Vintage Poster Archives
Eckersley State Security 1955 | Post Office Savings Bank
Eckersley State Security 1955 | Post Office Savings Bank
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A Life Guards soldier in a yellow-green Albert helmet is set against a bold crimson chevron, face rendered in three-quarter profile with a single black chin-strap arc crossing pale pink skin. Cream italic script reads 'State Security' at the apex; bold black sans-serif capitals state 'POST OFFICE SAVINGS BANK' below. The blue-grey ground recedes to near-white at the margins, giving the figure the concentrated weight of a heraldic device reduced to flat graphic colour.
Designed by Tom Eckersley for the Post Office Savings Bank around 1955, the poster was part of the GPO's post-war campaign reassuring British savers that their money was backed by the State. Eckersley, awarded the OBE in 1948 for services to poster design, was one of the GPO's most regularly commissioned artists through the 1950s. The Household Cavalry soldier as a symbol of state-backed security was an economical solution: one figure, one message, no supporting text required.
The work is representative of the mid-century modern direction Eckersley had developed from the flat-colour, reduced-form principles he absorbed from Cassandre and McKnight Kauffer and refined into his own post-war British idiom. By the mid-1950s Eckersley had also become Head of Graphic Design at the London College of Printing, where he established the first undergraduate graphic design courses in Britain, making this poster a document not only of commercial graphic design but of the decade in which that discipline found its institutional footing in the UK.
Reproduced from an archival source on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper. A natural fit for anyone interested in mid-century British design, the history of government communication, or the particular authority of a single-image poster that needs no explanation.
