For a people who were keen on sex, but just weren't very good at talking about it, they offered a welcome outlet for a snigger and a giggle.
Cartoons of hen-pecked husbands . . . doctors and nurses with wandering stethoscopes . . . waiters in trousers so tight you could see their religion . . . barmaids with a cleavage that Evel Knievel would have struggled to jump across on his motorbike. . . they've all brought a cheeky smile to the face of many a birthday recipient
Captions like 'I've got to get Mrs Gimlet to Oldham and then I'm going to Bangor as fast as I can' only added to the fun.
Embarrassment was the repressed Englishman's strongest emotion. Innuendo made a virtue of that fact. Double meanings gave you a good laugh without being too aggressively crude.
Innuendo also made Brits the world champs at wordplay. Greetings cards with saucy double entendres sold in their millions.
It was an essentially innocent approach epitomised by the late, great Donald McGill's incomparable illustrations of wobbling female flesh and pink- cheeked peeping Toms that so captivated generations of seaside holidaymakers.
Cards like his were a naughty-but-nice part of British humour. In my naivety, I thought that was still the case.
Then, the other day, I popped into my local branch of Scribblers with the kids to buy my mum a birthday card. Naturally, I assumed that in a greetings card chain with branches all over Britain's High Streets, the merchandise would be suitable for family viewing. Big mistake.
'What does OFF YOUR T*** mean, Mum?' bellowed the eight-year-old, holding up one card. I grabbed it off him and was putting it back when I did a double-take. The other cards in the rack made that first one look as pure as a snowy Nativity scene.
'Happy birthday to the office slut' ran the caption over a picture of a girl sitting on a desk in just a bra and skirt.
A photo from the Fifties of an elegant, Princess Margaret type bore the charming greeting: 'FYI: You're a cheap good for nothing rancid old slag.'
Particularly horrifying were the cards featuring pictures of pensioners with pornographic captions.
How I winced for the smiling old lady on the cover of one. Hilda, as they called her, could never have imagined a Britain where a frail elderly person would be the butt of a cruel joke about oral sex.
Equally shocked would be the devoted Darby and Joan, whom we see linking hands on another card, with a speech bubble which reads: 'Fancy a quickie up the ****?'
There are battalions of laws in this country to protect sensitive minority groups from offence. But in many card shops today, it seems, it's open season to be obscene about the very old - and the very young too.
No one is considered too vulnerable to be sexualised. In one card, showing a smiling old-fashioned little girl with her arm round her brother, the sister is saying: 'F*** off. He's mine.'
Another angelic brother and sister beam out over the caption: 'Happy Birthday W*.'
So who the hell is buying this wretched stuff? The staggering fact is that the greetings card industry is booming on the back of such smut, with an annual value of £1.3 billion making it more lucrative than sales of coffee and tea combined.
But what's even more depressing is that 85 per cent of all greetings cards are purchased by women.
What sort of woman would send a birthday card 'From one drunken whore to another'?
I suspect the answer lies in the binge-drinking ladette culture, which prides itself on being as crude and sexist as the male equivalent.
Frankly, who needs to worry about misogynistic men insulting and belittling women when the girls buying these cards happily call themselves and their mates 'slut' and 'bitch'?
Undoubtedly, the shops that stock cards like this are cynically jumping on the bandwagon of a black American street culture where dissing (disrespecting) your peers is seen as cool and coarse abuse of women is routine.
Thanks to them, we now have the spectacle of British girls sending birthday cards in which 'whore' is a term of endearment.
When it came to saucy cards, a nudge was always as good as a wink. But in Vulgar Britain, it seems we're all treated like slappers now.
(Abridged from Mail Online)
In case anyone thinks that they are jumping onto the commercial bandwagon, the Mail adds: " We apologise for reproducing these offensive cards but readers must see for themselves how distasteful some greeting cards have become"
