The assault on saucy seaside postcards, spearheaded by the Director of Public Prosecutions and implemented by the police, began in earnest in the early 1950s. In Blackpool, acting upon information received, a plain clothes officer would visit a shop, pick up the offending postcard, ask the shopkeeper whether they would sell it to their daughter, invariably receiving the response “No”, and then a prosecution would follow. Once the word got out, other shopkeepers would withdraw their stock of those postcards from sale. In 1953 32,603 postcards were seized under the Obscene Publications Act (1857).
In most major seaside resorts Watch Committees, self-appointed and made up of local worthies, were set up to vet and deal with reports of “obscene” cards in their area, ostensibly to reassure shopkeepers that if a certain design passed muster, they would be immune from prosecution. However, there was no national standard as to what was deemed to be offensive, although jokes about wind and other forms of toilet humour seemed high on the list, and so a postcard that was deemed to be acceptable in one resort could be banned in another. The general air of uncertainty led to the wholesale withdrawal of such postcards from sale.
However, the moral crusaders were not done and had the “King of the Saucy Postcard” and his publishers, Bamforth, firmly in their sights, finally bringing a charge of breaching the Act against him in July 1954. Donald McGill’s defence posed the not unreasonable question: “are the cards capable of corrupting the minds and morals into the hands they come?” Surprisingly, McGill insisted that he was simply naive, claiming that “I would desire to point out that in quite a number of the cards in question I had no intention of “double meaning” and, in fact, a “double meaning” was in some cases later pointed out to me”.
McGill was found guilty, fined £50 with £25 costs, and four of his offending postcards were banned immediately and his publishers were prevented from reissuing seventeen others. The verdict sent shock waves through the postcard industry, retailers cancelling orders and withdrawing stock and some smaller publishers going into bankruptcy.
In 1957 McGill was invited to give evidence to a House Select Committee, which was considering amending the Obscene Publication Act. He argued that a national censorship system would not work due to the vagaries of individual taste. The subsequent amendment in the law led to the waning of the powers of Watch Committees and gave the green light for saucy postcards to make a return.
McGill, though, hardly benefited from the renaissance, dying in 1962 having prepared all his designs for the 1963 season. He left an estate of just £735 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Streatham Park cemetery. His last designs were published in 1968.
The final nail in the coffin of saucy postcard industry was a change in public taste. By any stretch of the imagination their subject matter was sexist, sometimes racist, certainly politically incorrect, occasionally racist or xenophobic, as out of fashion as the humour of Benny Hill, the televisual manifestation of the saucy postcard. There was no place for them in the 21st century moral spectrum.
Despite that, McGill’s original colour-washed drawings now sell for several thousand pounds a time and examples of his postcards are soughtafter. His work was displayed at the Tate Britain exhibition, Rude Britannia: British Comic Art, in the summer of 2010, and there is a museum dedicated to his work in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. That would have brought a smile to the face of the former naval draughtsman who got into the postcard industry thanks to a get-well card he designed for a relative.
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