Straight to the Sauce

The saucy seaside postcard is now well over a hundred years old. While its origins at the end of the nineteenth century might have been very strait laced by modern standards steadily became more daring.

By the 1930s they had become a positive craze and various characters became staples of the trade. The buxom blonde, the overbearing mother-in-law, the fat vicar, the randy old man and the drunk holidaymaker barely changed for decades but the jokes got steadily more outrageous. So much so in fact that premises were raided and hefty fines handed out to artists under the 1857 Obscenity Act. As late as 1954, Donald McGill, the most famous seaside postcard artist received a hefty fine and thousands of his cards were seized in police raids.

The censors gave up as the sixties dawned but McGill continued working right up to his death. His position as an icon in postcard history was finally cemented in 1994 when the Royal Mail issued a set of stamps featuring his designs.