Dig for Victory: The Poster That Started All This

There is a poster in my hallway that I am never going to replace.

It is not a good print. It is a cheap reproduction, the paper has sagged in the frame and gets a little worse every year, and the colours were never quite right to begin with. I sell archival prints for a living now, made properly, on good paper, built to outlast the people who buy them. I could run myself a flawless copy of this exact poster this afternoon. I never have, and I never will.

To explain why, I have to go back to being thirteen.

Fifteen pounds in Olney

I grew up near Olney, a small market town in Buckinghamshire, the sort of place that is quietly famous for more than its size suggests. It has run a pancake race every Shrove Tuesday since, they will tell you, 1445, and it is where John Newton wrote "Amazing Grace". It was also, back then, a good town for junk shops, though it has since been quietly gentrified. It was in one of those shops, sometime around the age of thirteen, that I found it.

Dig on for Victory. A cheerful chap striding down a garden path, pitchfork over his shoulder, an armful of vegetables and a basket of potatoes. A wartime poster telling the British public to keep growing their own food. It cost fifteen pounds, which for a thirteen-year-old in the 1980s was a genuine sum of money, and I did not have it.

So I earned it. I washed cars and I mowed lawns until I had the fifteen pounds, and I went back and I bought it. I can still remember carrying it home.

The wall around it changed

Here is the part my friends could not understand. I put it on my bedroom wall, and it stayed there while everything around it changed, the way a teenager's wall does. Duran Duran had the space beside it for a while. Then Duran Duran came down and Back to the Future went up, a cheap Athena reproduction, Marty McFly in his red bodywarmer checking his watch beside the open door of the DeLorean. I wanted that bodywarmer badly enough to beg for one. And through all of it, the pop posters and the film posters coming and going, the Dig on for Victory poster stayed exactly where it was.

When friends came round to play on the flight simulator, the control clamped to my desk with suction cups and plugged into the big television, they would clock the wall. The film poster made sense to them. The wartime vegetable-growing poster did not. My friends thought I was, to put it kindly, a bit odd. A poster about growing your own food was not what anyone else had on their wall, and I could not really have told you at the time why I wanted it there. I just did. Something about it, the design, the directness, the fact that it had meant something urgent to real people once, held me in a way the film and pop posters never quite did, even as I loved those too.

I was right about it, as it turned out. But it took me a long time to understand why.

Why keep the bad one

The poster followed me through every house I have lived in since. It hangs in my hallway now, and it is in worse condition than ever. The paper sags. The colours have faded further. By every standard I now apply to my own work, it is exactly the kind of print I would tell a customer not to buy.

And it is the most important object I own, professionally speaking.

Because somewhere between that junk shop in Olney and now, the thing a strange thirteen-year-old loved became the thing I do. Vintage Poster Archives exists because a wartime poster on a bedroom wall, sitting incongruously beside a pop group and a time-travel film, got its hooks into me and never let go. Every poster I restore, every sheet I try to reproduce honestly and well, traces back to that one. It was my first piece of vintage art, bought with car-washing money, and it started all of this.

That is why I will never replace it. A perfect copy would be a better print and a worse object. The sagging paper, the fading, the fifteen pounds I did not have and earned anyway, that is the whole point. You cannot reprint that.

The one that got thrown away

There is an irony in it that I have grown to enjoy. The Back to the Future poster was the disposable one, the film tie-in, the thing you stuck up and expected to bin. It came from Athena, a shop that felt permanent in 1985 and does not exist any more. And original 1985 printings of that poster now sell at auction for thousands of pounds, more, at one recent sale, than four different original Star Wars posters put together.

Nobody pinning one up in a bedroom in 1985 imagined that. And nobody looking at my fifteen-pound wartime reproduction thought it was worth anything at all. The market, in the end, decided one of those posters was valuable. I decided the other one was. Only one of those decisions still hangs in my hallway.

That is the thing I have learned from thirty years of this, and it is really what the whole business is built on. Worth is not the same as fashion, and it is not always the same as price. Sometimes a thing is worth keeping simply because you chose to keep it, and kept choosing, through every house and every wall, until the choosing became the point.

Dig for Victory: the family of posters

The poster I bought was part of a wider campaign, and one that people muddle constantly. "Dig for Victory" was launched on the British home front to urge people to turn gardens, parks and verges over to growing vegetables, easing the pressure on wartime food supplies. The most famous image is the austere one, a booted foot driving a spade into the earth, which is what most people picture. Mine is a warmer, later variant, "Dig on for Victory", designed by the Scottish artist Peter Fraser around 1944, when the war's end was in sight and the worry was that people would stop digging too soon. It is the "keep going" poster, and I have always thought it the kinder of the two.

There is a third in the family too, a bright basket of vegetables by Irene Mitchell, "your own vegetables all the year round". People come looking for one and often mean another, which is half the pleasure of them.

Our Dig for Victory collection

We now have four designs from the campaign in the archive, each restored from the highest-quality archival source we could find.

Dig On For Victory — Peter Fraser — the one in my hallway. A smiling farmworker strides toward you carrying a pitchfork and a basket of vegetables, the countryside stretching behind him. Fraser's brushwork gives it a warmth the more graphic designs lack.

Dig for Victory — Child Gardener — adapted from the prize-winning design by Mary Tunbridge. A small child seen from behind, white sun hat and smock, spade in one hand, hoe over the shoulder. Bold black type above, red VICTORY below. One of the strongest pieces of graphic design to come out of the entire Home Front campaign.

Dig for Victory — All My Own Work — a boy in a beret kneels beside a blackboard chalked with the words ALL MY OWN WORK, a harvest of vegetables heaped around him. Warmer and more humorous than the others; the kind of poster that went up in schools and community halls rather than on hoardings.

Dig for Victory — Vegetable Basket — the Irene Mitchell design, a woven basket overflowing with fresh produce against sunshine yellow. The one most people picture when they think of the campaign.

Frequently asked questions

Who designed the Dig for Victory posters?

Several artists contributed across the campaign's six-year run. The child-with-spade design was adapted from a prize-winning entry by Mary Tunbridge and printed by H. Manly and Son for HMSO. The Dig On for Victory variant was illustrated by Peter Fraser. The vegetable basket is by Irene Mitchell. All were produced under the direction of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.

When did the Dig for Victory campaign start?

It launched in October 1939, just weeks after war was declared, following a radio broadcast by Minister of Agriculture Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith. By 1943 an estimated 1.4 million allotments were under cultivation across Britain. The campaign ran through to the end of the war and beyond — rationing lasted until 1954.

Are Dig for Victory posters public domain?

Yes. These designs were produced under Crown copyright for His Majesty's Stationery Office. Crown copyright in published works expired 50 years after publication under the law that applied at the time, meaning all early 1940s HMSO posters are now fully in the public domain in the United Kingdom.

What sizes are available?

All four designs are available from A4 through to A0, plus 50x70cm and 70x100cm, printed on 200gsm archival paper and fulfilled by Prodigi across the UK, US and Canada.

What paper are the prints on?

200gsm Enhanced Matte Art paper — the same stock used by museum print rooms. It holds colour accurately, has a subtle texture that suits illustrated and painterly originals, and is acid-free for longevity.