Carry on regardless

Bamforth was the company which for a century cornered the market in nudge-nudge, wink-wink postcards on the prom. The digital age seemed to have passed them by, but the images are about to get a new lease of life. Steve McClarence reports.

Blimey (as blokes on saucy seaside postcards often say), Ian Wallace isn’t hard to spot in the foyer of Leeds station on a drab Monday morning. Large as life and twice as bright, he has a great mane of shoulder-length hair, like a West Riding Wild Bill Hickok. He’s wearing claret-coloured trousers and a red and white striped shirt, and has a broad grin.

Surrounded by commuters with black coats and grey expressions, he’s an island of colour in a sea of monochrome. Oh, and he’s holding up a poster-sized picture of an all-bust-and-bottom bathing beauty bursting out of her bikini. “This is Beryl,” he says. “She’s BB – big and beautiful.”

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Wallace is a Leeds businessman with – no hint of saucy innuendo here – a broad portfolio. First, he runs a pallet distribution business. Second, more glamorously, he owns the Beatles Shop in Liverpool (Hey Jude t-shirts, Yellow Submarine Moccasins, Sergeant Pepper alarm clocks).

And third – the reason he’s met me at the station to drive to his North Yorkshire studio – he owns Bamforths, the celebrated Yorkshire company whose saucy postcards he’s relaunching this weekend with almost 20 products emblazoned with nudge-nudge, wink- wink jokes. There are jigsaws, coasters, playing cards, boxes of aniseed balls, mouse mats, mugs, fridge magnets – hilarity all the way.

Pause for guffaw. On the earlier postcards the Bamforth humour is gentler. One, which looks like it might be from the early 1930s, shows a chastened-looking housemaid whose uniform is covered by sooty prints being confronted by her stout employer. ‘He’s a good man, that sweep is, mum’, says the maid. ‘Yes. It looks like it!’ is the sceptical retort.

Forty years on they are mining a coarser and cruder seam of humour. “Have you had a check-up, miss?” a doctor asks a massively pregnant young woman. “No, doctor,” she says, “I think he came from Spain.”

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A bit risquê? A bit near the knuckle? Wallace shakes his head. “Bamforths is tame compared to some of the comedians on Channel Four,” he says. It’s Benny Hill humour, he says. Carry On humour. “People like a laugh.”

Oooh but they do. In its heyday in the 1950s, Bamforths, based in Holmfirth, was selling up to 30m cards a year. They offered gleeful vulgarity, with scrawny red-nosed drunks in pork-pie hats leering pop-eyed at voluptuous semi-dressed women. There were battleaxe-wives, sour old maids, weedy hen-pecked husbands (many called Bert), Scotsmen in fly-away kilts, nervous nudists and exhausted newly-weds. Blimey, there was a lot of sex about at the seaside; always scope for a snog or a snigger.

Sales dwindled, however, as holiday tastes and destinations changed and in the mid-1980s Bamforths was bought by the Dennis company in Scarborough, better-known for its “views” – more sedate holiday postcards that you could send to your gran rather than the lads at work. But it was no use: Dennis too ceased trading in the late 1990s.

“I read about it in the Yorkshire Post,” says Wallace. “I thought: ‘By God, what a terrible shame! The collection can’t be broken up. It can’t be totally forgotten about.’” He duly bought the Bamforth company and intellectual property rights and immediately wondered what he’d taken on.

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He was expecting a lot of cards, but not the 60-70,000 different designs he reckons he’s got. He opens the company’s vintage catalogues on the studio table. They’re a bumper celebration of the bawdy and the brazen, the sort of stuff that George Orwell viewed with disgust long before political correctness elbowed its way in to British life to stifle almost-innocent fun.

In a celebrated 1941 essay on Donald McGill, the most famous postcard artist (though not a Bamforths man), Orwell laid into the cards’ “overpowering vulgarity... the ever-present obscenity... the hideousness of the colours... utter lowness of mental atmosphere... grotesque, staring, blatant quality of the drawings.”

The people on them, he wrote, were “deliberately ugly, the faces grinning and vacuous, the women monstrously parodied, with bottoms like Hottentots... Every joke is ultimately a custard pie... 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.”

Local “watch committees” – guardians of public morality – agreed and censored some of the cards, stamping “Disapproved” across the back. Mostly, though, Bamforths got away with it.

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Pause for a further guffaw: An old maid in curlers is woken by a burglar climbing through the bedroom window. She flings out her arms and cries: “Come in – or I’ll scream!”

Today the cards – of which the Tolson Museum in Huddersfield also has an important collection – have a 1950s period atmosphere that’s very appealing. They seem overwhelmingly, parochially British, but they also sold well on the continent, as a range of French and Dutch translations in the Bamforths catalogues show.

They were listed by subject and genre: Cheeky Chimp, Fairy Secrets, Kute, Glass Eye, Play-Time Pets, Embossed Lovers (a bit obscure, that one). If you wanted something comic, choose from Donkey Comic, Welsh Comic (rather than Welsh Novelty), Puppy Comic, or Comic Kids (rather than Cute Kids or Cute Kiddies).

And they were cleverly marketed for different British resorts. “We’ve got the wind up at...” runs one caption, and there are the various versions of the card “personalised” for Blackpool, Bridlington, Morecambe, Clacton, Southend, Skegness and the Isle of Man. Even little Gorleston-on-Sea in Norfolk got its own range.

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This is the world Ian Wallace is re-introducing to the 21st century this weekend at the Spring Fair International at Birmingham NEC: Europe’s biggest gift fair with 3,000 exhibitors and an expected 100,000 buyers from all over the world. He’s recreating a beach scene on his stall and shows me the props list: “fluffy cloud, bucket and spade, lobster”. “And there’ll be a 12 foot Beryl,” he says. “She’s being made in Hunslet at the moment.”

The Bamforths merchandise, with the images licensed to manufacturers, will be on the High Street – including John Lewis and Top Shop stores – within a few weeks. And there’ll be a range of reprinted cards.

Bamforth sold sentimental cards, too, and was making films before Hollywood. Some of them are on the Yorkshire Film Archive website, including silent “shorts” from around 1900 with a strong music-hall flavour (Kiss in the Tunnel, showing a couple doing just that on a train; the oddly-titled Women’s Rights, in which men nail the skirts of two panto-dame-style women to a fence).

And there’s Bamforth’s most successful cinema creation – a faintly alarming clown called Winky, who seems to have strayed out of a German Expressionist film. Mostly dating from around 1914, titles include Winky Diddles the Hawker, Winky Gets Puffed-Up and Winky Waggles the Wicked Widow. Very strange.

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“Bamforths wasn’t just about cheeky postcards,” says Wallace. “But that’s what everyone knows them for. It’s brilliant when you get 18 to 25 year-olds. Give them a bunch of cards and see their reaction. It creases them up. They’ve never seen them before. They were brought up on holidays in Majorca and the Costas. And these days you need something to make you laugh, don’t you?”

Pause for a final guffaw. A man eyes up a busty woman carrying two Pekingese dogs. “What a delightful pair, Miss Smith,” he says. “They must be quite a handful.”

Blimey.