Modern Notoriety · Blackpool, Lancashire
Blackpool and the Saucy Postcard
Blackpool made seaside innuendo a mass-market art—and Donald McGill's wildly popular postcards eventually put their seventy-nine-year-old artist in court under Victorian obscenity law.
The story
Blackpool's railways, wakes weeks and Golden Mile made it the great working-class seaside resort. Its presiding comic form was the saucy postcard, and its best-known artist was Donald McGill, credited with thousands of designs and an enormous print circulation. In July 1954, aged seventy-nine, McGill pleaded guilty at Lincoln under the Obscene Publications Act 1857 and was fined. The episode joins Blackpool's popular humour to Holywell Street's obscenity-law story: inexpensive, visible pleasure drew attention that private and expensive forms often escaped.
More stories at this spot
Sources
- The Postal Museum, Saucy Seaside Postcards and Censorship
- Country Life, What happened to saucy seaside postcards?
Nearby on the map
Victorian Liverpool's Sailortown was a waterfront economy of lodging houses, pubs, brothels and crimps—and also a set of close migrant communities that hostile observers reduced to vice.
Documented historyHot spotNotable LandmarksSt Winefride's WellHolywell, Flintshire · WalesThe 'Lourdes of Wales' — a holy well whose origin legend is a tale of thwarted lust; pilgrims still bathe in the star-shaped basin for healing and intercession.
Documented historyBohemian & LibertineDe Quincey's Opium Marriage at Dove CottageGrasmere / Rydal, Cumbria (Westmorland) · EnglandThe Opium-Eater moved into Wordsworth's old cottage, got a farmer's daughter pregnant, married her — and the Wordsworths never forgave the 'beneath him' match.
Documented historySpotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.