Saucy Old Postcards

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Every day, for the past few weeks, I have been posting a saucy old seaside postcard on my Facebook page. Back in the late 1950s and early 60s, I used to see such postcards when we went for family holidays to Hayling Island. What do we mean by saucy seaside postcards? The term was coined for cards featuring images of well-endowed, often scantily clad, females and doubles entendres full of sexual innuendo.

The most celebrated creator of such images is Donald McGill. In 1954 he was prosecuted for his designs under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act, found guilty and fined £50 with costs of £25. McGill was so famous – or notorious – that, in 1941, George Orwell wrote an essay about him and the whole saucy postcard genre. According to Orwell: “Your first impression is of overpowering vulgarity. This is quite apart from the ever-present obscenity, and apart also from the hideousness of the colours. They have an utter lowness of mental atmosphere which comes out not only in the nature of the jokes but, even more, in the grotesque, staring, blatant quality of the drawings. The designs, like those of a child, are full of heavy lines and empty spaces, and all the figures in them, every gesture and attitude, are deliberately ugly, the faces grinning and vacuous, the women monstrously parodied, with bottoms like Hottentots.”

After these disparaging remarks, Orwell’s tone softens: “It will not do to condemn them on the ground that they are vulgar and ugly. That is exactly what they are meant to be. Their whole meaning and virtue is in their unredeemed lowness, not only in the sense of obscenity, but lowness of outlook in every direction whatever. The slightest hint of ‘higher’ influences would ruin them utterly. They stand for the worm’s-eye view of life, for the music-hall world where marriage is a dirty joke or a comic disaster, where the rent is always behind and the clothes are always up the spout, where the lawyer is always a crook and the Scotsman always a miser, where the newly-weds make fools of themselves on the hideous beds of seaside lodging-houses and the drunken, red-nosed husbands roll home at four in the morning to meet the linen-nightgowned wives who wait for them behind the front door, poker in hand. Their existence, the fact that people want them, is symptomatically important. Like the 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 own outlet, like water. On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time … The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish.”

My own view is that these cards are naughty and amusing as opposed to pornographic. They never titillate, as pornography does; rather, they make us laugh. At their worst, they are crude and unfunny; at their best, they are witty. They are never pornographic.

Which leads me to a card I posted on Facebook two days ago. It is the only example I've ever seen of a saucy postcard that may be deemed racist.

A father sits in the waiting room of a hospital. He is white. He is holding brooms and has a bag labelled "sweep," identifying him as a chimney-sweep. A smiling nurse leans into the room and says, "You've got twins mister -both black - you'd better get YOUR chimney swept." The father is surprised. Behind the nurse is his wife, also white, who is in a hospital bed, looking angry, with two dark-skinned babies.

We are living in the age of woke. When I posted the card, I half-expected someone to accuse me of racism. Only two people responded – one with a smiley-face emoji, the other with: “We've travelled far. Perhaps too far and fast for some conservatives, bless them.”

The card, in my opinion, is decidedly non-racist. The nurse’s comment and smile show her awareness of what has happened - namely the chimney-sweep has been cuckolded by a black man. She is not criticizing the blackness of the biological father or of the babies but, rather, the sweep’s marital situation. It would be the same if he had been cuckolded by a white man – although, in that case, the sweep could pass off the babies as his own.

As I say, I feared some people might interpret the nurse’s comment as racist – equating the wife’s illicit liaison and black babies with soot or dirt in a chimney. However, I think the nurse’s words are metaphorical: the chimney refers to the wife’s vagina, and the chimney sweep’s rod is a phallic symbol. The nurse is advising the sweep to put his own house in order – in other words to ensure that his wife’s “chimney” is cleaned by him and not by an outsider.

This card is unusual because of its racial overtones and interesting phallic imagery. By contrast, the naughty seaside humour of the 1950s and 60s tends to be simple and unambiguous - straightforwardly sexual in the nicest possible way. I agree with Orwell that the world would be a less colourful place without these quaint old cards.

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