Modern Notoriety · Blackpool, Lancashire
Blackpool and the Saucy Postcard
Spice 2/5 · Warm
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
Visiting today
Blackpool is a seaside town on the Fylde peninsula of Lancashire's Irish Sea coast. The Golden Mile is the stretch of promenade between North Pier and South Pier, and Blackpool Tower opened in 1894.
- Council
- Blackpool
- Ward
- Bloomfield
- County
- Lancashire
- Region
- North West
- Nation
- England
- Constituency
- Blackpool South
- OS grid reference
- SD 306 352
Landmarks nearby
- Central Pier · 0.3 km — One of three piers; built 1868
- Blackpool Tower · 0.7 km — 518 ft tower, opened 1894
- North Pier · 1.1 km — Oldest and longest of the three piers
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 · WalesSpice 1/5 · ChilledThe '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) · EnglandSpice 2/5 · WarmThe 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.