The Sancho Panza View

Rare is the Briton who has not paused during a seaside holiday to dash off a "wish-you-were-here" note on one of those "naughty postcards." From Brighton and Blackpool, millions of the garishly colored cards are mailed each year with their fat ladies and skinny drunks, timid vicars and saucy tarts, bashful honeymooners and beery, bulb-nosed husbands, all with risque captions. Since 1904, their creator, shy, retiring Donald McGill, turned out no fewer than 12,500 cards, and sold 200 million copies. In London, the "King of the Postcards" died at 87, and Britain last week mourned the passing of an institution.

Too corny to be really dirty, McGill's cards played for the broad belly laugh rather than the snide snigger, and in so doing gave expression to a peculiarly British brand of humor. His very first success, which might draw a wondering shrug or an embarrassed titter outside Britain, but hardly a howl, showed a chambermaid peeping through the bathroom keyhole and saying, "He won't be long now, sir, he is drying himself."

His humor was less in the tradition of the Miller's Tale than of the music hall, the kind that called for an elbow in the ribs and a broad wink. He: "Do you like Kipling?" She: "I don't know, you naughty boy, I've never kippled." The double-entendre gave McGill his most successful card, good for a staggering 6,000,000 copies, but now out of print. A shriveled shrimp of a man with a huge mustache, naked but for a small towel, stands before a doctor, who tells him: "Sorry, but we will have to take it off. It's sapping your strength." Another pictured a fat. bulging female kneeling on her bed and praying:

Please send a man to share my lot,

No one knows what a lot I've got.

A gentle, proper man who favored bow ties and bowlers and was often taken for a solicitor, McGill said of himself: "I am really rather Victorian in my outlook." And so he was. To Author Stephen Potter (Gamesmanship], McGill's cards brought back "memories of bathing tents and sand in gym shoes and tea at a beach cafe." To the late George Orwell, they meant something vastly different: a splashy, tintype, but nonetheless authentic expression of ''the Sancho Panza view of life." Like Don Quixote's earthy squire, McGill "punctures your fine attitudes and urges you to look after number one," wrote Orwell in the '40s. "The other element in man the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of us, can never be suppressed altogether, and needs a hearing occasionally."

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