The local magistrates’ destruction orders had no effect in other towns, so the same postcards were prosecuted again and again in different seaside resorts, year after year. Shopkeepers attempted to protect themselves with local censorship committees, to ban the worst cards. By 1954 censorship committees were operating in Blackpool, Hastings, Cleethorpes, and Brighton, with an official postcard censorship on the Isle of Man. But the destruction orders continued, and in 1956 some 22,558 cards were condemned.
The anti-obscenity campaign lasted more than a decade, but it lost momentum after 1960, when the jury in the prominent prosecution of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover brought in a verdict of not guilty. Local prosecutions of postcards continued for a couple of years, but the tide of opinion was changing once more. The postcard artist Donald McGill might have been prosecuted for obscenity in 1954, but by 1966 his cards were being hailed as art, and in the following year the Brighton Art Gallery proudly mounted an exhibition of his original designs.