Original 'Keep Calm and Carry On' poster expected to sell for £8,000 at auction

An original 'Keep Calm and Carry On' poster from World War Two is expected to sell for £8,000 at auction.

The now overused phrase and variants of it are found on t-shirts, mugs, keyrings and posters and are sold around the world.

But the original wartime poster from 1939, which was hardly seen at the time, is very rare despite the government printing 2.5 million of them.

They were printed to raise the morale of the British public as they were threatened with widely predicted mass air attacks on major cities.