A curious discovery, attached to the inside front page of my copy of Frank Colquhoun’s account of Graham’s 1954 Greater London Crusade, Harringay Story. This postcard was evidently being distributed outside Wembley Stadium during the the climactic evening of Graham’s twelve-week campaign in London on 22 May while, inside, Graham preached to some 120,000 people, including 20,000 standing on the pitch itself.

It’s interesting for the evident emphasis on Graham himself as a figure, whose looks were often likened (positively or negatively) to those of a film star. (See this post on Graham as “Salvation Army plus sex”)

It’s also interesting to see a kind of religious marketing that would have been new to most British people at this time, but which was a standard feature of Billy Graham Evangelistic Organisation campaigns. The significance of the success of the marketing for the 1954 crusade was not lost on the British churches, although it was some time before anything was attempted on the same scale. In both aspects, Graham’s methods were often seen as ‘too American’ to be fully embraced in the British context.