This summer, composer Barry Russell was commissioned to write Sing Holmfirth!,  a choral piece for the Holmfirth Arts Festival, containing songs about the history of the village. He asked local writers for lyrics, and I supplied these verses celebrating one of the town's most notable businesses, the firm of Bamforth, which supplied outrageously saucy postcards to British holidaymakers for most of the twentieth century.

The Postcard Song



When your mates are on vacation
You'd like some communication
Telling you they're fit and cheery
Telling you they're bright and beery,
So they send a postcard.
And of course it's for the best if
That card's saucy and suggestive -
That's a Bamforth postcard.

Send me Bamforth cards cartooning
Eager couples honeymooning,
Cross-eyed drunks that sway and stagger,
Every mum-in law a nagger,
On a  Bamforth postcard.
Pretty girls in frilly knickers,
Randy blokes and silly vicars,
They're on Bamforth postcards.



Here's how Bamforth made his money:
Sex is fun and sex is funny.
Every postcard says that clearly,
That's why England loved them dearly,
Loved these saucy postcards.
Lovely girls with naughty leanings,
Cheeky chaps and double meanings -
That's a Bamforth postcard.

Saucy verging on the rudish,
Sometimes they offend the prudish,
The chairman of the Watch Committee's
Shocked and he cries out 'For pity's
Sake do ban these postcards!'.
We can't all be saints like you, man -
We're just human, bloomin' human -
We like Bamforth postcards.

George Simmers

If you have any thoughts on this poem, George Simmers   would be pleased to hear them.