The season of whiskery Scotsmen with knobbly sticks, fat women in bathing costumes, ferocious landladies and henpecked husbands, has arrived,” announced the Sheffield Weekly Telegraph in June 1950. “More than a hundred million postcards will flood our post offices.” The little pieces of card – most measuring no more than 5½ inches by 3½ inches – had, by the mid-20th century, become a ubiquitous part of life. Whether it was a “Wish you were here” or an “All is well” missive from the Front, or even a simple greeting to a friend in a neighbouring village, postcards were the quickest means of cost-effective correspondence for our ancestors. In the age of the smartphone we tend to only send postcards on holiday, but at the height of their popularity, in the first decade of the 20th century, more than six billion postcards were sent in the UK alone.
Prior to 1840,
