106, 108, 109, 124, plate 2, plate 5; eggs, 71, 94, plate 2; marketing, 36, 75, 82–5, 85(f), 99, plate 5; producer boards, 19, 31–3, 99, 133, 161; special cows, 21–2, 75 Australia, commodities, fruit: about, 31–3, 70–1; apples, 66, 73, 81, 82, 98, 125, plate 1, plate 4; ‘British to the Core’ slogan, 5, 27, 41, 66, 67, 89, plate 1; marketing, 32, 41, 72–3, 82, 85, 98, 130, plate 1; producer boards, 19, 31–3, 133. See also films, Australia Australia, commodities, fruit, dried: about, 70–1, 131, 132(f); Christmas puddings, 21, 61, 70–1, 109; currants, 66, 70–1, 85, 131, 132(f); marketing, 33(f), 66, 76–7, 82–5, 84(f), 105, 120, 131, 132(f); raisins, 21, 66, 70–1, 85, 131, 132(f); sultanas, 66, 70–1, 105, 120, 131, 132(f) Australia, commodities, meat: about, 32–3; industry disorganisation, 32–3; marketing, 33, 127–8, plate 7; producer boards, 32–3, 106, 133, 161; sheep and cattle, 33, 106, 122, 127–8, plate 7

Australia, marketing: about, 5–6, 22– 8, 133, 145; Britishness, 5–6, 17, 66– 73, 82–5, 85(f), 87, 159–60; Britishprone, 27–8, 31–3; competitiveness, 41, 54, 75; imperial sentiment, 56–9; Indigenous peoples, 81, 106, 159–60; industry disorganisation, 32–3; landscapes, 72–3, 75, 82–3, 103–4, 118–19, 122, 127–8, 130, plate 5, plate 7; modern, white, rural, and masculine, 17, 76–7, 82–7, 84(f), 85(f), 110, 127–8; modernity, 76–9, 121–2; producer boards, 31–3, 38; purity and whiteness, 76–7, 82–3, 131; quality and reliability, 54–6, 75–7, 120, 130–1; sales representatives, 56, 58–9; shared strategies, 31, 41–2, 79; trade volumes vs. ad size, 27. See also advertising agencies, Australia; films, Australia Australia, marketing, Australian Trade Publicity (ATP): about, 16, 23–4, 31–3, 36, 58–9, 133; funding, 19, 32; London-based offices, 24–5, 32, 58–9; strategies, 56–9, 66, 79. See also Australia, marketing strategies Australia, marketing strategies: about, 5–6, 79; ‘Australia weeks’, 36; brands, 27; ‘British to the Core’ slogan, 5, 27, 41, 66, 67, 89, plate 1; Christmas puddings, 5, 21, 70–1; contests, 56, 57; cookbooks, 32, 60–3, 66, 70–1, 75, 96; dairy campaigns, 19, 31–3, 36; displays, 36, 60; exhibitions, 60, 75; health and nutrition, 77–9; maps, 73, 83, 119, 120–4, plate 1, plate 2, plate 3, plate 5; posters, 33, 33(f), 111–12, 127–8, 131, plate 1, plate 2, plate 4, plate 5, plate 7; public giving, 63; tours, 59; Wembley on Wheels (pageant), 21–4, 22(f) Bashford, Alison, 76 Belich, James, 25–6, 122, 163

Index Benson, John, 136 blackness. See Africa; race and racism Bombay, 124 Bowker, Kathleen, 62–3 boycotts, 64–5 British Empire and imperial power: empire, as term, 72; healthy race as precondition, 78–9; map (‘Highways of Empire’), 111, 120–1, 131; metropole vs. periphery, 17; trade as cultural force, 9–10, 20. See also dependent empire; Dominions British Empire Exhibition, Wembley (1923–5), 3–4, 21–3, 22(f), 24, 35, 44–5, 52, 165 British Empire Producers Organization (BEPO), 49, 53, 58 Britishness: about, 5–6, 8–14, 66–72, 87, 160, 163–5; co-ethnicity, 9–10, 69–71, 87; commodity Britishness, 12–13, 26–7, 69, 82–3; about, 66–73, 80–3, 87; concept of, 12–13, 163–5; constructedness, 67, 69; Dominions vs. dependent empire, 81–2, 124–30; economic reciprocity, 71–2; empire as family, 49, 52, 117, 120, 126; vs. foreignness, 82, 121; as ‘Home-like’, 118, 120, 136, 145, 148; imperial sentiment, 9–10, 52; landscapes, 5–6, 72–5, 74(f), 82–3, 104–6, 106(f), 118–21, 127–8; maps, 67, 70, 73, 83, 119, 120–4, plate 3; modern, white, rural, and masculine, 12–13, 18, 20, 69, 82–7, 84(f), 85(f), 104–5, 110, 127–8, 164–5; race and gender, 12–13, 69. See also co-ethnicity; consumer economy; cultural economy; Empire Marketing Board (EMB); gender; imperial sentiment; marketing and advertising; marketing strategies; race and racism; social inclusion/exclusion Canada: co-ethnicity, 9–10, 69, 72, 87; demographics, 71–2, 80, 147,

233

148, 149; economics of empire, 16–17, 71–2; French Canada, 67, 72, 80, 147; imperial sentiment, 9–10, 19, 23–5, 34, 39, 56–7, 59; independence, 16–17, 26, 34, 36, 41–2, 133, 183n17; Indigenous peoples, 80, 106, 128, 148, 158–60; migration campaigns, 25–6, 34–5, 69, 95; modernity, 76–9, 121–2; trade statistics, 26, 37–8, 162; WWI and WWII, 37–8, 69–70, 161–3. See also advertising agencies, Canada; co-ethnicity; films, Canada; United States–Canada relations Canada, commodities: about, 26–8, 34–42; British-prone, 27–8, 34–42; competitiveness, 36–41, 54; farm labour, 37; quality and reliability, 54–6, 75–7; raw vs. processed, 26–8, 75–6 Canada, commodities, dairy: about, 36–9; butter, 54, 124; cheese, 36–7, 39, 54; marketing, 39; milk, 38; producer boards, 19, 36–7, 38–9, 133; ties to bacon production, 37 Canada, commodities, fruit: about, 39–40; apples, 39, 63, 67, 70, 122, 127–8, plate 4; ‘British to the Core’ slogan, 5, 27, 41, 67, 89; canned fruit, 39, 54; marketing, 39–40, 40(f), 82, 118, 127–8, plate 4; producer boards, 19, 133 Canada, commodities, grains: marketing, 27–8, 36, 69, 73, 74(f), 82, 86, 102, 124; processed grains, 27, 39, 70, 86; producer boards, 38, 70; trade statistics, 37, 162 Canada, commodities, meat and fish: about, 36–9; bacon, 37, 67, plate 8; marketing, 39, plate 8; pre-interwar years, 37–8; producer boards, 10, 36–7, 133; salmon, 54; trade statistics, 37, 38 Canada, marketing: about, 5–6, 22–8, 34–43, 56, 133; archives, 20; Britishness, 5–6, 17, 66–73, 82–3,

234

Index

87, 159–60; British-prone, 27–8, 34– 42; Canada Calling campaign, 40–2, 69, 72, 133, 161; competitiveness, 36–41, 54; effectiveness, 36–9; EMB relations, 23, 34, 36; French Canada, 67, 80; government offices, 24–5, 34–5, 38–9, 41–2, 56–7; Indigenous peoples, 81, 106, 128; landscapes, 72–3, 74(f), 82, 103, 118–19, 127–8, 130; modern, white, rural, and masculine, 17, 85, 85(f); modernity, 76–9, 121–2; purity and whiteness, 76–7, 82–3; quality and reliability, 54–6, 75–7; shared strategies, 41–2, 79; trade volumes vs. ad size, 27, 36. See also advertising agencies, Canada Canada, marketing strategies: about, 5–6, 57–8, 79; aeroplane banners, 5, 41; brands, 27, 39; ‘British to the Core’ slogan, 5, 27, 41, 67, 89; Canada Calling campaign, 40–2, 69, 72, 133, 161; cookbooks, 60–3; displays, 36, 39, 42, 57, 60; exhibitions, 35–6, 39–40, 40(f), 42, 131; health and nutrition, 77–9, 86–7; maps, 119, 120–4, plate 3; posters, 57, 111–12, 117–23, 131, plate 4, plate 8; public giving events, 63; tours, 56–7; Wembley on Wheels (pageant), 21–4, 22(f) Catts Patterson (agency), 141 Chapman, W.L., 145–6 Charles Haines (agency), 6, 140, 143–4, 147, 149 children, marketing to, 35–6, 63–4, 99–100, 100(f), 131 Christmas puddings, 5, 21–3, 22(f), 63, 70–1, 87, 109, 117, 126 Ciarlo, David, 160 cinema. See films class, social, 7, 18, 51–3 cocoa, 125, 129, 130, plate 8 co-ethnicity: about, 9–10, 19, 45–6, 67–9, 87; advertising,

69–70; Britishness, 9–10, 69–71, 87; cultural economy, 9–10, 45–6, 65, 87; economic reciprocity, 71–2; EMB participation, 34, 36; imperial sentiment, 9–10, 46, 58–9, 60–3, 71, 87; social inclusion/exclusion, 10–11, 19, 80; as unreliable in consumer competition, 67; WWI as shared, 69–70. See also social inclusion/exclusion commodities: about, 7–8, 26–8; British-prone commodities, 27–8, 31–42, 70; commodity Britishness, 12–13, 163; commodity racism, 11–12, 68–9, 82–3; Dominions vs. dependent empire, 124–30; exoticism, 7–8, 12, 70, 124–7, plate 8; national identities, 67, 124; quality and reliability, 54–6, 75–7; raw vs. processed, 26–8, 75–6; seasonal advantages, 146; WWII’s impacts, 161–3. See also Australia, commodities; Canada, commodities; New Zealand, commodities; tea Conor, Liz, 158 Constantine, Stephen, 85, 117, 193n12 consumer economy: about, 7, 18, 50–4, 59–65, 159–60; advertising agencies, 145; Britishness, 5–6, 9, 18, 66–9, 136–8; chain stores, 36, 51–3, 59, 61–2, 137; cookbooks, 60–3; housewives, 18, 50–3, 59–60, 65, 76, plate 5; imperial sentiment, 9–10, 47–53, 63; Indigenous peoples, 158–60. See also economy; imperial sentiment cookbooks and recipes, 60–3, 66, 70, 90, 98, 99, 117 Copeland, Donalda, 158–9 cotton, 64–5, 104, 123, 129, plate 6 Crawford, Robert, 158 Crawford, William, 79, 114, 116 Crawfords (agency), 79, 114, 152 Cronin, Mike, 118

Index cultural economy: about, 7–11, 17– 20, 45–6, 53, 65, 163–4; Britishness, 45–6, 66–9, 82–3, 87; co-ethnicity, 9–10, 45–6, 65, 87; effectiveness of marketing, 53; imperial sentiment, 45, 47, 53, 65; marketing as cultural force, 7, 9–10, 20, 53–9, 65; power relations, 20. See also Britishness; co-ethnicity; imperial sentiment; marketing and advertising currants. See Australia, commodities, fruit, dried dairy industry. See Australia, commodities, dairy and poultry; Canada, commodities, dairy; New Zealand, commodities, dairy Darwin, John, 8, 162 David Allen (agency), 138 de Grazia, Victoria, 50 Denmark: competitiveness, 54, 82; meat and dairy industries, 37, 38, 39, 54, 78, 121 dependent empire: about, 124–30; vs. Dominions, 83–7, 124–30, plate 7; EMB participation, 82, 114, 115; exoticism, 7–8, 12, 70, 124–7, plate 8; food quality, 108; gendered images, 83–7, 127, 129–30; labourers, 127–8; vs. masculinity, 83–7; vs. modernity, 120–1, 127; posters and maps, 111, 115, 123–4, plate 3, plate 6, plate 7, plate 8; racial stereotypes, 117, 127, plate 7; scholarship on, 91; vs. whiteness, 81–2, 117, 123–5, 127 Depression, 70–1, 82, 87, 99, 101, 113, 140–1 Dominions: about, 5–8, 164–5; competition between, 75; consumers vs. producers, 86; vs. dependent empire, 83–7, 117, 124–30; display for hoardings, plate 3; Dominionness, 164–5; EMB role, 113–15; map, plate 3; modern, white, rural, and masculine,

235

12–13, 127–8; modernity, 75–7, 121–2, 127; turn to independence, 16–17, 183n17; whiteness, 81–5, 84(f), 85(f), 127, plate 7. See also Britishness; dependent empire; economy; settler colonies Dominions, specific: Irish Free State, 6, 118, 168n16; Newfoundland, 6; South Africa, 6, 62, 115, 125, 171n65, 196n77. See also Australia; Canada; New Zealand dried fruit. See Australia, commodities, fruit, dried Dunkley and Friedlander (agency), 138 economy: academic turn to culture, 8–10; co-ethnicity, 9–10, 46, 71, 118; cooperative societies, 52; Depression, 70–1, 82, 87, 99, 101, 113, 140–1; empire as family, 49, 52, 117, 120, 126; free trade, 14, 49, 58; imperial preference, 14–15, 25, 49–50, 53, 113, 133; imperial sentiment, 9–10, 49, 118; postWWII, 162–3; protectionism, 14, 49; reciprocal trade, 71–2, 117–18, 122–3; trade routes, plate 3; trade statistics, 26–7, 53, 115, 149–50, 162, 194n21; trade wars and boycotts, 64–5; US competition, 139–40, 149. See also consumer economy; cultural economy; imperial sentiment education, 51, 56, 90, 101 EMB. See Empire Marketing Board (EMB) emotions and empire. See imperial sentiment Empire. See Britishness; dependent empire; Dominions; economy Empire Economic Union, 49 Empire Industries Association (EIA), 49 Empire Marketing Board (EMB): about, 14–18, 19–20, 23–5, 111–15, 131–3, 132(f), 133; archives, 20,

236

Index

193n20; British consumers, 115, 131; Britishness, 7, 18, 70–1; complementary programmes, 16; dependent empire, 82, 114, 115, 124–30; Dominions’ roles, 25, 34, 36, 58, 111–16, 131; economic reciprocity, 71–2, 117–18; effectiveness, 14–15, 17–18, 23, 116–17; empire as family, 117, 126; funding, 15–16, 25, 112, 113; goals, 116; history (1926–33), 14–18, 23, 25, 111–15; imperial sentiment, 50, 57–9, 71; Indigenous peoples, 119, 128; influence of exhibitions, 113–14; statistics, 15, 115. See also Britishness; Imperial Economic Conference (1932), Ottawa Empire Marketing Board, Australia: hoardings, plate 3; marketing, 131, 132(f); posters and maps, 33(f), 111–12, 127–8, 131, plate 3, plate 4, plate 5, plate 7; representation, 114 Empire Marketing Board, Canada: Empire Shopping Weeks, 53, 115, 131, 137; hoardings, plate 3; posters and maps, 111–12, 117–23, 131, plate 3, plate 8; representation, 114; school materials, 131 Empire Marketing Board, New Zealand: about, 29–31, 111–12, 131–3; Empire Shopping Weeks, 53, 115, 131, 137; hoardings, plate 3; ineffectiveness, 116–17; landscapes, 118–19, 127–8, 130; posters and maps, 116–24, 129–30, plate 3, plate 4; press ads, 131; representation, 115 Empire Marketing Board, strategies: celebrities, 126; Christmas puddings, 70; competitions, 31; films and distribution, 92–3, 96, 101, 115; hoardings, plate 3; landscapes, 118–19, 122, 127–8, 130; maps, 111–12, 119, 120–4, plate 3, plate 5; posters, 111–12, 117–23, 127–8, 131, 194n22, plates

3–8; press ads, 115, 130–1; rural vs. urban images, 117–22; shopping weeks, 53, 115, 131, 137 Englishness and Britishness, 12–13. See also Britishness exclusion. See social inclusion/ exclusion exhibitions: about, 4, 8; basis for marketing, 8, 24, 42–3, 45, 113–14. See also marketing and advertising exhibitions, specific: British Empire Exhibition, ‘On Tour’ (1925), 21–4, 22(f), 44–5, 52; British Empire Exhibition, Wembley (1923–25), 3–4, 35, 165; Glasgow (1938), 4, 161; Great Exhibition (1851), 8, 11, 168n25; Imperial Fruit Show, 39–40, 40(f); International Health Exhibition, 28; Olympia (1932), 75 femininity. See gender; women films: about, 11, 19, 89–90, 104–5, 109–10; audiences, 90, 91(f), 96, 98–101; Britishness, 69, 90–2, 94– 102; commodity processing, 105– 10; critical reception, 93–4, 97–8; distribution, 96–7; documentaries and non-fiction, 92–4; educational role, 90, 101; effectiveness, 19, 94; government film units, 93–6; historiography, 91–3; imperial unity, 101; Indigenous peoples, 103–4, 105–6; landscapes, 72–3, 75, 103–4, 105–6, 106(f); The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (US), 88–91, 110; metropole vs. periphery, 91–3; migration, 95, 103–4; modern, white, rural, and masculine, 102–7, 110; modernity, 19, 79, 90; One Family (EMB), 117; pre-interwar, 93, 94–5; press coverage, 99, 100(f); scholarship on, 91–2; shared films, 93; social realism, 92, 93, 101, 102; statistics, 89–90, 96–7, 99, 101, 117; talkies, 105; theatres, 96–9; tourism, 95, 103, 186n79; US films, 88–91, 110

Index films, Australia: about, 95, 104–5; ATP promotions, 96, 98; commodities and processing, 104–10; distribution, 96–7; government film units, 92, 95–6; modern, white, rural, and masculine, 102–5, 110; network of shared films, 93; new settler identity, 105–7, 110; theatres, 96–8 films, Australia, specific: Among the Hardwoods, 94; Australian Apples, 109; British to the Core, 89–90, 99, 105, 109–10; Dairy Farming in Queensland, 98; Fruit Canning in Australia, 98; Life in Australia, 99; Playground of the Sea Folk, 99; The Story of the Sultana, 105; This Is Australia, 98, 104 films, Canada: about, 95–6, 101–2, 104–5; Canada Calling campaigns, 41, 42, 69; commodity processing, 105–10; critical reception, 93–4; distribution, 96–7, 101; government film units, 92, 95–6, 101–2, 189n47; Indigenous peoples, 103, 106; modern, white, rural, and masculine, 102–7, 110; statistics, 32; wheat marketing, 69, 102 films, Canada, specific: Alice in Apple Land, 101; Falling Waters, 103; The Kinsmen, 69, 102; Seeing Canada, 96 films, New Zealand: about, 95, 104–5; children’s contests, 99–101, 100(f); commodity processing, 105–10; critical reception, 93–4, 97–8; distribution, 93, 96–7; government support, 29, 92, 95–6; modern, white, rural, and masculine, 102–5, 110; new settler identity, 105–7, 110; press coverage, 99, 100(f); talkies, 105; theatres, 96–7, 101 films, New Zealand, specific: Down on the Farm, 97; Meadow to Market, 105, 107, 109, 110; The Meat We Eat, 97–8, 104, 109; The Milky Way, 109;

237

New Zealand’s Thermal Wonderlands, 95 First Peoples. See Indigenous peoples Flavelle, Joseph, 37 Forsyth, R.S., 103n19, 114, 115, 116, 193n19 fruit. See Australia, commodities, fruit; Australia, commodities, fruit, dried; Canada, commodities, fruit gender: about, 12; Britishness as masculine, 12–13, 83–7, 127–8, 164–5; dependent empire images, 83, 86, 127, 129–30; Dominions, 83, 127; EMB marketing, 14, 127, 129–30; feminised exotic other, 12, 83, 86, 127; social inclusion/exclusion, 87. See also women Gerahty, D.G., 56–7, 115 Glasgow. See Scotland Goldberg, Frank, 138–9, 141–3, 142(f), 148–50, 158 Goldbergs (agency), 139, 141–3, 142(f), 149 Gordon & Gotch (agency), 6, 145, 147–8, 148(f), 150 grains: Australian wheat, 27, 104, 105, 119, 124. See also Canada, commodities, grains Great Depression. See Depression Great Exhibition (1851), 8, 11, 168n25 Grierson, John, 92–3 Haines. See Charles Haines (agency) health and science: cleanliness, 76–7, 82–3, 120; exhibitions, 28; food processing, 107–10, 120, 131; health and nutrition, 77–9, 86–7, 155; healthy white race, 78–9, 86–7; Ovaltine marketing, 155–60, 157(f); physical culture, 79; scientific motherhood, 76, 155; scientific racism, 68 Hill, O. Mary, 35, 176n98

238

Index

housewives. See consumer economy; women Hyland, A.E., 5, 32, 58, 90, 96, 99 identity: about, 5–6, 8, 13, 17–18, 20, 87, 110, 163–5; commodity marketing, 81; Dominion competitiveness, 75; EMB marketing, 131–3, 132(f); globalisation, 13; modern, white, rural, and masculine, 12–13, 17–18, 20, 82–7, 84(f), 85(f), 110, 127–8; national unity and commodity racism, 68–9; new settler identity, 105–7, 127; shared identity, 17–18; urban vs. rural images, 121–2. See also Britishness; co-ethnicity; gender; Indigenous peoples; race and racism Ilotts. See J. Ilott Ltd. (agency) imperial cultural economy. See cultural economy Imperial Economic Committee (IEC), 25, 34, 113–14 Imperial Economic Conference (1923), 113 Imperial Economic Conference (1932), Ottawa: agreements, 15, 140; as continuity vs. change, 15–16; EMB disbanding, 14–16, 23, 133; films, 93; impacts on Dominions, 14–16, 31, 32, 171n65; imperial preference, 14–15, 25, 133; tariffs, 23, 25, 113; turn to independence, 16–17, 183n17 Imperial Fruit Show, 39–40, 40(f) Imperial Institute, 101 Imperial Press Conference, 115 Imperial Relations Trust, 93 imperial sentiment: about, 9–10, 45– 53, 65; co-ethnicity, 9–10, 46, 58–9, 60–3, 71, 87; consumer imperialism, 50–3; cultural economy, 47, 53; dynamic and fragmented, 46; emotional communities, 47–53, 56, 58–9, 63; empire as family, 49, 52,

117, 120, 126; ‘Home’ bonds, 118, 120, 136, 145–6, 148; metropolitan organisations, 48–53; post-Wembley ‘buying empire’, 24–5; scholarship on, 45–8, 51; women, 50–3. See also Britishness; cultural economy inclusion. See social inclusion/ exclusion India: commodities, 82, 123, 124, 130, plate 6; The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (film), 88–91, 110; posters, 115, 123–4, 129–30, plate 3, plate 6 Indigenous peoples: advertising images, 80–1, 127–8, 158–9; cultural appropriation, 119, 158–9, 186n80; demographics, 80; dispossession, 10, 12, 26, 68, 128, 159; exclusion from marketing, 138, 158–60; films, 103–4, 105–6; scholarship on, 68; symbolic annihilation, 68, 103, 106, 119, 127–8, 158–9. See also Māori Inuit, 158–9 Irish Free State, 6, 118, 168n16 J. Ilott Ltd. (agency): British goods sold to NZ consumers, 151–60; comparison of UK vs. Dominion ads, 151–2; London office, 134–5, 135(f), 139, 143–7, 149; Ovaltine marketing, 155–60, 157(f) Jaikumar, Priya, 89 J.J. Gibbons (agency), 143 JWT (J. Walter Thompson) (agency), 139, 153, 154 King, W.L. Mackenzie, 16–17, 24, 34 kinship networks. See co-ethnicity landscapes. See Britishness; marketing strategies Larkin, Peter, 34–5 League of Empire Housewives, 51, 58, 65 Levine, Philippa, 128 Lord Mayor’s Show, London, 21, 22(f), 23, 28

Index Lydon, Jane, 48 Lyons, Joseph, 59, 64, 89 MacKenzie, John, 45, 46–7, 113, 138 MacLaren (agency), 41, 138 Magee, Gary, 9–10, 45, 136 Malta, 4, 44, 124 Māori, 80, 81, 103, 104, 106, 107, 158–9, 186n80 Marchand, Roland, 82 marketing and advertising: about, 5–6, 11–12, 16–17, 21–8, 53–9, 66–9, 163–5; archives, 10, 20, 139, 193n20; by Britain, 23, 46–53; Britishness, 5–6, 66–73, 82–3, 87, 160; British-prone commodities, 27–8, 31–42; children as audience, 35–6, 63–4, 99–100, 100(f), 131; by Dominions, 53–9, 133; economic reciprocity, 71–2; effectiveness, 53–5; empire, as term, 72; imperial sentiment, 56–9; market research, 149; metropole vs. periphery, 16, 23; migration campaigns, 25–6, 34–5, 69, 95; personal connections, 56–9; price, quality, and supply, 53–6; scholarship on, 13–14; shared identity, 17–18; statistics on, 11; tourism, 80–1, 95, 186n79; WWI and WWII, 69–70, 161–3. See also advertising agencies; Australia, marketing; Canada, marketing; consumer economy; Empire Marketing Board (EMB); Imperial Economic Conference (1932), Ottawa; New Zealand, marketing marketing strategies: brands, 27–9, 31, 39, 55, 63–4, 81, 134; clothing in ads, 127, 129–30, 158; commodity racism, 11–12, 68–9, 82–3; contests, 31, 56, 57, 99–100, 100(f); cookbooks, 60–3, 66, 70, 90, 98, 99, 117; health and nutrition, 77–9, 86–7, 155; imperial sentiment, 9–10, 23–5, 53, 70–2; Indigenous culture, 80–1, 106, 119; landscapes,

239

72–5, 74(f), 82–3, 103–6, 106(f), 118–20, 130; negative appeals, 86; shared strategies, 31, 41–2, 79; spectacles, 4–6, 8, 21–3, 22(f), 163, 165; tours, 56–7, 59. See also Australia, marketing strategies; Britishness; Canada, marketing strategies; Empire Marketing Board (EMB), strategies; films; New Zealand, marketing strategies; social inclusion/exclusion masculinity. See gender Massey, Vincent, 40, 101–2 Mather and Crowther (agency), 41, 79 Mauritius, 125 McClintock, Anne, 11, 12, 68 McConnell and Fergusson (agency), 138, 144 McDougall, Frank, 58, 114 McFall, Liz, 11 McKenzie, Francine, 16 McKim (agency), 138–9, 145, 147–8, 150 meat industry. See Australia, commodities, meat; Canada, commodities, meat and fish; New Zealand, commodities, meat men. See gender migration: co-ethnicity, 45–6; films, 95, 103; marketing by Dominions, 25–6, 34–5, 69, 95 modernity: about, 164–5; advertising strategies, 76–9, 121–2; new technologies, 11, 19, 156; Ovaltine advertising, 156–7; in settler colonies, 154–5. See also films; health and science; marketing and advertising Mosby, Ian, 204n8 movies. See films nationalism, 23–4, 164–5. See also identity native people. See Indigenous peoples

240

Index

networks. See co-ethnicity New Zealand: co-ethnicity, 9–10, 19, 67–9, 87; demographics, 71–2, 80, 109; economics of empire, 16–17, 71–2; imperial sentiment, 9–10, 19, 23–5, 58–9, 145–6; independence, 16–17, 183n17; Māori, 80, 81, 103, 104, 106, 107, 158–9, 186n80; migration campaigns, 25–6, 95; modernity, 75–6, 121–2, 156–7; tourism, 95, 186n79; trade statistics, 26, 31, 162; WWII’s impacts, 161–3. See also advertising agencies, New Zealand; co-ethnicity; films, New Zealand New Zealand, commodities: about, 26–31; apples, 125; British-prone, 27–31; competitiveness, 38, 41, 54–5, 75; quality and reliability, 54–6, 75–7; raw vs. processed, 26–8, 75–6; seasonality as advantage, 146. See also New Zealand, producer boards New Zealand, commodities, dairy: about, 28–9, 108–9; brands, 31, 55, 63–4, 81; butter, 5, 20, 29, 31, 55, 63–4, 81, 98, 108–9, 124; cheese, 31, 36, 55, 64, 66; gift packs, 64; marketing, 5, 15, 27–9, 31, 120–1; publications, 131; trade statistics, 31. See also New Zealand, producer boards New Zealand, commodities, meat: about, 28–31, 30(f); frozen meat, 28, 52, 55; labour, 69; lamb, 5, 27–31, 30(f), 58, 61, 66, 98, plate 1; marketing, 5, 27–8, 66, 69, 73, 104, 109, 127, plate 1. See also New Zealand, producer boards New Zealand, marketing: about, 5–6, 22–31, 133; Britishness, 5–6, 17, 66–70, 72–3, 82–3, 87, 145–6, 148, 160; British-prone, 27–31; competitiveness, 38, 41, 54–5, 75; Indigenous culture, 81, 106;

landscapes, 72–3, 75, 82–3, 103–4, 105–6, 106(f), 118–19, 127–8, 130; London-based High Commission, 24–5, 29, 95, 96, 134; maps, 22, 67, 119, 121, plate 3; modern, white, rural, and masculine, 17, 127–8, 158; modernity, 76–9, 121–2, 156–7; purity and whiteness, 76–7, 82–3; quality and reliability, 54–6, 75–7; sales representatives, 56; shared strategies, 31, 41–2, 79. See also advertising agencies, New Zealand New Zealand, marketing strategies: about, 79; brands, 27–9, 31, 55, 63–4, 67, 81; clubs, 63–4; cookbooks, 60–3; displays, 29–31, 30(f), 60; exhibitions, 21–3, 22(f), 28; food gifts, 64; food sculptures, 31; health and nutrition, 77–9; Ovaltine marketing, 155–60, 157(f); posters, 66, 116, 117–23, 129–30, plate 4; slogans, 5, 66. See also films, New Zealand New Zealand, producer boards: about, 28–31, 30(f), 38, 133, 161; cooperation with Australia, 31; cooperative dairy, 19, 29, 31, 63–4, 81, 96; dairy board, 58, 78, 81, 96, 99; effectiveness, 29, 38; impact of Ottawa agreements, 31; marketing, 19, 29–31, 30(f), 56, 61, 64, 66–7, 69, 161; meat producers, 28–9, 30(f), 58, 66–7, 96, 99–100, 161 Newfoundland, 6 Nigeria, 4, 129 Nova Scotia, Canada, 39–40, 40(f) Ottawa agreements. See Imperial Economic Conference (1932), Ottawa Ovaltine, 155–60, 157(f) Patterson, George, 139, 141, 143, 149 Pick, Frank, 114

Index Porter, Bernard, 177n20 press, 11, 62–3, 131 Primrose League, 50–1 progress, 4, 126 puddings, Christmas, 5, 21–3, 22(f), 63, 70–1, 87, 109, 117, 126 race and racism: about, 11–12, 68–9, 81–3; advertising images, 68, 81–2, 127, 158, plate 7; Britishness, 12–13, 87; commodity racism, 11–12, 18, 68–9, 81–3; competitors as ‘foreigners’, 82; gender, 12–13; healthy white race, 78–9; non-white immigration as threat, 156; purity in race-based discourses, 76–7, 82–3; race and place, 7; scientific racism, 68; social inclusion/exclusion, 87 raisins, 85, 139. See also Australia, commodities, fruit, dried Rappaport, Erika, 18 recipes and cookbooks, 60–3, 66, 70, 90, 98, 99, 117 Reddy, William, 47–8, 50 rice, 124, 127, 128, 130 Richards, Jeffrey, 89, 91 Rooth, Tim, 177n23 Rosenwein, Barbara, 47–8 Schwarzkopf, Stefan, 79, 153 science. See health and science Scotland: Dominion campaigns, 41, 60, 72, 73, 74(f), 102; exhibitions, 4, 60, 161; wool, 72, 173n25 Self-Supporting Empire League, 44–50, 52, 59, 65 sentiment. See imperial sentiment settler colonies: about, 7, 9, 159–60, 163–5; commodity racism, 11–12, 68–9, 81–3; creation stories, 106; imperial sentiment, 9–10, 145; modern, white, rural, and masculine, 12–13, 20, 82–5, 84(f), 85(f), 155, 158–60, 164–5;

241

modernity, 154–5; new settler identity, 105–7, 110; non-white immigration as threat, 156. See also co-ethnicity; Dominions; imperial sentiment; Indigenous peoples; migration; race and racism; whiteness shows. See exhibitions; films Sifton, Clifford, 34–5 Skelton, Oscar, 16–17, 34, 36 social class, 7, 18, 51–3 social inclusion/exclusion: about, 10–11, 19, 67–9, 87; Britishness, 67–9, 87, 103, 159–60; co-ethnic networks, 10–11; commodity racism, 11–12, 68–9, 81–3; EMB marketing, 121; films, 103; Indigenous peoples, 68, 103, 106, 119, 127–8, 158–9. See also race and racism South Africa, 6, 62, 115, 125, 171n65, 196n77 spectacles, commodity, 4–6, 8, 21–3, 22(f), 163, 165. See also exhibitions, specific Suez Canal, 124 sugar, 104–5, 108, 125, 128, 130, 197n83 sultanas. See Australia, commodities, fruit, dried tea: consumer knowledge, 18, 51, 52; marketing, 12, 18, 72, 82, 83, 123, 128, 129, plate 6 Thomas, Nicholas, 159 Thompson, Andrew, 9–10, 45, 136 tobacco, 14, 68, 86, 128–9, 196n77 tourism, 80–1, 95, 186n79 trade films. See films Trentmann, Frank, 7, 50 United States: about, 79; advertising agencies, 149–50, 154; Americanness vs. Britishness, 154; competitiveness, 149–50; market

242

Index

research, 11; Rotary Clubs, 50; trade with UK, 149 United States–Canada relations: advertising agencies, 139–40; California raisins, 85, 139; competitiveness, 41–2, 54, 79, 139–40, 149; film representations of British Empire, 88–9; trade statistics, 26 Victoria League, 49 Ward, Stuart, 9–10 Wembley, British Empire Exhibition (1923–1925), 3–4, 21–3, 22(f), 24, 35, 44–5, 52, 165 wheat: Australian, 27, 104, 105, 119, 124. See also Canada, commodities, grains whiteness: about, 7, 82–3, 158–9, 164; marketing, 81–5, 84(f), 85(f), 158; posters, 125–30; purity and

cleanliness, 76–7, 82–3, 131. See also identity; race and racism; settler colonies Wolfe, Patrick, 68 women: about, 59–65; careers, 52–3; consumer imperialism, 50–1, 59–65; as consumers, not producers, 129, plate 5; cookbooks, 60–3, 66; in dependent empire, 127, 129–30; health of the empire, 86–7; housewives, 18, 50–3, 59–60, 65, 76, 85, 86, 90, 99–100; media celebrities, 62–3; metropolitan organisations, 50–3, 58, 65; mothers, 86, 155–6; posters, 127, 129–30, plate 5; scientific motherhood, 76, 155; social class, 51–3; whiteness and purity, 76–7. See also consumer economy; gender World War I, 37, 69–70 World War II, 161–3, 204n8