Just too saucy! The bawdy seaside postcards the censors banned 50 years ago
They are images that epitomise the golden age of seaside holidays. Saucy postcards featuring heaving bosoms, henpecked husbands, miserable wives and captions loaded with double entendres were as much part of the fun as candy floss and donkey rides.
But more than 50 years ago, prudish officials deemed these bawdy cartoons unfit for public consumption and had them banned.
Now a museum is putting on show all 21 of the comic cards by prolific artist Donald McGill that the censors suppressed.
Too saucy for some: McGill's cartoons were full of double entendres
McGill produced 12,000 designs over nearly six decades and sold more than 200million cards in small shops in British seaside towns.
But in the early 1950s local councils organised a mass clean-up at resorts across the country, and in 1954 McGill was charged with publishing obscene images. He pleaded guilty. Four of his cards were immediately banned and 17 withdrawn from sale.
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James Bissell-Thomas, owner of the Donald McGill Postcard Museum in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, which is showing the cards, said: 'What is startling is how innocent the majority of these "obscene" cards were.
Guilty: McGill admitted in court that his illustrations broke the 1857 Obscene Publications Act
'It seemed to be a bit of a witch-hunt. Many of the images had been on display in the 1930s and 1940s but they were suddenly seen as a threat to society. It has to be the worst example of a nanny state curtailing the lives of the public.
'McGill's work was enjoyed by millions during his lifetime, but he remained a modest man and, in my opinion, never really received the recognition he deserved.'
McGill lost around £100,000 of revenue, by today's value, as a result of the censorship.
Banned: Not everyone saw the funny side of the cartoons, as the censors' official stamp on one of the postcards above proves
DONALD McGILL, THE ACCIDENTIAL ARTIST
Self portrait: McGill by McGill
It was forwarded to a publisher who commissioned his work. He went on to sell more than 200million cards with at least 12,000 designs over almost six decades.
He lived in a suburban home in Blackheath, South-East London, with his wife and children, and was described as looking like a bank clerk.
Yet by 1941 he was singled out by George Orwell as ‘the most prolific and by far the best of contemporary postcard artists’.
His work was popular but also notorious and led to the 1954 show trial at Lincoln Assizes over the postcards pictured here and others.
The artist, who was 79 by then, admitted breaking the 1857 Obscene Publications Act but claimed in mitigation: ‘I had no intention of a “double meaning” and, in fact, a double meaning was in some cases later pointed out to me.’
He died in 1962, aged 87.
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