In January 1941
Picture Post published their "Plan for Britain". This included minimum wages throughout industry, full employment, child allowances, a national health service, the planned use of land and a complete overhaul of education. This document led to discussions about post-war Britain and was a populist forerunner of
William Beveridge's November 1942 Report. Sales of
Picture Post increased further during
World War II, and by December 1943, the magazine was selling 1,950,000 copies a week. By the end of 1949 circulation had declined to 1,422,000. The founding editor,
Stefan Lorant (who had also founded
Lilliput and had even earlier pioneered the picture-story in Germany in the 1920s), had been succeeded by (Sir)
Tom Hopkinson in 1940. Lorant, who was Jewish, had been imprisoned by Hitler in the early 1930s and later wrote a best-selling book, ''I Was Hitler's Prisoner''. By 1940, he feared that he would be captured in a
Nazi invasion of Britain and so fled to
Massachusetts, where he wrote important illustrated US histories and biographies. During World War II, the art editor of the magazine,
Edgar Ainsworth, served as a war correspondent and accompanied the
American 7th Army on its advance across Europe in 1945. He visited the
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp three times after the British army liberated the complex in April 1945. Several of his sketches and drawings from the camp were published in a September 1945 article,
Victim and Prisoner. Ainsworth also commissioned the artist
Mervyn Peake to visit France and Germany at the end of the war and reported from Bergen-Belsen. Hopkinson said that his photographers were thoroughbreds and that text could always be written after the event, but if his photographers did not come back with good pictures, he had nothing to work with. Years later, Hopkinson said that the greatest photos he ever received to lay out were
Bert Hardy's images from the
Korean War's
Battle of Incheon, for which
James Cameron wrote the article. The magazine's greatest photographers included Hardy,
Kurt Hutton,
Felix H. Man (aka Hans Baumann),
Francis Reiss,
Thurston Hopkins, John Chillingworth,
Grace Robertson, and Leonard McCombe, who eventually joined
Life magazine's staff. Staff writers included
MacDonald Hastings, Lorna Hay,
Sydney Jacobson,
J. B. Priestley, Lionel Birch, James Cameron,
Fyfe Robertson,
Anne Scott-James,
Robert Kee and
Bert Lloyd. Many freelancer writers contributed as well, including
George Bernard Shaw,
Dorothy Parker, and
William Saroyan. On 17 June 1950,
Leader magazine was incorporated in
Picture Post. Editor Tom Hopkinson was often in conflict with (Sir)
Edward G. Hulton, the owner of
Picture Post. Hulton mainly supported the
Conservative Party and objected to Hopkinson's
socialist views. The conflict led to Hopkinson's dismissal in 1950 following the publication of Cameron's article, with pictures by Hardy, about
South Korea's treatment of political prisoners in the Korean War. By June 1952, circulation had fallen to 935,000. Sales continued to decline in the face of competition from television and a revolving door of new editors. By the time the magazine closed in July 1957, circulation was less than 600,000 copies a week.
Picture Post was digitised as The Picture Post Historical Archive, 1938–1957 and consists of the complete, fully searchable facsimile archive of the
Picture Post. It was made available in 2011 to libraries and institutions. ==Hulton Press Library==