Golliwogs and an Essex pub: racism in the wild?
The owners of the White Hart Inn in Essex have had a collection of golliwog dolls confiscated by the police, but are they racists or victims of woke enforcement?
I’ll be totally honest: I didn’t expect, in the Year of Our Lord 2023, to see a story sprawled across the national media involving a pub in Essex, social media, the home secretary and a collection of golliwog dolls. But sometimes life comes at you fast. You will have seen the story, but a brief recap so we’re all on the same page: following an anonymous complaint in February, five officers from Essex Police attended the White Hart Inn in Grays, Thurrock, on 4 April and confiscated 15 golliwog dolls which had been on display and which, the complaint alleged, constituted a hate crime. The landlord and landlady of the pub, Chris and Benice Ryley, claim the dolls are gifts from patrons, and strenuously, indeed vociferously, deny that there is any racist intention in their display.
Yeah. Golliwogs.
Mrs Ryley was outraged.
The whole thing is totally mad. Since the gollies were taken and the story was in the newspapers, we have had so many people get in touch with myself and my husband to say we shouldn’t give up and should keep them on our shelf.
She has vowed to replace the display of dolls when they are returned by Essex Police, and has proudly recounted the degree of support offered by their regular customers. “Over the last two days my customers keep singing ‘save the gollies’ and they want us to get them back,” she told reporters. Mrs Ryley went on to say that she had made a sign for the pub warning potential patrons of the presence of golliwogs and advising those who might be offended not to enter the premises.
This is, of course, perfect material for the so-called ‘culture wars’ into which we seem to be wading deeper and deeper. On the one hand, we have a white, middle-aged couple from Essex displaying deplorable, old-fashioned and unacceptably racist attitudes, vindicating the prejudices of every impeccable liberal in the land; one the other, we have a police force wasting its time on a minor dispute over some toys and performative outrage, pursuing a “woke” agenda rather than chasing criminals—the epitome of political correctness gone mad.
Let me set out a few parameters of my own starting position here. I don’t think anyone who knows me would accuse me of signing up to any kind of “woke” agenda or being a social justice warrior. I have little patience with pietistic monitors of ethics and beliefs, I think that people should in general terms be left alone with their opinions, even if they are objectionable, and the full powers and panoply of the state and law enforcement should, hard pressed as they are, concentrate on the resolution and punishment of serious crimes which have caused real harm. I don’t believe there is a general right not to be offended, and a free and pluralistic society will inevitably involve disputes and disagreements which will, sometimes, be stark and sharp-edged.
All of which being said, I have a strangely intense dislike of the kind of slow-witted, deliberately stubborn rejection of manners and courtesy, the sort of mentality which believes in what it regards as “common sense” and is always ready to downplay the feelings of others and emphasise its own “rights”. I mourn the day that the current meaning of “woke” came into common usage, and deplore the way it has come to mean anything of which conservatives disapprove or which they dislike. And, perhaps more than anything else, I hate—on both sides of the argument—the performative adoption of rigid and extreme positions with an eye to making them into a cause célèbre. So I have objections on all sides, from the exaggerated outcry at the “misgendering” of Audrey Hale, the trans man who murdered six people at a school in Nashville last month, to the assertion that any woke dilution of the traditional form of heterosexual marriage will inevitably and ruinously undermine the fabric of society.
Where do I stand on the Thurrock Gollies, then? Well. I am persuadable that Essex Police have overreacted to this whole situation. Despatching five officers to a pub to take away a collection of dolls numbering just over a dozen does seem, to put it mildly, like overkill. It is, after all, three dolls per attending PC. (Yes, I know, the numbers were not calculated on logistics in that respect.) If a complaint was made, then of course Essex Police had a duty to investigate: the constabulary cannot simply do a quick mental estimation and decide that something is probably not worth chasing up. It seems to me that a single officer could have visited the pub at some point, realised that this was not the crime of the century, and taken appropriately low-key action. That, however, is about the limit of my sympathy with the “conservative” side of the argument.
This isn’t rocket science, but several all-too-familiar tropes have been thrown up by the Ryleys to defend themselves and, further, to suggest that this is an outrageous infringement of their liberties and an imposition on their lives. Let us look at some of these.
The first, of course, is that “golliwogs are not racist”. This is often proposed in particular by people of a certain age, generally a little older than me and above; people in their fifties and older, who remember golliwogs in their childhood memories of Enid Blyton’s Noddy stories (there are 24 books in all) and Robertson’s marmalade and jam, of which the golliwog was a symbol until 2002. (Yes, 2002: I was surprised to find it was so late. I had graduated twice by then and golliwogs were not regarded as very progressive.) Mr Ryley had expressed this idea with admirable clarity and crispness: “The golliwogs are not me being racist, they are a reminder of my childhood. I don't understand how anybody could be offended by them.” Essentially, we are to believe, golliwogs are simply charming dolls and beloved icons of innocent childhood.
This really shouldn’t be hard to dismiss, but it seems we have to. The golliwog was created by an Anglo-American writer and cartoonist called Florence Kate Upton, born in New York State in 1873, who introduced the character in an 1895 book called The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a “Golliwogg”. Upton based the character on a blackface minstrel doll that her aunt had found in the attic—sharp-eyed readers will have spotted the words “blackface” and “minstrel” and will already be hearing alarm bells—and, while the book was enormously popular and spawned another 12 adventures, the golliwog was not a wholly positive portrayal. Although he became a friendly and well-meaning figure, Upton’s initial description was of “a horrid sight, the blackest gnome”. Moreover, Blyton’s later depiction of the golliwog(s) (Upton failed to trademark her character) was mischievous, trouble-making and sly at best: although Mr Golly, the owner of the Toytown garage, was Noddy’s friend and serviced his car, Gilbert Golly, another of the golliwogs, was a villain. In Here Comes Noddy Again (1951), a group of golliwogs hijack Noddy in the woods, rob him and steal his car, leaving him abandoned hatless and barefoot.
There have been some impressive attempts, not least by the Enid Blyton Society, to argue that this indicates neither prejudice on Blyton’s part nor a stereotyping of the golliwogs (and by extension black people) as criminals and mischief-makers. Ultimately, if you analyse a text closely enough you can argue almost anything, but let’s look at this realistically. We have a book published in the early 1950s, in a Britain which had a much higher background level of anti-black racism that we do now, depicting characters who resemble a caricature of black people from the American South, embracing the imagery of blackface, minstrelsy and the antebellum stereotype of Jim Crow, and they are depicted in the commission of a crime, and a crime by a mob too, reinforcing atavistic white fears. You do not have to be an experienced scholar of racial nuance to understand that this is, on the whole, negative rather than positive.
At the most innocent, positive, charitable interpretation, the golliwog has its roots in a demeaning depiction of black people as simple, unserious, unintelligent and slightly tricksy folk. They are at least to be mocked and laughed at, and more realistically to be treated with suspicion and perhaps fear. It is irrelevant that people recall the golliwog from their childhood, tinged with the agreeably roseate glow with which many invest their early years. This is a demeaning and dehumanising stereotype. It is, for want of a better word, racist.
We can see this by looking at the cognate term “wog”. This too is subject to imaginative reinterpretation and the minimising of racial overtones. Various “innocent” etymological origins are proposed to show that “wog” is not an inherently racist term for a black person (or other non-white, such as an Arab or an Asian person). The most elaborate is that it began with the letters W.O.G. stencilled on the shirts of workmen digging the Suez Canal, and denoted the phrase “Working on Government service”, but this is fanciful. There is no evidence for it, nor any explanation for the omission of the S for “service”. Other false derivations include “Westernised Oriental Gentleman”, “Worthy Oriental Gentleman”, “Wily Oriental Gentleman” and “Wonderful Oriental Gentleman”, but none has any basis in fact. They may be quirky stories, or designed to deflect any suggestion of racism, but they simply are not true.
Invoking Occam’s Razor, the most obvious etymology for the word “wog” is that it is a clipping of “golliwog”. That latter term was being used adjectivally by the 1900s, and James Joyce refers in 1922’s Ulysses to “Madcap Ciss with her golliwog curls”. We also find the alternative form “wogger”, perhaps cognate with “nigger”. In Frank C. Bowen’s Sea Slang of 1929, the conversion is complete, with the entry for “Wogs, lower class Babu shipping clerks on the Indian coast”. So, again, we really don’t need to make any elaborate mental arguments: “wog” is a plainly racist term, derived from “golliwog”, itself a piece of linguistic racism.
This may seem like sledgehammer-and-nut territory, but it matters, because the Ryleys have argued again and again that golliwogs are not inherently racist and therefore their decision to display the dolls in the White Hart is an innocent celebration of childhood toys rather than a hateful collection of stereotyped figurines. Given the antecedents of the golliwog figure, the idea of showing off a collection of more than a dozen dolls can only have one intention, even—somehow!—if it were an unwitting one: these are racist, and we, as the owners of this pub, are comfortable with the atmosphere and ethos which they suggest. Basic manners would suggest it was wiser not to put the dolls around the bar for fear of offending patrons of any ethnic background.
If we were in any doubt about Mr and Mrs Ryley, however, we are able to adduce additional information to support the idea that they are, as they plainly appear, racists. Because Mr Ryley has what the police would call “form”. And it reminds us that in the age of social media, nothing is ever truly forgotten. In 2016, Chris Ryley posted a photograph of some of the dolls in the bar, displayed—with echoes which some might think unfortunate—hanging by their necks. On 11 March, Ryley accompanied the image with the message “We have our golliwogs, yaaay”. His wife responded with a jocular “Are you sure this is legal.lol.xx”, to which he replied “They used to hang them in Mississippi years ago”. It is a small point, but if golliwogs are not caricatures of black people, whom did “they” hang in Mississippi? It is difficult to read this as anything except a not-very-elliptical reference to lynchings in the American South in the period between the end of Reconstruction and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
Ryley denies that the hanging of the golliwogs had any racist intent. It was, in his explanation, a simple and neutral reference to historical lynchings.
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. It was not meant to be detrimental to anybody. I was just repeating something that used to happen, you can’t accuse me of being racist for that.
It seems so obvious when you put it like that. Many public houses choose to commemorate hate crimes of previous eras without it having any implication or loaded meaning. [/sarcasm] Come on. Like the display of golliwogs in the first place, hanging the dolls by their necks and making specific reference to lynchings can only have one meaning.
By this stage, I suspect most of you have come to the conclusion that Chris and Benice Ryley are, again using the most charitable interpretation, willing to countenance and invoke some unsavoury racist stereotypes and refer with sly unpleasantness to violent acts of racism. But Ryley has not yet ticked all the boxes of the denial of racist tropes. He is not a racist, he claims, and indeed could not be because he has associated with non-white people.
This is the defence we commonly think of as “Some of my best friends are…” It is so common and so hollowly unconvincing that it is a hoary comedic device, but Ryley has embraced it nonetheless. “I haven’t got a racist bone in my body, anybody who knows me will tell you that,” he has protested, hitting more of the clichés. And to demonstrate the impossibility of his racism, he argues that he used to have an Indian business partner, and that his company trades as “India Inns”. “If I was racist, would I do that?” he asks rhetorically. Well, yes. You can harbour racist beliefs without publicly abjuring any connection to non-white people whatever, and golliwogs depict African-American stereotypes rather than Indian ones (though admittedly the word “wog” can be used for a variety of non-white groups: if you want a demonstration of how sensibilities have changed, this clip from episode six of series one, “The Germans” (1975), of Fawlty Towers features Major Gowan (Ballard Berkeley) illustrating to Basil (John Cleese) the difference between “wogs” and “niggers” with reference to cricket). But, of course, Ryley’s comments have been taken out of context—another old favourite—and twisted to make him seem like a racist. Well, you can judge for yourselves.
There is more context of casual prejudice: in 2020, Ryley posted on social media in support of “White Lives Matter”, an inversion of the Black Lives Matter campaign which, while BLM may have substantial flaws, feeds into a narrative which is dismissive of racism and ignores the privileged position which white people have held in Western society for centuries. In October of that year, after the dismissal of Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor of the Exchequer, he commented on social media “Black Chancellors matter”, a remark more difficult to parse as explicitly racist but making play of Kwarteng’s ethnicity in connection with police brutality towards black people, and he had also asked “When is White History Month please. Anybody know?” Another 2020 post featured a picture of a golliwog captioned “Sadiq’s new ideas”, in reference to the (Muslim) mayor of London. The accumulating picture is of a man obsessed with racial optics and determined to make provocative remarks at every opportunity.
One more issue which I want to note: the activity of Essex Police is responding to the complaint about the Ryleys has not escaped the observant eye of the home secretary, Suella Braverman, who has overall ministerial responsibility for policing (although within the Home Office these matters are delegated on a day-to-day basis to one of the ministers of state, Chris Philp, minister for crime, policing and fire). The Mail on Sunday reported a Home Office source saying:
The Home Secretary’s views have now been made very plain to Essex Police so they’re under no illusions. Police forces should not be getting involved in this kind of nonsense. It’s about tackling anti-social behaviour, stopping violence against women and girls, attending burglaries and catching criminals—not seizing dolls.
This is not on. Of course the home secretary has ministerial responsibility and oversight, but to be sending unofficial messages about what individual police forces should or should not be doing in operational terms is extremely inappropriate. Her intention can only be to influence Essex Police and warn them to scale down their response, and that is not the home secretary’s role. It is a matter for the chief constable, Ben-Julian Harrington, and the elected police, fire and crime commissioner, Conservative Roger Hirst, a former Essex county councillor who has been in office since 2016. There is a widespread suspicion, which seems to me entirely plausible, that Braverman, who seems to see the culture wars as fertile ground for her standing and reputation in the Conservative Party, has chosen the controversy over the White Hart Inn and its golliwogs to boost her profile and prepare further for any future party leadership contest.
But the home secretary struggles with the proprieties of office; quite apart from resigning for nearly a week in October 2022 after breaching the Ministerial Code by inappropriately sharing an official document over her personal email account, she tweeted in 2020 in support of Boris Johnson’s then-chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, who had broken lockdown regulations by driving from London to County Durham. She endorsed the defence of Cummings which 10 Downing Street had circulated, tweeting:
Protecting one’s family is what any good parent does. The @10DowningStreet statement clarifies the situation and it is wholly inappropriate to politicise it.
Many Conservative MPs had tweeted in similar terms. But Braverman was at the time attorney general, the government’s chief legal adviser and responsible for the Crown Prosecution Service. She denied that her tweet constituted a “legal opinion” on Cummings’s actions, but, even if one accepts that argument, she was commenting on the behaviour of someone subject to an ongoing police investigation. Although Durham Constabulary eventually decided not to take any action, had they done so then the comments of the attorney general could have been catastrophic for the prosecution. It was a bafflingly glaring and basic misjudgement for Braverman and should almost without question have been a resignation matter. But she remained in office.
Let me conclude. It seems obvious to me, based on the available information, that Chris and Benice Ryley have old-fashioned attitudes to racial matters which contain a strong element of prejudice. They are comfortable with racial stereotypes and tropes that make others uneasy. And, confronted by these facts, they have chosen to double down and argue, firstly, that they are not prejudiced, and, second, that they have the right to display the symbols they have used. I suspect that by most people’s definition they would be classed as racists. I certainly don’t think they are nice people, they have bought heavily into a lot of distastefully obtuse and aggressive tropes and if I lived in Thurrock I would not be going near the White Hart Inn.
Have they broken the law? That is a much more delicate matter. The relevant legislation is the Equality Act 2010 (which I had the joy of shepherding through its public bill committee stage in the summer of 2009), specifically section 26 on harassment. The police and CPS would need to be satisfied that the Ryleys’ behaviour constituted the violation of the dignity of patrons, or that they had “creat[ed] an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment” and “whether it is reasonable for the conduct to have that effect”. If all of those boxes could be ticked, the Ryleys would be guilty of an offence. But the CPS must satisfy themselves of two things before pursuing a prosecution: that it is in the public interest, and that there is a reasonable prospect of securing a conviction. I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t (or at least won’t) offer an opinion whether an offence was committed and whether a prosecution should be pursued.
My instinct is that the full-dress route of a prosecution would be excessive for the notional offence. The Ryleys have behaved in a way which is certainly offensive and they have previously declined to remove the display of golliwogs; they have also expressed their determination to replace the dolls when Essex Police returns them. But I am not at all sure that a prosecution would be in the public interest, unless it was felt that it would be beneficial pour encourages les autres. But this is really a secondary point.
The real issue, the one which keeps the culture war embers glowing, is this: has the display of golliwog dolls and the other surrounding circumstances been racist? Are the Ryleys exercising some legitimate but gruesome right to free speech and expression? No. No, they have not. They have used clearly racist symbols and references and they have done so in a way which must, on an overwhelming likelihood, have been intended in a racist way. So let’s keep this story in context and perspective. This is a pub in Thurrock run by people who seem to be unapologetic racists. If you live locally, don’t go there. And don’t, I beg you, try to use the Ryleys as martyrs or heroes in a battle of the culture wars. They’re a grim couple of don’t mind offending gratuitously and don’t or won’t see why they’re being offensive. Write them off as unpleasant, thank your good fortune you will never need to visit the White Hart Inn, and move along. It’s really all they deserve.
A very thoughtful piece, thank you.
I still have my gollywogs from my own childhood. Let us examine in detail the appearance and character of the Gollywog (who has changed very little since he was first introduced) . He is a black man, not African, but probably from The West Indies or the Southern States of America. Yes, he has frizzy hair and usually pearl buttons for eyes, or painted ones, this was a toy for little children and buttons or paint were safer than the glass eyes that were used in animal toys. He is very definitely human and realistic . His blue coat was a tail coat of formal English Evening Dress. He wore white gloves, a white shirt and usually bright orange trousers with yellow shoes. He was quite obviously a 'Jazz Man', a musician in a Jazz band.. There was a strict hierarchy in children's nurseries in middle and upper class homes in England. Mr, Golly was the 'boss', the 'manager' and disciplinarian of all the personality toys. He was sensible and wise as well as clever. The Teddy Bear was very beloved but rather dim. There was a Porcelain adult doll (if your family were wealthy she would have been a French Jumeau, but more likely was a French Armande Marseille. She was grown up and fashionable. There was a white baby doll and a black baby doll. These two were the most played with, their clothes washed and ironed and generally cared for by their human 'mothers'. There was , very often a sailor doll, he was always a bit of a rogue owing to his unreliability and travelling nature. These were The Lords of the Nursery that we meet in A.A. Milnes stories. Of course there were other nursery people and animals that we enjoyed as innocent children. Unfortunately Mr. Golly has now been used by cynical and unpleasant people as an icon of hate...by the despicable people who see evil in the most innocent children's friends but glory in the destruction of a simple culture and the perversion of goodness. We have destroyed an urbane and gentlemanly Jazz musician and replaced him with Drag artistes showing their private parts to little children.