[SEASIDE POSTCARDS] | Two sketchbooks of illustrations, c. 1950s

[SEASIDE POSTCARDS]

Two sketchbooks of illustrations, c. 1950s

Winsor & Newton Ltd ‘Educational’ Drawing Booklet. Folio, illustrated title-page captioned “Scrap Book for 1950 | Laugh – there’s still time –“, with 19 pages of colour illustrations, mostly full-page or with multiple illustrations, majority with captions in blue ink, green wrappers with illustration on upper wrapper, very light browning, soft corners with lower right creased, spine splitting, two staples rusting;

Roberson & Co Ltd. Sketch Book. Folio, illustrated title-page captioned “This and That”, with 81 pages of colour illustrations (all but 2 in colour), mostly full-page or with multiple illustrations, majority with captions, two additional illustrations on each paste-down endpaper, cloth boards, soft corners, light browning, boards scuffed, spine splitting

“I think these cards represent two weeks of the year when people went on holiday to a different place that had different rules. That holiday promised all sorts of things – more and better food, more drink, more sun and more sex. And it promised more self expression and freedom. The cards help to define that whole liberty” (Dr Nick Hiley, British Cartoon Archive)

The tradition of the saucy postcard had existed for decades, but the golden age began in the 1950s, when the current two albums were presumably created. The largest and most successful firm producing these postcards were Bamforth & Co. The topics were familiar and consistent. The honeymoon holiday was a favourite, as was the nudist colony. But the underlining theme was always sex. Each card had to rely, on varying degrees of the nudge-nudge wink-wink innuendo of the artist.

When Churchill and his Conservative government regained power in 1951, censorship committees appeared in these seaside towns creating a rapid escalation of prosecutions for the publishers and artists. The Bamforth Company alone was subject to 159 prosecutions. Under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 an estimated 11,662 seaside cards were destroyed in 1951. The following year the number rose to 16,029, and doubled to 32,603 in 1953. 

George Orwell in an 1941 essay on these postcards argued the voluptuous women who appeared in almost all of them as a “caricature of the Englishman’s secret ideal”. He described the existence of the genre as “like music halls, they are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue. They express only one tendency in the human mind, but a tendency which is always there and will find its out outlet, like water. On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”

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