Good golly Miss Molly! as the American rock’n’roller Little Richard exclaimed
in his 1956 hit. The uproar over the BBC’s dropping of Carol Thatcher for
her use of the word “golliwog” has sharply divided opinion on whether it was
a harmless children’s toy or an offensive racist caricature.
The BBC was reportedly inundated with angry calls condemning its decision to
sack Baroness Thatcher’s 55-year-old daughter as “roving reporter” on The
One Show after she used the word to describe Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, the
mixed-race French tennis player.
Soon there was royal collateral damage. Golliwog soft toys were withdrawn from
the gift shop on the Sandringham estate and the Queen was said to be
“furious”, particularly after Prince Harry’s dressing down for calling a
military colleague a Paki and Prince Charles referring to a friend as Sooty.
It was recalled that Camilla was spotted with a golliwog key-ring at Hampton
Court Flower Show last year.
Then Hamleys, the Regent Street toy shop, withdrew golliwogs from sale.
However, the internet retailer Amazon continued to advertise them and eBay,
the online auction site, was last week offering 219 items ranging from
“golliwog salt and pepper pots” to “cute rubber golly fridge magnet”.
Thatcher’s comments had been made in the green room after the show in a
conversation with its host, Adrian Chiles, and the comedian Jo Brand.
According to Thatcher’s friends she was incensed that she had been reported
for a private conversation, but the BBC’s version of events was that 12
people had been present.
“In my school playgrounds, during the 1950s and 1960s, ‘golliwog’ was a
routine piece of racist abuse, a fighting word, and after all this time it’s
hard to believe that Carol Thatcher was using the word innocently,” Mike
Phillips wrote in The Guardian.
According to Matthew Syed in The Times: “Words like Paki, nigger and golliwog
are not iniquitous because of tone, context or intent. Their power lies in
their capacity to reinforce an inner bias so potent that few of us can rid
ourselves of its influence.”
Although many people have fond memories of golliwog toys, the concept has
fallen into disuse – as out of place in the modern age as The Black and
White Minstrel Show, which for two decades was one of Britain’s most popular
television programmes until it faded away in 1978 after a barrage of
criticism.
In the 1980s a campaign against racial insensitivity, led by the Greater
London Council, led to the withdrawal of golliwog books from public
libraries and the decline of golliwog toys.
The last straw for loyalists came in 2001 when Robertson’s jam dropped the
golliwog trademark that had first appeared on its jars in 1910, becoming one
of the Britain’s longest running consumer loyalty schemes. More than 20m
golliwog badges were dispatched to children who sent in three tokens.
Robertson’s denied that it had given in to campaigns and boycott threats,
citing research that children were unfamiliar with the character. According
to the firm’s promotional literature, John Robertson, the owner’s son, had
first encountered the golliwog doll in America just before the first world
war. He saw rural children playing with black rag dolls made from discarded
black skirts and blouses. Believing the children called the toys “golly” as
a mispronunciation of “dolly”, he returned to Britain with the name and
image.
However, the golliwog had first lodged in public consciousness about 15 years
earlier as a story book character created by Florence Kate Upton. Born in
1873 in Flushing, New York, to English parents who had moved to the United
States three years previously, Upton was 16 when her father died. Four years
later the family returned to England.
Impoverished, but harbouring ambitions as an artist, she began illustrating
her own children’s books as a way of raising the money for tuition. With the
accompanying verse written by her mother, Bertha, her book The Adventures of
Two Dutch Dolls was published in London in 1895. The story featured two
dolls, Peg and Sarah Jane, let loose in a toy shop where they encountered “a
horrid sight, the blackest gnome” wearing bright red trousers, a red bow tie
on a white shirt and a blue swallowtailed coat.
“He was a caricature of American black-faced minstrels – in effect, a
caricature of a caricature,” wrote David Pilgrim, professor of sociology, in
his study for the Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in
Michigan.
Upton named the character Golliwogg, perhaps derived from pollywog, a dialect
word for tadpole meaning wiggle head. Her Golliwogg was based on a black
minstrel doll she had played with roughly as a small child in New York. She
recalled: “Seated upon a flowerpot in the garden, his kindly face was a
target for rubber balls . . . the game being to knock him over backwards. It
pains me to think of those little rag legs flying ignominiously over his
head, yet that was a long time ago, and before he had became a personality .
. . We knew he was ugly.”
Upton often drew her Golliwogg with paws instead of hands and feet, giving him
a coal black face, wide eyes, thick lips and long, unruly hair.
The book became a bestseller in Britain and the Golliwogg was such a hit that
the second printing was retitled The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a
Golliwogg. In 12 books over the next 14 years, the Golliwogg journeyed to
the North Pole and Africa with his friends, the Dutch Dolls. By then the
Golliwogg had top billing over the dolls in every title.
The Uptons’ failure to copyright the Golliwogg led to the character becoming a
common figure in other children’s books, renamed Golliwog. Whereas the
Uptons’ doll was ugly but loveable, his successors tended to be unkind and
hideous.
Meanwhile, other industries had cottoned on to the golliwog’s potential,
notably Steiff, the German doll manufacturer, which in 1908 began mass
production of the dolls. Those early examples now change hands for thousands
of pounds. In Britain the firms Merrythought and Deans joined the bonanza.
Only the teddy bear exceeded the golliwog’s popularity in the first half of
the 20th century. Sir Kenneth Clark, the art historian, remembered his
childhood toy as an example of chivalry, “far more persuasive than the
unconvincing knights of Arthurian legend”. Claude Debussy, the French
composer, was so charmed by the golliwogs in his daughter’s books that he
included Golliwog’s Cakewalk in his Children’s Corner suite.
Enid Blyton, the children’s writer, featured villainous golliwogs in her Noddy
stories, as well as writing three books primarily about golliwogs. These
days her style would set teeth on edge. The Three Golliwogs, for example,
includes this passage: “Once the three bold golliwogs, Golly, Woggie, and
Nigger, decided to go for a walk . . . Golly wasn’t quite ready so Woggie
and Nigger said they would start off without him, and Golly would catch them
up as soon as he could. So off went Woggie and Nigger, arm-in-arm, singing
merrily their favourite song – which as you may guess, was Ten Little Nigger
Boys.”
The golliwog was embraced throughout the British empire as an ostensibly
paternalistic symbol of the black man but, like colonialism itself, its
image began to fall into disfavour. After the second world war the name
suffered by association with the racial insult “wog”, even though this
applied mainly to Arabs and Asians rather than Africans. By the 1960s the
clamour of protest was growing amid racial tension between blacks and whites
in Britain.
According to Pilgrim, the campaign to ban golliwogs was similar to the
American campaign against Little Black Sambo, a children’s book by Helen
Bannerman, a Scot who lived for 30 years in Madras, southern India. First
published in 1899, it was the tale of an Indian boy named Sambo who prevails
over a group of hungry tigers.
“In both cases, racial minorities and sympathetic whites argued that these
images demeaned blacks and hurt the psyches of minority children,” said
Pilgrim.
In 2006 police seized three golliwogs from a shop in Bromyard, Herefordshire,
after complaints. They were acting under section 5 of the Public Order Act,
which makes it an offence to display material that could be threatening,
abusive or insulting. Last year Viv Endecott, a shop owner in Corfe Castle,
Dorset, complained of receiving hate mail after she sold more than 500
golliwogs in six months.
Joan Bland, who runs the teddy shop Asquiths in Henley-on-Thames, was standing
firm last week. “I will say the word ‘golly’ simply means ‘doll’ and that
the golliwog’s duty is to spread love and happiness. And they do spread love
and happiness. Masses of people buy them and collect them, people of all
races,” she said.
Children are colour blind, a listener told Radio 5 Live last week. But many
adults, conscious of the golliwog’s accumulated baggage, have consigned him
to the fate of Paddington Bear – who was left on a railway platform long ago.
