Risque business

IAN Wallace lays his cards on the table straight away, a bawdy bumper bundle in a ribald rubber band. An old favourite shows a surgeon berating a harassed nurse – “You blithering idiot, I distinctly told you to remove his spectacles” – whilst a patient flees, rollock- naked, into the distance.

Another – they swear it was the direct inspiration for the television sitcom On the Buses – depicts a perspiring driver peering into the steaming innards of his clapped-out vehicle.

Behind him stands a conductress, blonde and buxom, who enquires if he’d like a screwdriver. The response may easily be imagined, but is something along the lines of “No thanks, I’m ten minutes late already.”

We’re having lunch in the pub, the first course arriving at much the same time as the postcard about the woman said to have acute angina – there’s a lot of hospital humour – a red-nosed roue inevitably in attendance.

“Blimey,” he says, “her boobs aren’t bad, either.”

The legendary Bamforth’s picture postcard company, then Holmfirth’s finest, was in receivership when Ian bought it 12 years ago. He insists that he didn’t tell his wife until everything was stamped and sealed.

“I’m a bit of a wacky person, I suppose there’s a sort of crazy bit in my head. I then had to put my commercial head on and decide what to do with it.”

Risque business? “It took years to sort everything out, but it’s going very well. There’s an eager market out there, people who are fed up with all this political correctness,” he says.

Already the cartoons are licensed on everything from boxer shorts to fridge magnets, T-shirts to pear drops.

In the new year he plans to relaunch the postcard range.

Some call them saucy, others cheeky, the reverent irreverent.

What’s sauce for the goose may not be sauce for the gander, of course, or possibly vice-versa. A few suppose them obscene and not heard.

Ian’s defiant, among his personal favourites a card showing two cannibals – “bones through their noses, the lot” – with another ineluctably buxom blonde in their pot and a line about hoping they like pee soup.

“We had an Afro-Caribbean working for us and she loved it, begged us to have copies made for her friends. In this time of doom, gloom and rising heating oil prices, people just want a bit of fun – why do you think all these comedians are packing out massive halls? A friend of mine calls the cards plain daft, and that’s what they are.

“They’re not hurtful, they’re not vindictive. You watch television and hear nothing but swearing; there are no swear words on Bamforth’s postcards.

You’ll never make everyone happy; if you can make 99 per cent happy, you’re doing pretty well.”

JAMES Bamforth was a painter and decorator in Holmfirth, Last of the Summer Wine country, before launching a portrait photography business in 1870. He later specialised in magic lantern films, often featuring a character called Winky in episodes like Winky Dons the Petticoats, Winky the Bigamist and Winky Diddles the Rentman.

If that were nudge, nudge, wink Winky the postcards launched in 1910 were very much wham, bam, thank you Bamforth’s.

Although some were tourist scenes, others for children, it was the seaside picture postcards that were to make Bamforth’s name – particularly after the Second World War when PC was still Dixon of Dock Green. They sold a billion, despite the scrutiny of local censorship committees.

“They had to send the sketches and gags to the council,” says Ian. “We still have cards with a stamp saying they were approved by the Isle of Man censorship committee, or whatever.

In some ways, they could probably get away with it more easily then than some people would have them do today.”

In the Fifties, launch of the space age, the authorities turned down a card showing a pair of pink bloomers being blown from a washing line in a gale. The caption was “There go granny’s sputniks.”

Their legacy, back in Holmfirth, was Last of the Summer Wine.

Ian fishes out a still-familiar postcard: little bloke pushing a pram, another big-beamed blonde – nothing if not true to form – looking maternally on.

The chap’s Compo, or possibly Howard, the blonde’s inescapably Marina. “Just look at their faces, pure Sumer Wine,” says Ian. The punchline, of course, is about wondering who put him up to it.

The company was bought in the early Eighties by ETW Dennis, the Scarborough printer, who seemed to find it not its type at all. Ian inherited 30 chests of uncatalogued images, 50 pieces of original artwork and the intellectual property rights.

Intellectual? “Oh, very.”

Among those which will never be reproduced are those with a swastika in the corner. “At first glance they’re just furry little cats and dogs. Apparently the swastika was at one time a sign of good luck. I don’t think we’d get away with that today.”

In total there were 50,000 postcards, about half now scanned and catalogued. He still finds it all a bit of a laugh.

“If I’ve had a stressful day I just come home and look at the cards for 20 minutes. Cheers me up no end; absolutely never fails.”

HE’S 64, was born in Huddersfield, brought up on Bamforth’s postcards – “the humour was fantastic” – now lives near Boroughbridge, in North Yorkshire.

Once he was in transport, 30 years ago launched the Beatles Shop in Liverpool which remains in family ownership.

His hair’s almost Sixties, too, at least for a chap just months short of his pension. He positively twinkles, evidence of all that they say about laughter being the best medicine.

“When I bought the business, postcards were having a hard time. People were just starting to text one another, and to talk away on their mobile phones. Now they’re sending postcards again because they can help brighten someone’s day. That’s what Bamforth’s was always about.”

The Royal Mail has been less amused. When he proposed a set of ten “smiler” stamps, several were rejected on grounds of taste. They’re talking of appealing to the Prime Minister.

“All I want to do is bring these characters into the 21st Century,” he insists over the soup, and the bread and butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

It’s going well, the cards stacking up nicely. Ian Wallace may just have played the joker.