The White Hart Inn in Grays, Essex, proudly displayed racist dolls (Wikicommons/ David Anstiss)
It’s just a toy. How can you get so upset about a doll? That was the right’s refrain last week after police investigated a pub with a collection of blackface dolls, known by the racist term “golliwogs”, sitting proudly behind its bar.
Suella Braverman, the hard right home secretary, had strong words with the “woke cops” after the event—despite no arrests, charges or permanent confiscations. But the apparent lack of awareness of the dolls as a racist symbol was feigned. Everyone who grew up in Britain in the 1970s and 80s knows they are a racist provocation, every bit as much as a sign saying “no blacks” above a pub door.
They were the mascot of household jam and marmalade brand Robertson’s, which later led to collectable pendants, jewellery and dolls. Not only are the dolls a caricature complete with jet black skin, large white-rimmed eyes and clown-like lips, they also gave rise to the most hateful racist term—wog.
Those who claim ignorance are much like people that think throwing bananas at black footballers, and police chanting monkey-like noises at black people, is “just a bit of fun”. It comes as no surprise to find that the Essex pub landlord Chris Ryley has declared support for “White Lives Matter” and wore a fascist “Britain First” T-shirt.
On social media Ryley wrote, “They used to hang them in Mississippi years ago” alongside a picture of the dolls in his bar. Asked about the post, Ryley said, “In the 1800s when slaves used to run away in the Deep South of America they either beat them or hanged them. My comment was a reference to that.” He added what he thought was a soothing balm, “It was not meant to be detrimental to anybody.”
‘Course not, mate. In their various incarnations since the turn of the 19th century, the dolls were never meant to represent what black people actually look like. Instead they were part of a minstrel tradition that emerged in America far earlier, where white people would don black make-up and talk in imagined colloquialisms.
Marxist historian David Roediger argues that this blackface culture, which included plays, songs and mock speech, was a reaction to the fear of the newly industrialising society. “Racist entertainments of the period,” were used to “project white male anxieties onto blackface characters,” he wrote in his book, The Wages of Whiteness.
The rapid growth of factories and mills threatened livelihoods and traditions. Skilled artisans were being replaced by machines. For the white poor, and sections of the middle class, “wage slavery” felt like a betrayal of the supposed benefits of whiteness the powerful had long promised them. Their anger at being treated “like slaves” needed to be redirected away from the bosses.
Racist caricatures that depicted black people as dim-witted, lazy, buffoonish and cowardly served this purpose. These reinforced ideas of white superiority and drove division deep into the emerging working class. Out of this racist swamp a book that featured Golliwog, a doll-like black character, emerged in New York in 1873.
It soon spread to Europe where the figure took on an ever more sinister persona. It was children’s literature was designed to support white superiority. Poetry and novels came dripping in racist filth—and mass-produced dolls based on foul stereotypes sold in their millions.
But the world that spawned blackface was changing fast by the 1930s. Across the Empire rebellion stirred. Dark-skinned people derided by racists as “ignorant” showed great acumen in the often-bloody battles to take their countries back. They forced a humiliated British ruling class to flee most of Asia, Africa and the Middle East within a few decades. Perhaps that spirit of rebellion should now pay a visit to a particular pub in Essex.
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