Tribute To Creator Of Seaside Postcard

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31345, 15 April 1967, Page 5

Tribute To Creator Of Seaside Postcard

(London Correspondent)

LONDON, March 27.

Donald McGill died on October 13, 1962 at the age of 87 and received brief mention in the British newspapers of the day as “The King of the Postcards,” the man whose 12,000 funny postcards sold at seaside resorts in tens of millions.

Two months later it was revealed that McGill left only £735. Apparently the artist, famous for his fat women and henpecked husbands, the busts and bottoms of Brighton, the Freudian giggle innocently painted in technicolour, had been utterly unbusinesslike.

Now, five yean after McGill’s death, his brand of humour and prolific artistry have become "in.” The reason seems to be the publication by Hutchinson of a selection of postcards and an appraisal by Arthur CalderMarshall under the title “Wish You Were Here.” Since it came out last October the book has become a runaway success, going through three printings before the end of the year. It is a best seller in many parts of the country. 50 Guineas Expected

The new wave of interest has led to an exhibition of McGill’s work, to be held as part of the Brighton Festival of Arts from April 14 to 30. Some 40 or 50 of his original drawings, plus a selection from his many thousands of seaside postcards, will be exhibited in the Brighton Art Gallery, next door to the flamboyant Royal Pavilion. Sotheby’s are now cataloguing over 1800 McGill originals —owned by D. Constance, Ltd., of Littlehampton, the sole publishers of the postcards—for auction this summer.

Some of these, it is said, should fetch as much as 50 guineas. The satirist, George Orwell, in 1941 was first to recognise, in an essay, McGill as “a clever draughtsman with a real caricaturist’s touch in the drawing of faces; but the special value of his postcards is that they are so completely typical. They represent as it were the norm of the comic postcard.”

Orwell observed that “without being in the least imitative” McGill's postcards “are exactly what comic postcards have been any time over the past 40 years.” He said that they reminded people of the barely different postcards they bought in their childhood —which was not surprising, since McGill had probably also drawn these. Music-Hall Jokes “Your first impression is overpowering vulgarity. This is quite apart from the everpresent obscenity,” wrote Orwell, “and apart 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 diliberately ugly, the faces grinning and vacuous, the women monstrously parodied, with bottoms like Hottentots.

“Your second impression, however, is of indefinable familiarity. But more than this, what you are really looking at is something as traditional as Greek tragedy, a sort of sub-world of smacked bottoms and scrawny mothers-in-law which is part of European consciousness.”

Some cards are merely illustrations of good music-hall jokes, far McGill was a regular visitor to the London Palladium.

He listened to all the sentimental songs, trying to think of puns which would turn

them into some comic purpose. He haunted pubs for both for types to be portrayed and for jokes. Donald McGill was brought up in Blackheath, a southern suburb of London, known to most New Zealanders for its famous Rugby club. It was Rugby which probably changed McGill’s destiny. A kick in the ankle while he was playing a match at the age of 17 brought recurring pain, until eventually his left foot was found to be so diseased that it had to be amputated, and McGill was fitted with an artificial limb. Instead of going overseas as a soldier or in toe Colonial Service he resigned himself to life in London, first in toe drawing office of a naval architect

Most other young men of toe district were going off to wider horizons, and none of McGill’s four sisters was able to find husbands in toe rather limited'field. This may have inspired McGill’s later composition called “The Shortest Prayer,” which consisted of: “A Man. Amen!”

While he was working with the naval architect, McGill’s sketching, or comic doodling, probably became a habit. When a nephew was in hospital, McGill wanted to send him a card saying “Hope You’ll Be Out Soon.” He illustrated it on toe back of a plain postcard with toe drawing of a man clutching a notice saying “No Skating” up to his waist in the broken ice of a pond. It is believed that someone, a friend or brother, saw this and suggested its commercial possibilities.

Until 1894 toe only cards that could be sent through British mails were those on sale at post offices, but a postcard industry was developing at toe turn of toe century. A publisher offered McGill in 1905 the sum of 6s for the copyright of any funny postcard which he accepted, and McGill started churning them out more and more in his spare time and for his own amusement.

McGill portrayed in his work a type of philosophy, psychology and social commentary on his tone—until toe name Donald McGill became synonymous with the humour which toe British seaside visitors are emboldened to post to their friends, as a sort of proof that they have smelt toe ozone.