Outputs

The Ministry of Information was an impressively productive organisation throughout its brief life. What follows is a list of all its printed outputs for which we could provide documentary evidence. This evidence comes from INF files in the National Archives or from collections in the British Library. Most of the entries in the list record the specific file or shelf mark from which they come.

In this list ‘print’ takes many forms. There are books, of course, but these are in a minority. There are pamphlets; leaflets; flyers; notes; newspapers; magazines; comics; cartoons; single photographs, or in sets, or in continuous (concertina) form; posters in a range of sizes up to billboard format; sets of stickers; sets of transfers; tie pins; lapel badges; and model aircraft kits. There were also ‘clip sheets’ and ‘digests’ that collected excerpts from newspaper and magazines that might be of use to journalists in the UK and abroad. Not usually recorded in this list, though still an important form of print, were all the articles written by MoI staff, or by other journalists commissioned by the Ministry, which were syndicated or reprinted in all sorts of periodicals in many nations. Many printed outputs were produced in more than one language, and the most popular often appeared in ten or more languages. In fact, nearly half of the printed items produced were not in English. Attached to most printed items in this list, including second and subsequent printings, is an indication of the recorded print run. These give some indication of just how many copies of certain items were produced. In the case of the MoI’s popular and profitable ‘Official War Books’ series, some titles ran into millions, with the most popular, The Battle of Britain, selling about 4.8 million in the UK alone in its first six months. Altogether, at home and abroad, the Official War Books had sold 23 million copies by 1944. Two illustrated magazines: Neptune and War in Pictures, together were produced in over 69 million copies between 1940 and 1945. These numbers, however, were frequently dwarfed by the print runs of the smallest items such as leaflets and flyers. Even this, however, pails when compared with the Political War Executive (PWE), which had links to MoI in terms of staffing and direction (Bracken was one of the two ministers responsible for PWE). It appears to have produced and distributed nearly six billion leaflets during the war.

The spreadsheet is ordered chronologically by year of production, when known. This is followed by a longer list of outputs where the year is not known, usually indicated by a likely date range in square brackets. Finally, there is a list of printed outputs most likely produced in a particular year, or range of years, and these are again indicated in square brackets.

This list gives a rough indication of the MoI’s printed output. But this was only one aspect of its ferocious productivity. It was, in one way or another, involved in the production of nearly 2,000 short and feature films during the war, and was responsible for hundreds of thousands of film shows outside cinema chains in the UK and abroad. It also organised and ran approximately 160,000 public meetings during the war. It constructed, presented, and distributed thousands of public exhibitions throughout the country – and abroad. It not only printed, but distributed and displayed hundreds of thousands of posters throughout the UK, thus ensuring that no high street was unaware of Ministry’s presence, and of its messages. It ran national surveys of public opinion using a wide range of information that it gathered officially and unofficially, and produced reports, sometimes daily, that were widely distributed to ministries and government agencies (though not to the public).

Acknowledgements

The data in this spreadsheet is derived almost exclusively from evidence in either the National Archives or The British Library, and we thank both institutions for their co-operation. Some of the part-time researchers within the IES’s MoI Project worked on ‘Printed Outputs’, and we are delighted to thank them for their major contributions: Valerie Fairbrass, Elaine Gilboy, Sharon Thorpe, and Dave Walton.

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