Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising

by Christopher Wixson

  Through a couple changes of agency, Formamint continued to be aggressively marketed into the mid-1920s, although the future of the German-based brand was threatened at the onset of the First World War by the Patents, Designs, and Trade Marks Act (1914). Within two months of its passage, according to a 1914 piece in Scientific American, “about one hundred applications were received from British business men asking for permission to make products protected by English patents granted to Germans, and about the same number of applications for the right to use German trade-marks which have been widely advertised in England.” 55 In the February 20, 1915 issue, The British Medical Journal articulated its position in relation to the “special legislation, passed shortly after the commencement of the war,” empowering the “Board of Trade to make drastic alterations in regard to the continuance of patent rights and trade-mark rights in this country held by alien enemies” (339). No action is taken until an application is made to suspend proprietary rights and license manufacture of a product “for the public interest and not merely for the private interest of the applicant.” Reviewing such cases, the Journal concludes that “the Board has been guided solely by a consideration of the importance, from the public point of view, of keeping in existence the production of certain articles, and has never avoided or suspended the rights of patentees or the owners of registered trade-marks merely on the ground that they were alien enemies.”

  The article notes that an application was made to suspend the trademark Formamint but was denied. 56 Yet, in its December 16, 1916 issue of the Journal, the AMA reported thatthe English assets of Wulfing, including all stocks of santogen, formamint, albulactin, and cytospurin, have been, like other German-owned undertakings in this country, sold by order of the government. They have been purchased by Lord Rhondda, a business magnate, in conjunction with others. In the future, therefore, the business will be entirely British and free from enemy capital or influence. 57

  The new proprietors announced their intention, “with the encouragement of the medical profession, to offer ample funds and facilities for experimental research work in synthetic chemistry, in the hope that English investigators may devise new products of no less value”—they hope to win back physicians who had “only abandoned on patriotic grounds” prescribing the products, particularly as they had heard from “many physicians” how disappointed they were by the inferiority of their “numerous imitations.”

  In the meantime, like Formamint, Shaw’s trademark persona seemed to be at a moment of crisis. An editorial that appeared in The Nation in October 1909 declared thatthe time has come … when the insolent Shavian advertising no longer fills us with astonishment or discovery or disables our judgment from a cool inspection of the wares advertised. The youthful Athenians who darted most impetuously after his novelties are already hankering after some new thing. The deep young souls who looked to him as an evangelist are beginning to see through him and despair. 58

  In his 1916 biography of Shaw, Augustus Hamon suggested that “G.B.S.” was at a critical juncture, analogical perhaps to the one increasingly faced by testimonial advertising in general, over questions of truthfulness:It is this outrageous system of advertisement, in conjunction with the humorous fashion in which he presents his most serious ideas, which have prevented, and continue to prevent, people from taking him seriously. “He is a very clever man, his plays are extremely amusing, but he is neither serious nor sincere,” say of him most of his countrymen. Others, somewhat less dogmatically, are content to ask themselves, “Is he in earnest?” 59

  However, it was his Common Sense about the War , appearing in the New Statesman in November of 1914, that dealt Shaw’s reputation the most serious blow and turned him into what A. M. Gibbs describes as an “extraordinarily isolated and reviled figure in England.” 60 Running counter to the atmosphere of fierce nationalism, his essay was intensely critical of British leadership, and the playwright ascribed culpability to both sides for the conflict. Shaw’s “reasoning was impeccable; his offence emotional,” and the outcry was immediate and severe. 61 As Dan H. Laurence recounts,Common Sense about the War shook the nation to its underpinnings, generating a fury of outrage and splenetic derogation from the press. He was denounced as a traitor, an enemy “within our walls.” Former friends cut him dead at committee meetings and in the streets. Booksellers and librarians removed his works from their shelves. 62

  The newspapers that had so eagerly published anything by and about him now “instructed their readers to boycott his plays,” 63 and “Shaw was effectively expelled from the Dramatists’ Club and forced out of his positions on committees of the Society of Authors.” 64 Among the personal losses for Shaw was his long friendship with playwright Henry Arthur Jones ; in 1915, Jones wrote to his daughter, “There is no use talking or thinking about the war. It’s awful, and Shaw is only anxious to get an advertisement out of it.” 65 He was prophetic, in a sense. When, in 1915, the British Army anxiously turned to Shaw to get a war advertisement out of him, the playwright responded with a one-act meditation on the celebrity testimonial .

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  A nation is forced to advertise its needs in order to win recruits, just as a manufacturer is forced to advertise his promises in order to gain purchasers. 66

  Throughout the war, advertising revenue sharply decreased, and “by the end of 1915 it became clear that newspapers had also suffered a large drop in the volume of advertising they carried … not so much the result of cutbacks by advertisers as of a shortage of newsprint, which was forcing them to run smaller issues, with the column inches available for advertising correspondingly reduced.” 67 At the same time, government advertising in various media surged to disseminate national propaganda and imitated professional marketing techniques in recruitment notices. For instance,[On October 30, 1915] the entire front page of the Freeman’s Journal was dedicated to a recruitment advertisement that declared, “Irishmen! You cannot permit your Regiments to be kept up to strength by other than Ireland’s sons! It would be a deep disgrace to Ireland, if all her regiments were not Irish to a man.” The advertisement summoned “50,000 Irishmen to join their brave comrades in Irish regiments.” (A detachable form that men could complete in order to enlist was even included at the bottom of the page.) 68

  In turn, commercial advertising put the war to work on its own behalf. Accounts of battlefield heroism and soldier life and appeals to home front morale and support “became grist to the copywriters’ mill, and manufacturers … often boasted of their popularity with the troops up the line.” 69 Copy that made reference to the war and layout crafted to mimic the form of official journalism could catch the attention of readers with enlisted loved ones desperate for any information as advertisers sought to “tap into nationalist sentiment and align their brands with the values often associated with wartime service: courage, sacrifice, heroism.” 70

  The industry had for decades often mimicked the journalistic article in form and headline as a strategy. In Advertising, Literature and Print Culture in Ireland, 1891–1922, John Strachan and Claire Nally survey the ways in which advertising borrowed the likeness of official news by analyzing specific adverts:At first glance, before the realization that we are in the presence of a commercial advertisement dawns, this looks like part of the recruitment effort, with its banner evoking the recruitment banner so common elsewhere in the contemporary Irish press. … Such semi-disguised advertisements, which gesture towards the spirit of the age around them, were especially popular in the turbulent period under discussion here, when readers were hungry for news of war, rebellion and the rebirth of a nation. 71

  These masked advertisements built upon a tradition of patent medicine marketing that aped the form of articles in medical journals and often deployed testimonials from war participants in a way similar to the legitimating endorsements from health-care practitioners in their predecessors. In America, for instance, images of “war casualties quickly popped up in advertisements for a range of commercial products,
from Swan pens to Santanogen, a topical disinfectant, [and were] upbeat in tone, mirroring the stories of cheerfully wounded soldiers that filled wartime newspapers.” 72 In Ireland, “testimonials from the front were also very common in First World War advertising copy, as members of the soldiery supposedly put pen to paper to commend manufacturers of cigarettes, porridge, nourishing hot drinks and the like, which had sustained them in their hour of darkness.” 73 Testimonial performance also was a key facet of enlistment drives, and Shaw’s 1915 playlet “O’Flaherty V.C.” reveals a shrewd understanding of the interplay between the war industry and modern advertising.

  During the summer and fall of 1915, the British army launched an intense enlistment campaign in Ireland, trying to improve recruit totals that were significantly lower than those from England and Scotland. In July, Michael John O’Leary had returned home after becoming the first Irish soldier to be awarded the Victoria Cross for his single-handed capture of two German barricades (including the killing of eight German soldiers) and became the effort’s centerpiece, featured prominently in posters and leading parades. When asked by Sir Matthew Nathan , Under-Secretary for Ireland, to aid the sluggish drive, Shaw appropriated O’Leary’s celebrity in both the English and Irish press and, as Michael Holroyd puts it, “Shavianized it for the stage.” 74 Needless to say, the one act play was not the hoped for endorsement; in consultation with General Sir John French , Commander-in-Chief of Home Forces, Nathan “requested that Shaw postpone the 1916 Abbey Theatre production by the Irish players … for fear of rioting in Ireland, and because it was felt that some passages of the play taken out of context might be used by the Central Powers for propaganda purposes.” 75 “O’Flaherty V.C.” would have to wait until February 1917 in Belgium for its first performance.

  In their account of the sale of the Formamint brand name, JAMA, echoing widespread frustration with patent medicine among medical professionals, bemoans that “the gullibility of the public and unfortunately of many physicians with regard to these preparations appears to be inexhaustible.” Similarly irked, Shaw, in so much of his writing about the war, targeted a public gulled by propaganda, and the beginning of “O’Flaherty V.C.” seeks to awaken its audiences to the ways in which the war industry marketed patriotism. Building upon the play’s subtitle (“A Recruiting Pamphlet”), Shaw begins the preface by again characterizing “O’Flaherty V.C.” as a print advertisement: “It may surprise some people to learn that in 1915 this little play was a recruiting poster in disguise.” 76 In doing so, he situates the play not only in relation to issues of the war and Irish nationalism but also to advertising, both national and commercial. During the war, such posters and pamphlets were of course ubiquitous and deployed many of the same marketing strategies as product advertising.

  When the army began to specifically address Ireland in their recruitment materials, 77 O’Leary , upon whom Shaw bases Dennis O’Flaherty, had been used in 1915 posters in the ways endorsers appeared in patent medicine adverts (among others). Bold banners directly addressing the viewer: “AN IRISH HERO! 1 IRISHMAN DEFEATS 10 GERMANS” heads a likeness of O’Leary’s face at the center of a medal “for valour” situated above his name: “SERGEANT MICHAEL O’LEARY, V.C.” with “IRISH GUARDS” in green underneath. Consistent with his denials of “any direct correlation between his character and the real life O’Leary ,” Shaw’s play acts in dialogue not with the man but with this advertisement representation. Nonetheless, as Lauren Arlington points out, “the seeming correlation between the fictional soldier and the real-life O’Leary would do little to endear his play to either the civil or the military authorities.” 78 Shaw’s O’Flaherty, replete with his own Victoria Cross and fresh off a sensational battlefield exploit, seems a similarly perfect testimonial provider. The play’s subtitle sets up assumptions as to its ideological thrust only to have them, in typical Shavian fashion, upended in a turnaround that reveals as much about the playwright’s understanding of promotional technique as it does his conviction of the “futility of nationalism.” 79

  The play begins at the conclusion of a recruiting appearance at an Irish country house, against the aural backdrop of “God Save the King,” “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” and cheering from the crowd. The title character emerges onstage “wearily” and “exhausted” 80 in his promotional role, claiming he “never knew what hard work was til [he] took to recruiting”:What with the standing on my legs all day, and the shaking hands, and the making speeches, and – what’s worse – the listening to them, and the calling for cheers for king and country, and the saluting the flag til I’m stiff with it[.]

  Already it’s drove me to the pitch of tiredness of it that when a poor little innocent slip of a boy in the street the other night drew himself up and saluted and began whistling [Tipperary] at me, I clouted his head for him. 81

  Hardly a ringing affirmation from a celebrity spokesman. As Arlington notes, O’Flaherty is an “unenthusiastic participant in the recruitment campaign,” and Shaw “takes a sharp jab at British recruiting propaganda” by evoking the conventional anthems of the war. 82 In contrast, General Sir Pearce Madigan arrives still spewing recruitment copy: “Though I am a general with forty years of service, that little Cross of yours gives you a higher rank in the roll of glory that I can pretend to” (988). Yet, even Madigan is familiar with the mythologizing tendencies of such events. After O’Flaherty’s confession that he has lied to his mother and that he is a “ready liar” (992), the General responds by suggesting that, “in recruiting, a man gets carried away” (992) but nonetheless some prudent pruning of the soldier hero’s copy might be in order:I stretch it a bit occasionally myself. After all, it’s for king and country. But if you won’t mind my saying it, O’Flaherty, I think that story about your fighting the Kaiser and the twelve giants of the Prussian guard singlehanded would be the better for a little toning down. I don’t ask you to drop it, you know; for it’s popular, undoubtedly, but still, the truth is the truth. Don’t you think it would fetch in almost as many recruits if you reduced the number of guardsmen to six? (992)

  Ignoring the copywriting advice, O’Flaherty swerves away from endorsement, undercutting the reputed heroism of his battlefield act as well as his motives for enlistment. He claims to have no idea what the war is about (994) and isn’t sure “about its being a great war [although] it’s a big war; but that’s not the same thing” (995). In response, Sir Pearce is incredulous: “have you no knowledge of the causes of the war? Of the interests at stake? Of the importance—I may almost say—in fact I will say—the sacred rights for which we are fighting? Don’t you read the papers?” (994). O’Flaherty’s extended reply squarely takes on Dublin Castle’s ideological cloaking:It’s in the nature of governments to tell lies … what use is all the lying, and pretending, and humbugging and letting on, when the day comes to you that your comrade is killed in the trench besides you, and you don’t as much as look round at him until you trip over his poor body, and then all you say is to ask why the hell the stretcher-bearers don’t take it out of the way. Why should I read the papers to be humbugged and lied to by them that had the cunning to stay at home and send me to fight for them? Don’t talk to me or to any solider of the war being right. No war is right. (1005, 996)

  As Terry Phillips suggests, “from almost the first words he speaks, O’Flaherty is transformed from the ignorant peasant he at first appears to a version of the Shakespearean Fool enunciating uncomfortable truths, anticipating Joan.” 83 In marketing terms, the veteran is also transformed from the celebrity personality enlisted to endorse the product into one whose testimony leads in another direction.

  For Shaw, O’Flaherty’s “experience in the trenches has induced in him a terrible realism and an unbearable candor” that renders him unable to tow the promotional line. 84 As a result, Murray Biggs argues thatthis play is not the merely amusing trifle it at first seems to be but, rather, an uncomfortably pessimistic account of the way things are and for the foreseeable future
will be. As the work’s protagonist gloomily prophesies, one war or another will make “no great differ” to the state of the world as it fundamentally is. 85

  However, in the preface, Shaw writes that it may come as a “surprise” to the reader that the play is in fact a “recruiting poster in disguise”; if O’Flaherty’s shreds the army’s patriotic appeal derived from romanticized British nationalism, Shaw replaces it with a different marketing approach. For Terry Phillips ,the word “surprise” suggests a tension between intention and effect, a tension that … resides in the question of audience. The basis for regarding the play as a recruiting play is fairly sound, given the assumption that it was written, at least in the first instance, for an Irish audience. 86