Cartaz de Propaganda da Primeira Guerra "Britons: Lord Kitchener Wants You", 1914, Inglaterra - Alfred Leete
Propaganda
Lord Kitchener Wants You is a 1914 advertisement by Alfred Leete which was developed into a recruitment poster. It depicted Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for War, below the words "WANTS YOU". Kitchener, wearing the cap of a British Field Marshal, stares and points at the viewer calling them to enlist in the British Army against the Central Powers. The image is considered one of the most iconic and enduring images of World War I. A hugely influential image and slogan, it has also inspired imitations in other countries, from the United States to the Soviet Union.
Prior to the institution of conscription in 1916, the United Kingdom relied upon volunteers for military service. Until the outbreak of the First World War, recruiting posters had not been used in Britain on a regular basis since the Napoleonic Wars. UK government advertisements for contract work were handled by His Majesty's Stationery Office, who passed this task onto the publishers of R. F. White & Sons in order to avoid paying the government rate to newspaper publishers. As war loomed in late 1913, the number of advertising contracts expanded to include other firms. J. E. B. Seely, then the Secretary of State for War, awarded Hedley Le Bas, Eric Field, and their Caxton Advertising Agency a contract to advertise for recruits in the major UK newspapers. Eric Field designed a prototype full-page advertisement with the coat of arms of King George V and the phrase "Your King and Country Need You." Britain declared war on the German Empire on 4 August 1914 and the first run of the full-page ran the next day in those newspapers owned by Lord Northcliffe.
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom H. H. Asquith had appointed Kitchener as Secretary of State for War. Kitchener was the first currently serving soldier to hold the post and was given the task of recruiting a large army to fight Germany. Unlike some of his contemporaries who expected a short conflict, Kitchener foresaw a much longer war requiring hundreds of thousands of enlistees. According to Gary S. Messinger, Kitchener reacted well to Field's advertisement, although he insisted "that the ads should all end with 'God Save the King' and that they should not be changed from the original text, except to say 'Lord Kitchener needs YOU.'" In the following months, Le Bas formed an advisory committee of ad men to develop further newspaper recruiting advertisements, most of which ran vertically 11 inches (28 cm), two columns wide.
Alfred Leete, one of Caxton's illustrators, designed the now-famous image as a cover illustration for 5 September 1914 issue of London Opinion, a popular weekly magazine, taking cues from Field's earlier recruiting advertisement. At the time, the magazine had a circulation of 300,000. In response to requests for reproductions, the magazine offered postcard-sized copies for sale. The Parliamentary Recruiting Committee obtained permission to use the design in poster form. A similar poster used the words "YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU".
Kitchener, a "figure of absolute will and power, an emblem of British masculinity", was a natural subject for Leete's artwork as his name was directly attached to the recruiting efforts and the newly-forming Kitchener's Army. Le Bas of Caxton Advertising (for whom Leete worked) chose Kitchener for the advertisement because Kitchener was "the only soldier with a great war name, won in the field, within the memory of the thousands of men the country wanted." Kitchener made his name in the Sudan Campaign, avenging the death of General Gordon with brutality and efficiency. He became a hero of "New Imperialism" alongside other widely regarded figures in Britain like Field Marshal Wolseley and Field Marshal Roberts. Kitchener's appearance including his bushy mustache and court dress jacket was reminiscent of romanticized Victorian era styles. Kitchener, 6 ft 2 in (188 cm) tall and powerfully built, was for many the personification of military ethos so popular in the present Edwardian era. After the scorched earth tactics and hard-fought victory of the Second Boer War, Kitchener represented a return to the military victories of the colonial era. The fact that Kitchener's name was not used in the poster demonstrates how easily he was visually recognized. David Lubin opines that the image may be one of the earliest successful celebrity endorsements as the commercial practice expanded greatly in the 1920s. Keith Surridge posits that Kitchener's features evoked the harsh, feared militarism of the Germans which bode well for British fortune in the war. Kitchener did not see the end of the war; he died onboard in the sinking of HMS Hampshire in 1916.
Leete's drawing of Kitchener was the most famous image used in the British Army recruitment campaign of World War I. It continues to be considered a masterful piece of wartime propaganda as well as an enduring and iconic image of the war.
Recruitment posters in general have often been seen as a driving force helping to bring more than a million men into the Army. September 1914, coincident with publication of Leete's image, saw the highest number of volunteers enlisted. The Times recorded the scene in London on 3 January 1915; "Posters appealing to recruits are to be seen on every hoarding, in most windows, in omnibuses, tramcars and commercial vans. The great base of Nelson's Column is covered with them. Their number and variety are remarkable. Everywhere Lord Kitchener sternly points a monstrously big finger, exclaiming 'I Want You'". One contemporaneous publication decried the use of advertising methods to enlist soldiers: "the cold, basilisk eye of a gaudily-lithographed Kitchener rivets itself upon the possible recruit and the outstretched finger of the British Minister of War is levelled at him like some revolver, with the words, 'I want you.' The idea is stolen from the advertisement of a 5c. American cigar." Although it became one of the most famous posters in history, its widespread circulation did not halt the decline in recruiting.
The use of Kitchener's image for recruiting posters was so widespread that Lady Asquith referred to the Field Marshal simply as "the Poster."
The placement of the Kitchener posters including Alfred Leete's design has been examined and questioned following an Imperial War Museum publication in 1997. The War Museum suggested that the poster itself was a "non event" and was made popular by postwar advertising by the war museum, perhaps conflating Leete's design with the so-called "30-word" poster, an official product from the Parliamentary Recruitment Committee. The 30-word design was the most popular recruitment poster at the time, having been printed ten times more than Leete's image. Leete's image has been praised for being more arresting while his accompanying text is also far less verbose. The official wording, taken from a Kitchener speech, may seem more fitting for a character in a Henry James novel. The 30-word recruiting poster was developed as Britons' collective hopes of the war being over by Christmas were dashed in January 1915 and volunteer enlistments fell. A 2013 book researched by James Taylor counters the popular belief that the Leete design was an influential recruitment tool during the war. He claims the original artwork was acquired by the Imperial War Museum in 1917 and catalogued as a poster in error. Though the image of Kitchener (Britain's most popular soldier) inspired several other poster designs, Taylor says he can find no evidence in photographs of the time that the Leete poster was used, although a photograph from 15 December 1914 taken at the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway station in Liverpool clearly depicts Leete's depiction among other recruiting posters.
The effectiveness of the image upon the viewer is attributed to what E. B. Goldstein has called the 'differential rotation effect.' Because of this effect, Kitchener's eyes and his foreshortened arm and hand appear to follow the viewer regardless of the viewer's orientation to the artwork. Historian Carlo Ginzburg compared Leete's image of Kitchener to similar images of Christ and Alexander the Great as depicting the viewer's contact with a powerful figure. Pearl James commented on Ginzburg's analysis agreeing that the strength of the connotation lies with a clever use of discursive psychology and that art historical methods better illuminate why this image has such resonance. The capitalized word "YOU" grabs the reader, bringing them directly to Kitchener's message. The textual focus on "you" engages the reader about their own participation in the war. Nicholas Hiley differs in that Leete's portrayal of Kitchener is less about immediate recruiting statistics but the myth that has grown around the image, including ironic parodies. Leete's Kitchener poster caught the attention of a then eleven-year-old George Orwell, who may have used as it the basis for his description of the "Big Brother" posters in his novel 1984. It remains recognised and parodied in popular culture.
In 1997 the British Army created a recruiting advertisement re-using Leete's image substituting Kitchener's face with that of a British Army non-commissioned officer of African descent. Leete's image of Kitchener is featured on a 2014 £2 coin produced by sculptor John Bergdahl for the Royal Mint. The coin was the first of a five-year series to commemorate the centennial of the war. Use of Leete's image of Kitchener has been criticized by some for its pro-war connotation in light of the human losses of the First World War and the violence of Kitchener's campaign in Sudan. In July 2014, one of only four original posters known to exist went to auction for more than £10,000. The other three originals exist on display in State Library of Victoria, the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising, and the Imperial War Museum. Leete's design was also used for a corn maze in the Skylark Garden Centre in Wimblington to mark the centenary of World War I.
A recruitment poster of the stern-eyed Lord Kitchener has become a defining image of World War One. A clever illustrator's psychological trickery has spawned a thousand imitations, writes Adam Eley.
It is perhaps history's most famous pointing finger.
The image of British war minister Lord Kitchener's index finger unsettlingly aimed at the viewer remains immediately recognisable 100 years after its design. Still regularly copied in advertising, it has also served as a satirical motif in the media and inspired military recruitment campaigns across the globe.
Most people assume this image owes its fame to a government recruiting campaign during World War One.
But while an estimated 5.7 million official posters printed in the UK from 1914-18, as few as 10,000 copies of this particular image were made.
It was initially intended only as a front cover design for the London Opinion magazine on 5 September 1914, created by professional illustrator Alfred Leete, supposedly in a single day. The cover bore the message "Your Country Needs You".
The slogan was then slightly tweaked to simply "Wants You" and the image was privately produced as a poster shortly afterwards. But there is little photographic evidence of it on display in public places and only a handful of original copies survive today.
The authorities equally anticipated that an image of Kitchener - immensely popular with the public and seen as a great symbol of army and empire - would be good for recruiting.
But in the first instance the official Parliamentary Recruitment Committee poster used a completely different and far less dramatic image of the field marshal. It was next to a rather uninspiring quote from one of his speeches: "Men, materials & money are the immediate necessities. Does the call of duty find no response in you until reinforced - let us rather say superseded - by the call of compulsion? Enlist today."
With a print-run potentially 15 times that of the poster based on Leete's image, it was given the resources and prominence to be remembered above all others, but is now largely forgotten.
So why, almost 100 years on, does Leete's design retain such potency?
"Among the myriad of images pushed towards us each day, that of Kitchener pointing is an instantly recognisable symbol of World War One," says the Museum of Brands founder Robert Opie. "Television programmes have used the poster in advertising campaigns to immediately establish that the show is set at the time of the Great War."
Its longevity, he adds, is also a result of Leete's powerful design with "Lord Kitchener's eyes following you round the room like the Mona Lisa".
Leete's illustration carefully manipulates Kitchener's actual appearance. Firstly, his squint - clearly visible in the official, long-winded poster - is corrected. His moustache was darkened and widened. The design is probably based on a photograph taken some 30 years earlier, as by the start of the war, Kitchener was 64.
Kitchener's hand gesture is equally provocative in its directness. "Pointing is individualistic, it singles out one person alone," says University of Hertfordshire psychology professor Karen Pine. "This makes you more engaged and places you under an obligation to respond."
The illustrator's work also compared favourably with official recruitment posters of the time. As Richard Slocombe, senior curator of art at the Imperial War Museum, explains: "Poster design was a very mechanical process with little finesse. A large number solely used words."
In contrast, Leete was a renowned cartoonist "who knew how to connect with the wider public through his work and understood the importance of simplicity".
Those four words, "Your Country Needs You", also proved effective. "They evoke patriotism and guilt in those yet to enlist without straying as far as emotional blackmail," says the National Army Museum's David Bownes, co-author of Posters of the First World War.
The success of the image has arguably enabled it to transcend the legacy of Lord Kitchener himself. Leete's design has been copied by military recruitment campaigns from India to Canada to Germany. Four million copies of James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam poster were printed by the US during WW1. Indeed, the image still features in the country's recruitment drives today.
As recently as 1998 a version of the Kitchener poster was used in a campaign to improve the number of ethnic minority recruits in the British Army. Kitchener's face was replaced in two posters by servicemen of African and Asian heritage.
As a humorous motif it is even more widely used.
The Sunday Times replaced Kitchener's face with David Cameron's after the prime minister used the phrase "your country needs you" when promoting his vision of the Big Society in October 2010.
Any nod to the famous poster can be humorous because of how unusual the pointing gesture now seems. "We're less deferential to authority now, so politicians are trained to use open-hand gestures rather than point," explains Karen Pine.
Opie explains that the poster remains widely used because "it contains everything a caricaturist needs - a strong, powerful image that can act as a quick and easy communicator".
In the 1960s, two boutiques called I Was Lord Kitchener's Valet - incorporating Leete's design in their advertisements - opened in London's Portobello Road and Carnaby Street. Selling military memorabilia and clothing to customers including Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Eric Clapton, they invoked ironic nostalgia towards the age of authority in which Kitchener lived.
Since then, everything from mugs to T-shirts have carried Kitchener's face, including duvet covers claiming "your bed needs you". And his image has recently featured on a special edition £2 coin commemorating the war.
Horatio Kitchener was born on 24 June 1850 in County Kerry, Ireland
Educated in Switzerland and at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich
Took part in the unsuccessful operation to relieve General Charles Gordon at Khartoum in 1884-1885, and in 1886 was appointed governor general of eastern Sudan
In 1902 he was appointed commander in chief of India
In 1911, he became the proconsul of Egypt, serving there and in the Sudan until 1914
When war broke out, he reluctantly accepted the appointment of secretary of state for war
Credited with great foresight in recognising that WW1 would last several years and require a large army
Died on 5 June 1916 in the sinking of HMS Hampshire, as he journeyed to Russia
Kitchener and his pointing finger are still regularly used in the promotion of everything from local fetes to garage sales. But for Martyn Thatcher, author of the Amazing Story of the Kitchener Poster, the image has often become "a lazy piece of graphic design".
The controversies that surrounded Lord Kitchener - famed for his disputes with political and military figures of the time - have been widely obscured in favour of Leete's evocative caricature. His successes have been reduced to a single image.
Lord Kitchener was uneasy about his use in recruitment campaigns. He believed it should be the country's monarch inspiring people to sign up, and not him, hence his insistence on the words "God Save the King" at the bottom of many posters.
But whether with his permission or not, his image will live on.
World War One was a truly global conflict. The war was fought in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Around 17 million soldiers and civilians were killed between 1914 and 1918.
Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914. In 1916, conscription was introduced for the first time. As millions of men left for the front, women filled their roles in factories, shops and offices across the country.
On the Western Front the opposing armies were trapped in a stalemate. Many lives were lost fighting over just a few miles of land. The Battle of the Somme was one of the largest of WW1 and nearly 20,000 British soldiers died on the first day.
WW1 saw advancements in medicine and technology - the invention of plastic surgery, innovations in flight, and new treatments for mental health.
Propaganda
Lord Kitchener Wants You is a 1914 advertisement by Alfred Leete which was developed into a recruitment poster. It depicted Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of State for War, below the words "WANTS YOU". Kitchener, wearing the cap of a British Field Marshal, stares and points at the viewer calling them to enlist in the British Army against the Central Powers. The image is considered one of the most iconic and enduring images of World War I. A hugely influential image and slogan, it has also inspired imitations in other countries, from the United States to the Soviet Union.
Prior to the institution of conscription in 1916, the United Kingdom relied upon volunteers for military service. Until the outbreak of the First World War, recruiting posters had not been used in Britain on a regular basis since the Napoleonic Wars. UK government advertisements for contract work were handled by His Majesty's Stationery Office, who passed this task onto the publishers of R. F. White & Sons in order to avoid paying the government rate to newspaper publishers. As war loomed in late 1913, the number of advertising contracts expanded to include other firms. J. E. B. Seely, then the Secretary of State for War, awarded Hedley Le Bas, Eric Field, and their Caxton Advertising Agency a contract to advertise for recruits in the major UK newspapers. Eric Field designed a prototype full-page advertisement with the coat of arms of King George V and the phrase "Your King and Country Need You." Britain declared war on the German Empire on 4 August 1914 and the first run of the full-page ran the next day in those newspapers owned by Lord Northcliffe.
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom H. H. Asquith had appointed Kitchener as Secretary of State for War. Kitchener was the first currently serving soldier to hold the post and was given the task of recruiting a large army to fight Germany. Unlike some of his contemporaries who expected a short conflict, Kitchener foresaw a much longer war requiring hundreds of thousands of enlistees. According to Gary S. Messinger, Kitchener reacted well to Field's advertisement, although he insisted "that the ads should all end with 'God Save the King' and that they should not be changed from the original text, except to say 'Lord Kitchener needs YOU.'" In the following months, Le Bas formed an advisory committee of ad men to develop further newspaper recruiting advertisements, most of which ran vertically 11 inches (28 cm), two columns wide.
Alfred Leete, one of Caxton's illustrators, designed the now-famous image as a cover illustration for 5 September 1914 issue of London Opinion, a popular weekly magazine, taking cues from Field's earlier recruiting advertisement. At the time, the magazine had a circulation of 300,000. In response to requests for reproductions, the magazine offered postcard-sized copies for sale. The Parliamentary Recruiting Committee obtained permission to use the design in poster form. A similar poster used the words "YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU".
Kitchener, a "figure of absolute will and power, an emblem of British masculinity", was a natural subject for Leete's artwork as his name was directly attached to the recruiting efforts and the newly-forming Kitchener's Army. Le Bas of Caxton Advertising (for whom Leete worked) chose Kitchener for the advertisement because Kitchener was "the only soldier with a great war name, won in the field, within the memory of the thousands of men the country wanted." Kitchener made his name in the Sudan Campaign, avenging the death of General Gordon with brutality and efficiency. He became a hero of "New Imperialism" alongside other widely regarded figures in Britain like Field Marshal Wolseley and Field Marshal Roberts. Kitchener's appearance including his bushy mustache and court dress jacket was reminiscent of romanticized Victorian era styles. Kitchener, 6 ft 2 in (188 cm) tall and powerfully built, was for many the personification of military ethos so popular in the present Edwardian era. After the scorched earth tactics and hard-fought victory of the Second Boer War, Kitchener represented a return to the military victories of the colonial era. The fact that Kitchener's name was not used in the poster demonstrates how easily he was visually recognized. David Lubin opines that the image may be one of the earliest successful celebrity endorsements as the commercial practice expanded greatly in the 1920s. Keith Surridge posits that Kitchener's features evoked the harsh, feared militarism of the Germans which bode well for British fortune in the war. Kitchener did not see the end of the war; he died onboard in the sinking of HMS Hampshire in 1916.
Leete's drawing of Kitchener was the most famous image used in the British Army recruitment campaign of World War I. It continues to be considered a masterful piece of wartime propaganda as well as an enduring and iconic image of the war.
Recruitment posters in general have often been seen as a driving force helping to bring more than a million men into the Army. September 1914, coincident with publication of Leete's image, saw the highest number of volunteers enlisted. The Times recorded the scene in London on 3 January 1915; "Posters appealing to recruits are to be seen on every hoarding, in most windows, in omnibuses, tramcars and commercial vans. The great base of Nelson's Column is covered with them. Their number and variety are remarkable. Everywhere Lord Kitchener sternly points a monstrously big finger, exclaiming 'I Want You'". One contemporaneous publication decried the use of advertising methods to enlist soldiers: "the cold, basilisk eye of a gaudily-lithographed Kitchener rivets itself upon the possible recruit and the outstretched finger of the British Minister of War is levelled at him like some revolver, with the words, 'I want you.' The idea is stolen from the advertisement of a 5c. American cigar." Although it became one of the most famous posters in history, its widespread circulation did not halt the decline in recruiting.
The use of Kitchener's image for recruiting posters was so widespread that Lady Asquith referred to the Field Marshal simply as "the Poster."
The placement of the Kitchener posters including Alfred Leete's design has been examined and questioned following an Imperial War Museum publication in 1997. The War Museum suggested that the poster itself was a "non event" and was made popular by postwar advertising by the war museum, perhaps conflating Leete's design with the so-called "30-word" poster, an official product from the Parliamentary Recruitment Committee. The 30-word design was the most popular recruitment poster at the time, having been printed ten times more than Leete's image. Leete's image has been praised for being more arresting while his accompanying text is also far less verbose. The official wording, taken from a Kitchener speech, may seem more fitting for a character in a Henry James novel. The 30-word recruiting poster was developed as Britons' collective hopes of the war being over by Christmas were dashed in January 1915 and volunteer enlistments fell. A 2013 book researched by James Taylor counters the popular belief that the Leete design was an influential recruitment tool during the war. He claims the original artwork was acquired by the Imperial War Museum in 1917 and catalogued as a poster in error. Though the image of Kitchener (Britain's most popular soldier) inspired several other poster designs, Taylor says he can find no evidence in photographs of the time that the Leete poster was used, although a photograph from 15 December 1914 taken at the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway station in Liverpool clearly depicts Leete's depiction among other recruiting posters.
The effectiveness of the image upon the viewer is attributed to what E. B. Goldstein has called the 'differential rotation effect.' Because of this effect, Kitchener's eyes and his foreshortened arm and hand appear to follow the viewer regardless of the viewer's orientation to the artwork. Historian Carlo Ginzburg compared Leete's image of Kitchener to similar images of Christ and Alexander the Great as depicting the viewer's contact with a powerful figure. Pearl James commented on Ginzburg's analysis agreeing that the strength of the connotation lies with a clever use of discursive psychology and that art historical methods better illuminate why this image has such resonance. The capitalized word "YOU" grabs the reader, bringing them directly to Kitchener's message. The textual focus on "you" engages the reader about their own participation in the war. Nicholas Hiley differs in that Leete's portrayal of Kitchener is less about immediate recruiting statistics but the myth that has grown around the image, including ironic parodies. Leete's Kitchener poster caught the attention of a then eleven-year-old George Orwell, who may have used as it the basis for his description of the "Big Brother" posters in his novel 1984. It remains recognised and parodied in popular culture.
In 1997 the British Army created a recruiting advertisement re-using Leete's image substituting Kitchener's face with that of a British Army non-commissioned officer of African descent. Leete's image of Kitchener is featured on a 2014 £2 coin produced by sculptor John Bergdahl for the Royal Mint. The coin was the first of a five-year series to commemorate the centennial of the war. Use of Leete's image of Kitchener has been criticized by some for its pro-war connotation in light of the human losses of the First World War and the violence of Kitchener's campaign in Sudan. In July 2014, one of only four original posters known to exist went to auction for more than £10,000. The other three originals exist on display in State Library of Victoria, the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising, and the Imperial War Museum. Leete's design was also used for a corn maze in the Skylark Garden Centre in Wimblington to mark the centenary of World War I.
A recruitment poster of the stern-eyed Lord Kitchener has become a defining image of World War One. A clever illustrator's psychological trickery has spawned a thousand imitations, writes Adam Eley.
It is perhaps history's most famous pointing finger.
The image of British war minister Lord Kitchener's index finger unsettlingly aimed at the viewer remains immediately recognisable 100 years after its design. Still regularly copied in advertising, it has also served as a satirical motif in the media and inspired military recruitment campaigns across the globe.
Most people assume this image owes its fame to a government recruiting campaign during World War One.
But while an estimated 5.7 million official posters printed in the UK from 1914-18, as few as 10,000 copies of this particular image were made.
It was initially intended only as a front cover design for the London Opinion magazine on 5 September 1914, created by professional illustrator Alfred Leete, supposedly in a single day. The cover bore the message "Your Country Needs You".
The slogan was then slightly tweaked to simply "Wants You" and the image was privately produced as a poster shortly afterwards. But there is little photographic evidence of it on display in public places and only a handful of original copies survive today.
The authorities equally anticipated that an image of Kitchener - immensely popular with the public and seen as a great symbol of army and empire - would be good for recruiting.
But in the first instance the official Parliamentary Recruitment Committee poster used a completely different and far less dramatic image of the field marshal. It was next to a rather uninspiring quote from one of his speeches: "Men, materials & money are the immediate necessities. Does the call of duty find no response in you until reinforced - let us rather say superseded - by the call of compulsion? Enlist today."
With a print-run potentially 15 times that of the poster based on Leete's image, it was given the resources and prominence to be remembered above all others, but is now largely forgotten.
So why, almost 100 years on, does Leete's design retain such potency?
"Among the myriad of images pushed towards us each day, that of Kitchener pointing is an instantly recognisable symbol of World War One," says the Museum of Brands founder Robert Opie. "Television programmes have used the poster in advertising campaigns to immediately establish that the show is set at the time of the Great War."
Its longevity, he adds, is also a result of Leete's powerful design with "Lord Kitchener's eyes following you round the room like the Mona Lisa".
Leete's illustration carefully manipulates Kitchener's actual appearance. Firstly, his squint - clearly visible in the official, long-winded poster - is corrected. His moustache was darkened and widened. The design is probably based on a photograph taken some 30 years earlier, as by the start of the war, Kitchener was 64.
Kitchener's hand gesture is equally provocative in its directness. "Pointing is individualistic, it singles out one person alone," says University of Hertfordshire psychology professor Karen Pine. "This makes you more engaged and places you under an obligation to respond."
The illustrator's work also compared favourably with official recruitment posters of the time. As Richard Slocombe, senior curator of art at the Imperial War Museum, explains: "Poster design was a very mechanical process with little finesse. A large number solely used words."
In contrast, Leete was a renowned cartoonist "who knew how to connect with the wider public through his work and understood the importance of simplicity".
Those four words, "Your Country Needs You", also proved effective. "They evoke patriotism and guilt in those yet to enlist without straying as far as emotional blackmail," says the National Army Museum's David Bownes, co-author of Posters of the First World War.
The success of the image has arguably enabled it to transcend the legacy of Lord Kitchener himself. Leete's design has been copied by military recruitment campaigns from India to Canada to Germany. Four million copies of James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam poster were printed by the US during WW1. Indeed, the image still features in the country's recruitment drives today.
As recently as 1998 a version of the Kitchener poster was used in a campaign to improve the number of ethnic minority recruits in the British Army. Kitchener's face was replaced in two posters by servicemen of African and Asian heritage.
As a humorous motif it is even more widely used.
The Sunday Times replaced Kitchener's face with David Cameron's after the prime minister used the phrase "your country needs you" when promoting his vision of the Big Society in October 2010.
Any nod to the famous poster can be humorous because of how unusual the pointing gesture now seems. "We're less deferential to authority now, so politicians are trained to use open-hand gestures rather than point," explains Karen Pine.
Opie explains that the poster remains widely used because "it contains everything a caricaturist needs - a strong, powerful image that can act as a quick and easy communicator".
In the 1960s, two boutiques called I Was Lord Kitchener's Valet - incorporating Leete's design in their advertisements - opened in London's Portobello Road and Carnaby Street. Selling military memorabilia and clothing to customers including Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Eric Clapton, they invoked ironic nostalgia towards the age of authority in which Kitchener lived.
Since then, everything from mugs to T-shirts have carried Kitchener's face, including duvet covers claiming "your bed needs you". And his image has recently featured on a special edition £2 coin commemorating the war.
Horatio Kitchener was born on 24 June 1850 in County Kerry, Ireland
Educated in Switzerland and at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich
Took part in the unsuccessful operation to relieve General Charles Gordon at Khartoum in 1884-1885, and in 1886 was appointed governor general of eastern Sudan
In 1902 he was appointed commander in chief of India
In 1911, he became the proconsul of Egypt, serving there and in the Sudan until 1914
When war broke out, he reluctantly accepted the appointment of secretary of state for war
Credited with great foresight in recognising that WW1 would last several years and require a large army
Died on 5 June 1916 in the sinking of HMS Hampshire, as he journeyed to Russia
Kitchener and his pointing finger are still regularly used in the promotion of everything from local fetes to garage sales. But for Martyn Thatcher, author of the Amazing Story of the Kitchener Poster, the image has often become "a lazy piece of graphic design".
The controversies that surrounded Lord Kitchener - famed for his disputes with political and military figures of the time - have been widely obscured in favour of Leete's evocative caricature. His successes have been reduced to a single image.
Lord Kitchener was uneasy about his use in recruitment campaigns. He believed it should be the country's monarch inspiring people to sign up, and not him, hence his insistence on the words "God Save the King" at the bottom of many posters.
But whether with his permission or not, his image will live on.
World War One was a truly global conflict. The war was fought in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Around 17 million soldiers and civilians were killed between 1914 and 1918.
Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914. In 1916, conscription was introduced for the first time. As millions of men left for the front, women filled their roles in factories, shops and offices across the country.
On the Western Front the opposing armies were trapped in a stalemate. Many lives were lost fighting over just a few miles of land. The Battle of the Somme was one of the largest of WW1 and nearly 20,000 British soldiers died on the first day.
WW1 saw advancements in medicine and technology - the invention of plastic surgery, innovations in flight, and new treatments for mental health.
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