Search results
Saucy Postcards by artist Donald McGillUK TV BBC 2005Original Music by Binary.
- 3 min
- 11K
- binarylibrary
Oct 22, 2005 · Censored at the Seaside: The Saucy Postcards of Donald McGill: Directed by Steve Webb. With Linda Smith, Alan Forrest, Bernard Crossley, Andrew Cunningham. This one hour docudrama charts the life of the man who invented the saucy seaside postcard.
- (7)
- Linda Smith, Alan Forrest, Bernard Crossley
- Steve Webb
- The Postcards
- Bamforth & Company Ltd.
- Donald McGill
- Opinions
- Censorship Boards
- Contemporary Thoughts
What do we mean by saucy seaside postcards? The name was coined for cards featuring risqué images and innuendo. These often include images of figures scantily clad and in precarious positions. Many of these designs would not be deemed appropriate today and even at the time, as we will discover, people questioned their impact on the morality of thei...
In our new temporary exhibition we were lucky enough to borrow material from Kirklees Museums and Galleries, which hold an extensive collection of Bamforth and Company material. Bamforth were a postcard publisher that crafted designs for much of the 20th century. The company was initially set up by James Bamforth in 1870 to produce portrait photogr...
Donald McGill was actually prosecuted for his designs under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act. His trial was held in Lincoln in 1954 where he was found guilty and fined £50 with costs of £25. The below design, on display in the exhibition, is not one of his risqué contributions to postcard design, but a rather sweeter scene.
George Orwell, the writer famous for Animal Farm and 1984, wrote the article ‘The Art of Donald McGill‘ in the Horizonin 1941. Here he talks of the characters and themes present on saucy seaside postcards and particularly focuses on McGill as a leading contributor to this genre. Acknowledging the postcards vulgarity he identifies them as, He went o...
Bamforth and Co. sent their designs to the Blackpool Postcard Censorship Board. The board first met in 1951, though a previous committee was created in 1912. At it’s first meeting around 500 postcards were examined from two publishers, of which one had about 20% of their designs rejected. The Manchester Evening Newson 30 October 1951 documented the...
These postcards speak to the humour of a bygone age. Despite this, the activity of the censorship boards show that not everyone agreed with these images, even at the time. We have chosen not to display any extreme examples of the saucy seaside postcard in the exhibition or here on the blog, instead we are celebrating the enjoyment of the seaside. H...
Jun 16, 2010 · Documentary about Donald McGill, whose saucy postcards became an integral part of the British seaside holiday, but who was prosecuted for obscenity in censorious post-war times.
May 14, 2024 · To contemporary observers, the humour of saucy seaside postcards is almost as unfathomable as the desire to go on the type of donkey-riding, pier-promenading, rock-sucking, British seaside holiday whose heyday they epitomised.
May 31, 2018 · By the 1960s, the strait-laced crew that ran Britain’s censorship boards was in full retreat, and Donald McGill’s comic cards were back in the seaside shops and newsstands and selling well. But, the end was near for the British seaside holiday.
People also ask
Was Donald McGill prosecuted for obscenity?
Who created saucy seaside postcards?
Do seaside postcards humour?
Who is the narrator of 'Sucy seaside postcard'?
This one hour docudrama charts the life of the man who invented the saucy seaside postcard. It tells the story of the Victorian gent who was prosecuted for obscenity in Britian in the 1950's...
