Pub decor
Ugh. I don’t think the police should have been involved, but at the same time I really don’t think pub owners or restaurant havers or food truck users should have racist caricatures on display. Not every “should” or “should not” is a police matter, to put it mildly.
The landlady of a pub whose collection of golliwog dolls was confiscated by police has assembled replacements, which she plans to display in defiance of a continuing investigation.
Last week four Essex police officers and a trainee seized all the dolls on show in the White Hart Inn in Grays as part of an investigation into an alleged hate crime.
We don’t have “golliwog” dolls in the US; it’s not even a word in US idiom. This is a golliwog doll:
No, I don’t think pubs should have those on display. I also don’t think it’s a police matter.
The dolls divide opinion in Grays. On Tuesday some pub regulars turned up to show support, but others expressed their fury. The pub’s landlady, Benice Ryley, 62, refuses to accept they are racist.
A neighbor disagrees with her.
Tony Daly, who manages a nearby charity shop, said the dolls made his “blood boil” and said he was shocked they had been on display in such a diverse area.
He also plans to confront Ryley over the issue. He said: “I find them very offensive and I’ll be going there to peacefully put my point across and to educate her. I grew up in Tottenham in the 70s when we fought against those kind of things. They used to call black people golliwogs. It’s a racist symbol that says slavery to me and the black and white minstrels. It’s so outdated and offensive to black people.”
It may be that Ryley is unaware of the black and white minstrels, but if so she should have taken the trouble to learn more. I hope she can hear what Tony Daly tells her.
Sunder Katwala, director of the integration thinktank British Future, said he was concerned by a post by Chris Ryley [husband of Benice and licensee of the pub] on Facebook. The 2016 post showed dolls hanging from a shelf in the bar alongside a comment by him saying, “They used to hang them in Mississippi years ago”. Katwala said that Chris Ryley had referenced lynchings in Mississippi in connection to the pub’s golliwogs collection in a Facebook post in 2016.
Uh, yeah. That makes the denial of racist intent less credible.
It is difficult to see how ‘golliwog’ dolls are not racist, given that they are 1. exclusively black, and with ‘negroid’ hair, and 2. are intended to poke fun of a racial nature are African negroid blacks: not say, at Melanesians or Australoids, and 3. they include that common racist epithet ‘wog’ in their common name. Their purpose is to denigrate rather than raise negroid people in general popular esteem. The contrast between a ‘golliwog’ and a classical Greek statue (eg ‘The Discobolus’ by Myron) could not be greater.
They’re not quite exclusively black, at least not according to the photo in the Graun, which shows the publican holding four black ones and one white one. I’m taking a wild guess that the pair bought ONE white gollywog so that they could say “LOOK LOOK THEY’RE NOT RACIST AT ALL WE HAVE A WHITE ONE.”
These things were quite common in 1970s Britain when I was growing up, I’m ashamed to say. Robertson’s jam had a golliwog as it’s mascot until, I think, the late 80s. They issued golliwog badges and little collectable figures. In fact, I think the figures were all jazz musicians, just in case they weren’t already sufficiently racist.
I seem to think Ken Livingstone ran the successful campaign to have the mascot abolished but the badges and figures were produced for years afterwards. A lot of people thought it was political correctness gone mad, even in the late 80s and there were protests about the logo’s abolishment.
A friend of my sister’s once came to stay, in about 1976-7, and bought a golliwog soft toy with her. My parents were furious and wouldn’t let it (the toy, not the child) in the house. One of the few times I’ve been proud of them.
Jeez… It’s not like they’re living in Japan…
I’m not going to defend the concept of a golliwog. Like many things that were accepted, even approved of, back whenever it is clearly of racist origin. What I will say is that like many European and Commonwealth children in the 60’s we had a family golliwog. I assume it was knitted by my Nan. Apart from the black face and curly hair the colours were all different from the ‘standard’ version. In our family at least there was never any hint of different or racist overtone to the doll (and my family certainly had all the low grade -isms you’d expect of the time). It was just a doll that was loved and played with, used a sleep cuddle and mixed freely with the teddy, fluffy dog, lonely penguin, china doll and other miscellaneous toys that four children is sequence inherited. That doesn’t make it right, then or now. But the childhood memories are pure and warm.
As a University student I attended a New Zealand play Conversations with a Golliwog. Activists on campus tried to have it banned and picketed performances. It was a one woman play about a mentally ill girl who grew up loving and talking to her golliwog until shamed out of it. As a young woman she suffers an event that triggers her mental health issues and Golly starts talking to her again. It’s a heart rending play and gave a young man a lot to think about with mental health and the treatment of girls and women. Could it have been reworked to be centred around a teddy? Maybe? I think something I can’t quite define would have been lost.
As with other forms of art and literature we’ve discussed here before, I’d rather keep them as they are and provide context and interpretation, than to erase them from history.
I’m sad for the lonely penguin.
A penguin should never be alone.
It’s like a piano key being alone.
Rob@5:
I think that young kids can be forgiven for playing with a doll like this; they don’t really understand racism until they get a little older and absorb what adults say. I know that I was completely confused about adults saying anti-semitic things when I was a child; I had Jewish friends and didn’t think them any different from me (and of course they weren’t). I still remembered some of the things that adults would say, but only began to understand in my teens when the kids of Italian origins would bully the Jewish kids, because their parents disliked them.
As you say, childhood memories are (often) pure and warm.
O @8, there’s nothing sadder than being all dressed up and having no one to go with. Happy feet staring at his toes.
JG @9, I agree. I actually had a miserable childhood in many respects, but not because of my cuddly toys. In the case of my family the -isms were quite strangely expressed.
I never heard anyone express distaste and negativity against people of different races. We didn’t mix with Maori, but then where I grew up there were more Vietnamese than Maori. As an adult I recall laughing at my Mum when she said to me “There’s new neighbours in that house. They’re really nice people. They’re [whispers] Chinese.” Why are we whispering Mum? My grandparents fervently believed that a girls/woman’s place was in the home, looking after the husband, kids and oldies. Jobs and education were for men. My Mum had quite a different view. My grandparents never even acknowledged the concept of homosexuality. To be fair they never acknowledged sexuality full stop. My Mum had no issue with homosexuality. Never even said it in a whisper.
Incidentally, My Golly had teal coloured jumper and pants, not the B&W Minstrels costume. In fact the B&W Minstrels were still on TV at that time. I never even associated Golly with them until much later. All that said, yes, there are good reasons to let that tradition fade away. Just like how all the neighbourhood kids used to have toy wooden guns and run around playing war or something. Not the done thing now and rightly so.
Rob, in our city the guns are still the done thing – only they’re real.
There seems be more than one racist Facebook post by Chris Ryley.
There was of course Gilbert Golly, an unpleasant little boy who enjoyed making life difficult for Noddy, in Enid Blyton’s Toyland tales. He has, it seems, been edited out of recent editions, or changed into a goblin perhaps.
There was all sorts of casual racism that didn’t really register as against those ‘other people’ to a child at the time.
I recall my father mentioning the term ‘n****r toes’ for brazil nuts. It was something he heard as a child, but I doubt he saw anyone with skin darker than light brown while growing up in rural Alberta in the 1920s & 30s.