Abram Games

[3] However, Games was determined to establish himself as a poster artist so while working as a "studio boy" for the commercial design firm Askew-Young in London between 1932 and 1936, he attended night classes in life drawing.

An article on him in the influential journal Art and Industry in 1937 led to several high-profile commissions for Games, from the General Post Office, London Transport, Royal Dutch Shell and others.

He served until 1941 when he was approached by the Public Relations Department of the War Office who were looking for a graphic designer to produce a recruitment poster for the Royal Armoured Corps.

[6] Games was allowed a great deal of artistic freedom which enabled him to produce many striking images, often with surrealist elements.

The Army Bureau of Current Affairs, ABCA, had commissioned Games and Frank Newbould to produce posters for a series entitled Your Britain - Fight for It Now.

While Newbould produced rural images similar to the pre-war travel posters he had created for several railway companies, Games presented a set of three Modernist buildings that had been built to address poverty, disease and deprivation.

The poster that annoyed Churchill most featured the Berthold Lubetkin designed Finsbury Health Centre superseding a ruined building with a child suffering from rickets.

[8] In 1946, Games resumed his freelance practice and worked for clients such as Royal Dutch Shell, the Financial Times, Guinness, British Airways, London Transport and El Al.[4] He designed stamps for Britain, Ireland, Israel, Jersey and Portugal.

[1] He also designed the tile motif of a swan on the Victoria line platforms at Stockwell tube station in the late 1960s.

The same year he produced a poster, Give Clothing for Liberated Jewry, and would often work to support Jewish and Israeli organisations.

[12] In October 1945, Games married Marianne Salfeld, the daughter of German orthodox Jewish émigrés, and initially lived with her father in Surbiton, Surrey.