The Forces’ Favourites

Published April 05, 2023 • Updated April 05, 2023

The Forces’ Favourites playing cards with glamorous illustrations by David Wright, United Kingdom, 2006.

Produced in 2006 by British Heritage Ltd., this is a fully illustrated pack of playing cards featuring glamour pin-ups from the 1940s. The artist was David Wright (1912-1967), an outstanding erotic artist of the day, whose work first appeared in The Sketch magazine in January 1941, and continued regularly throughout the War and beyond to 1951 in a series of 169 illustrations. The illustrations established him as one of the most popular pin-up artists during World War II. In the 1950s he continued drawing in a similar style for Men Only. See the box►

The cards (which have 4-corner indices) present a series of "lovelies" that epitomised female glamour during World War II, and beneath them are the original captions. An additional card provides information about the artist and describes the pin-ups as “willowy, long-legged, pert-breasted women, often in stockings” more►

The Forces’ Favourites pin-up playing cards produced by British Heritage Ltd, United Kingdom, 2006

Above: The Forces’ Favourites pin-up playing cards produced by British Heritage Ltd, United Kingdom, 2006.

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By Peter Burnett

United Kingdom • Member since July 27, 2022

I graduated in Russian and East European Studies from Birmingham University in 1969. It was as an undergraduate in Moscow in 1968 that I stumbled upon my first 3 packs of “unusual” playing cards which fired my curiosity and thence my life-long interest. I began researching and collecting cards in the early 1970s, since when I’ve acquired over 3,330 packs of non-standard cards, mainly from North America, UK and Western Europe, and of course from Russia and the former communist countries.

• Russian Playing Cards

Following my retirement from the Bodleian Library in Dec. 2007 I took up a new role as Head of Library Development at the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) to support library development in low-income countries. This work necessitated regular training visits to many sub-Saharan African countries and also further afield, to Vietnam, Nepal and Bangladesh – all of which provided rich opportunities to further expand my playing card collection.

Since 2019 I’ve been working part-time in the Bodleian Library where I’ve been cataloguing the bequest of the late Donald Welsh, founder of the English Playing Card Society.