The DPP’s card index eventually recorded the repeated prosecution of 1,300 different postcards in England and Wales, during the Government’s decade-long anti-obscenity campaign. Unfortunately for Mathew, the verdicts in these postcard prosecutions proved too random for him to compile an “(a) list” and a “(b) list”, and any advice which his office gave to the police must have been very subjective.
The DPP’s office stopped recording postcard prosecutions in 1962, and the index quickly became an anachronism. In 1998 the Crown Prosecution Service deposited it with the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent, which in 2011 catalogued and digitised it with a grant from from JISC, the higher education funding body.