Golliwogs and racism
Three golliwogs
Wogs, origins of Wogs
See also
Golliwog - racist toy that won't go away
Cecelia Layo Fadehan Sept 2008
, a harmless child’s toy from an old era or a
terrible
reminder of a deeply racist past that still haunts the black community
today. Recently many people in Reading did not find it amusing when dustbin men stuck a giant golliwog on the front of their vehicle as a joke.
Not too long ago there was uproar when a shop window display in Henley had many different types of golliwogs for all to see and buy.
As a local journalist wrote, “There in all its glory was a golliwog. As if that wasn’t jolting enough there was a whole shelf devoted to golly paraphernalia- mugs badges and plenty of golliwogs themselves” he went on to say “I was struck dumb by the sheer blatancy of a display that would not have gone out of place in a BNP shop”
The golliwog first appeared in a book called Two Dutch girls and a golliwog created by Florence Kate Upton in 1895. The story set in a toyshop follows two rebellious girls dolls that stumble upon a horrid “black gnome” the golliwog. The story was immensely popular in Britain so much so that Florence over the next 14 years gave the golliwog his own adventures. He travels to many places around the world accompanied by his friends the two Dutch dolls.
Florence had owned a black minstrel doll when she was a child; the black face minstrels wildly popular in America were negative caricatures of black people. It was she who named him golliwog and recounted how badly she had treated the doll in her youth “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 now to think of those little rag legs flying ignominiously over his head, yet that was a long time ago, before he had become a personality…we knew he was ugly”
Deciding if these relics of a racist past have a place 2008 multi cultural Britain is a hard one.
“This is PC going completely mad” one reader complained to the Sun “ I really don’t see why people are getting upset this a child’s toy” added another
Another
person commented online “Golliwog was shouted to black people
in Britain as a term of abuse” while another stated, “they knew they
would offend by using that doll” An angry poster said “incidentally if
you have a doll with a big nose and a yellow star on it chest and
called it Jew boy would that be okay? I think not, only when its black
PC has gone mad” University lecture John Molyneux also disagrees with the gollywog boom because of it’s imperialistic past “This is very much to be regretted as the golly or the golliwog has very strong racist connotations, they were a crude stereotypes repeated in children’s stories.
What ever their status golliwogs are still very popular amassing a whole sub culture of collectors. E bay selling a very kind of golliwog collectable imaginable dolls, books, cups, key rings, piggy banks and list goes on. Many are in mint condition and a testament to their strong production demand, as of recently collectors are bidding up to £600.
Golliwog Collector Nick Martin defended his 300+ collection of golliwogs “they are always happy little chappies that make you smile, I caught the bug, once you start you can’t stop. Nick, 68, has been collecting golliwogs since he was a child calls them “a piece of history” stating they are of great interest because lots of people collect them.
top
A new academic appraisal of the work of Enid Blyton claims that golliwogs may have been innocent victims of well-intentioned political correctness when they were banished from revised editions of the Noddy books more than 20 years ago.
The revisionist study, based on a close reading of the texts, argues that the characters were not the villains they were assumed to be by critics writing in the 60s and 70s.
Its author, David Rudd, also suggests more controversially that golliwogs were not simply a crude expression of any racism on Blyton's part. Dr Rudd, a senior lecturer at Bolton Institute in Greater Manchester, argues that a golliwog appears as a total villain only in the notorious Here Comes Noddy Again, where a golly asks the hero with a bell on his hat to give him a lift into the dark dark wood - and then steals his car.Elsewhere, goblins and monkeys emerge more consistently as villains than golliwogs and bears are regularly portrayed as more naughty.
Dr Rudd traces the pre-Blyton semantic and fictional history of the golliwog and concludes: "The golliwog, it seems, was not in origin a racist icon, whereas the offensive term 'wog' had a separate derivation.
"However, there is no doubt that the golly came to prominence in an age that was racist and that he was all too easily implicated in racist discourses, both in name and image."
Although it could be argued that the golliwog was not originally intended as a representation of a black person, anti-racists fastened on to the character as a key symbol of racism and sought to ban it, which gave it a status and significance it did not originally have.
Once the golliwog was given a new negative meaning in the public mind, its days had to be numbered and the Noddy stories had to be revised.
Part of Dr Rudd's study is based on what children - rather than disapproving adults - think about Enid Blyton. "All I can say is that, of the children who were not previously aware of the equation 'golliwog equals ethnically black person', none made it," he writes.
When he showed two 14-year-old Asian boys Noddy stories in which golliwogs had been replaced by white goblins, they were outraged that a black character had been removed.
In other chapters, Dr Rudd deals with the construction of Blyton as a cultural icon and also with gender relations in the Famous Five and Malory Towers stories.
The writer and broadcaster Darcus Howe said he was relaxed about the new study but added: "This golliwog thing is always being resurrected as political correctness. When I was a child in Trinidad, my parents associated the golliwog with colonial pomp and banned it from the house. I continue to take the same position.
"English people never give up. Golliwogs have gone and should stay gone. They appeal to white English sentiment and will do so until the end of time."
• Enid Blyton and the Mystery of Children's Literature by David Rudd, Macmillan, £40.
top
For the past four decades Europeans have debated whether the Golliwog is a lovable icon or a racist symbol. In the 1960s relations between Blacks and Whites in England were often characterised by conflict. This racial antagonism resulted from many factors, including: the arrival of increasing numbers of coloured immigrants; minorities' unwillingness to accommodate themselves to old patterns of racial and ethnic subordination; and, the fear among many Whites that England was losing its national character. British culture was also influenced by images - often brutal - of racial conflict occurring in the United States.
In this climate the Golliwog doll and other Golliwog emblems were seen as symbols of racial insensitivity. Many books containing Golliwogs were withdrawn from public libraries, and the manufacturing of Golliwog dolls dwindled as the demand for Golliwogs decreased. Many items with Golliwog images were destroyed. Despite much criticism, James Robertson & Sons did not discontinue its use of the Golliwog as a mascot. The Camden Committee for Community Relations led a petition drive for signatures to send to the Robertson Company. The National Committee on Racism in Children's Books also publicly criticised Robertson's use of the Golly in its advertising. Other organisations called for a boycott of Robertson's products; nevertheless, the company has continued to use the Golliwog as its trademark in many countries, including the United Kingdom, although it was removed from Robertson's packaging in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong.
In many ways the campaign to ban Golliwogs was similar to the American campaign against Little Black Sambo. In both cases racial minorities and sympathetic Whites argued that these images demeaned Blacks and hurt the psyches of minority children. Civil rights organisations led both campaigns, and White civic and political leaders eventually joined the effort to ban the offensive caricatures. In the anti-Golliwog campaign, numerous British parliamentarians publicly lambasted the Golliwog image as racist, including, Tony Benn, Shirley Williams, and David Owen.
The claim that Golliwogs are racist is supported by literary depictions by writers such as Enid Blyton. Unlike Florence Upton's, Blyton's Golliwogs were often rude, mischievous, elfin villains. In Blyton's book, "Here Comes Noddy Again", a Golliwog asks the hero for help, then steals his car. Blyton, one of the most prolific European writers, included the Golliwogs in many stories, but she only wrote three books primarily about Golliwogs: The Three Golliwogs (1944), The Proud Golliwog (1951), and The Golliwog Grumbled (1953). Her depictions of Golliwogs are, by contemporary standards, racially insensitive. An excerpt from The Three Golliwogs is illustrative:
Once the three bold Golliwogs, Golly, Woggie, and Nigger, decided to go for a walk to Bumble-Bee Common. 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 Three Golliwogs was reprinted as recently as 1968, and it still
contained the above passage. Ten Little Niggers was also the name of a
1939 Agatha Christie novel, whose cover showed a Golliwog lynched,
hanging from a noose.The Golliwog's reputation and popularity were also hurt by the association with the word wog. Apparently derived from the word Golliwog, wog is an English slur against dark-skinned people, especially Middle or Far East foreigners. During World War II the word wog was used by the British Army in North Africa, mainly as a slur against dark-skinned Arabs. In the 1960s the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, one of the most noted regiments in the British Army, wore a Robertson's golly brooch for each Arab they had killed. After the war, wog became a more general slur against brown-skinned people. As a racial epithet, it is comparable to nigger or spic, though its usage extends beyond any single ethnic group. Dark-skinned people in England, Germany, and Australia are derisively called wogs. In the year 2000, a British police officer was fired for referring to an Asian colleague as a wog. The association of wog with racial minorities is also seen with the word wog-box, which is slang for a large portable music box, the European counterpart of the ghetto blaster. The wog-box is also called a "Third World briefcase."
Some Golliwog supporters tried to distance themselves from the wog slur by dropping it from the word Golliwog. James Robertson & Sons, for example, has always referred to its Golliwog as "Golly." In the late 1980s, when the anti-Golliwog campaign reached its height, many small manufacturers of the Golliwogs began using the names Golly or Golli, instead of Golliwog. Not surprisingly, the words Golliwog, Golly, and Golli are now all used as racially descriptive terms, although they are not as demeaning as wog.
In the early 1980s, revised editions of Enid Blyton's Noddy books replaced Mr. Golly, the gollywog proprietor of the Toytown garage, with Mr. Sparks, to the outrage of many parents of a generation who thought that was a retrograde iconoclasm biased against both gollies and black garage-owners.
Golliwog is a racial slur in Germany, England, Ireland, Greece, and Australia. Interestingly, it is sometimes applied to dark-skinned Whites, as well as brown-skinned persons. Golliwog is also a common name for black pets, especially dogs, in European countries - much as nigger was once popular as a pet name. Golliwog was also the original name of the rock band Credence Clearwater Revival. They sometimes performed the song "Brown-Eyed Girl" (not the Van Morrison tune), dressed in white afros. This is not to suggest that they were racists, only to show that Golliwogs were a part - albeit, a small one - in American culture.
The Golliwog celebrated its 100 year anniversary in 1995. Golliwog collectibles, which always had a loyal following, again boomed on the secondary market. This popularity continues today and is evidenced by numerous eBay and Yahoo internet auctions and the presence of several international Golliwog organisations. A pro-Golliwog viewpoint can be found at the International Golliwog Collectors Club's website: www.teddybears.com/golliwog/direct.html. Many collectors, primarily though not exclusively Whites, contend that the anti-Golliwog movement represents political correctness at its worst. They argue that the Golliwog is just a doll, and that the original Florence Upton creation was not racist, intentionally or unintentionally - this is reminiscent of the claims about Helen Bannerman's Little Black Sambo.
Critics of the Golliwog have launched a new attack. They are trying to get the image removed from all newly published children's books, and they are trying to force businesses to not use the Golliwog as a trademark. The Black Trinidadian writer, Darcus Howe, said, "English [White] people never give up. Golliwogs have gone and should stay gone. They appeal to White English sentiment and will do so until the end of time." Gerry German, of the Working Group Against Racism in Children's Resources, was quoted in The Voice, a Black newspaper, as saying: "I find it appalling that any organisation in this day and age can produce anything which would commemorate the Golliwog. It is an offensive caricature of Black people."
top
To quote the wonderful
Victor Meldrew, I don't believe it!
Police have only gone and raided a shop in Bromyard, Herefordshire because the owner had three golliwogs in a window display!
What on earth is this country coming to?
Evidently a member of the public had complained that they were offensive so our boys in blue, ever ready and willing to protect Joe Public from harm, marched into the shop and snatched the golliwogs out of the display, leaving the owner in a state of severe flabbergastation!
While I understand that the original Golliwog, developed in the US during the late 1800s, was based on the Negro minstrels with the name incorporating the word 'wog', an obviously derogotory term once used to describe black people, surely our society has moved on since then? Modern Golliwogs are just rag dolls that happen to be black. There are plenty of white faced rag dolls around; maybe we should take offence at them, too? But ok, let's be a little more politically correct and call them "Gollies". Surely that's not offensive?
I'm not racist, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I sometimes think we're doing minority groups an injustice through the kid glove treatment we tend to give them. Ultimately, doesn't this kind of behaviour actually increase racist tendencies? Remember do-gooders demanding that blackboards be replaced with whiteboards, black bin bags replaced with green bags, and black out blinds renamed light eradicating blinds? Dear, oh dear!
Anyway, it's just as well that red compliments blue, because some very red faces had to return the black faced soft toys to the shop because, regardless of how offended the member of the public felt, it isn't actually illegal to either sell, display or own a golliwog. However, section 5 of the Public Order Act does outlaw the display of material that might cause or is likely to lead to alarm, harassment or distress. Fair enough, but what would happen if I called the police and told them I felt distressed because a local toy shop was displaying naked dolls that might excite paedophiles, for example? How do we actually decide what is and isn't offensive, etc.?
But all of this still begs the question: why the raid? Wouldn't you have thought the police would have perhaps had a word with the shopkeeper about his display rather than doing the heavy mob bit? Maybe it was just a quiet day and for the want of something better to do, they figured it'd kill some time? No doubt they'll be cursing over the paperwork, though!
And there was me thinking the police were there to fight crime! Easy enough mistake to make, I s'pose.
top
Wog is a vile, vulgar, racist slur popularized and first used in England. The little, frizzy-haired, orange dude in the title of today’s column (above) is an actual illustration from one of the Golliwogg books. He is, so-to-speak, the first wog. But more of that later. The best known sentence employing this put-down brims with political irony: “The wogs begin at Calais.” George Wigg, a Labour party MP, said it in 1945 to characterize and satirize the attitude of British Tories to foreigners. Calais was and sometimes still is the first port of France that a vacationing Brit encounters when venturing into continental Europe. The sentiment made the British laugh and fitted their racism perfectly, with its implication that all non-British persons in the world constituted “a bunch of bloody wogs.”
Early in the twentieth century, on its first offensive outing, wog was applied to persons of Arab extraction. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first print citation dates from 1929. Later wog expanded its circle of insult to include Indian and Asian people as well.
Wog’s origin is disputed. In this little essay I shall pin the word to the etymological butterfly board, beginning with the probable ancestor of “wog,” proceeding to spurious etymologies, and then looking at some curious new uses of “wog” which have sprung up in Australia.
The most cogent evidence suggests one source. Wog is a shortened form of the word golliwog. In the annals of etymology it is not often that precisely datable visual evidence remains to attest a word’s beginning. With golliwog we possess such proof. Golliwogg was coined by Florence Kate Upton, as the name of a character in her children’s book, The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg first published in 1895 by DeWolfe, Fiske & Company in Boston.
Her mother wrote the verses that accompany her daughter’s Golliwogg drawings and storyline. Florence also assisted in the production of the exquisite but controversial chromolithographed illustrations which have lasted for 110 years.
As a child Miss Upton had lived briefly in New York City and attended theatrical performances both high and low. Among her favorites as a child were minstrel shows. In those blackface vaudevilles little Florence had first seen a “Black Sambo” character. Yes, the Golliwogg is a stereotype of an African-American child. Its immediate ancestor was a character in American minstrel shows.
The blackface minstrel show was popular showbiz in 19th-century America and it featured a poisonously racist depiction of African Americans. Decades before the name became synonymous with racial segregation laws, Jim Crow was also a showbiz act — a performance first made famous in New York City by a young white actor named Thomas D. Rice. Some time around 1830, Rice learned a popular African-American song-and-dance routine, based on the myth of the trickster figure, an escaped slave named Jim Crow. His face blacked out with burnt cork, Rice perfected the act and sparked the tradition of the minstrel act. The audience for these shows was largely working-class whites, and at first the blackface character was actually a smart and sympathetic one. But as time went on, the minstrel show took on overt racist overtones, as the crude and outlandish parodies of supposed African American life grew nastier and meaner.Florence had purchased a large Black Sambo rag doll at an American fair and taken it back to England. Years later, when she was casting about in 1893 for characters to populate her first children’s book, she found the old raggy doll in a trunk in her mother’s London attic and christened it “Golliwogg.”
The book was an immediate success. She wrote and drew a Golliwogg book for the Christmas book market every year from 1895 through 1912. Initially undertaken to finance her art training in Paris, the series achieved its goal, for Florence Upton became a successful portrait painter of London ’s high society. This long series of Golli-wogg books made both daughter and mother rich and famous. But they neglected to copyright their little figure, and soon innumerable knockoffs thronged the British marketplace. To avoid copyright infringement in a much less strigent age than ours, the postcards and dolls and products usually spelled the name as Golliwog.
Golliwog then is a mere orthographical simplification of Golliwogg, for the basest of purposes, quick money. No sooner were little Golliwog dolls ("Gollies" in British kids' slang) in every London nursery than some bloke in the street hurled the first racist use of the term at a passing Arab. At length the whole country shortened Golliwog to wog and a new arrow was added to the quiver of English racism.
False Origins of the Word Wog
Now, wading boots and Wellingtons pulled on our feet, let us wade into the turbid fen of false etymology,where every word’s origin is an acronym. Here lurk spurious origins offered by unlettered hoi polloi. The word wog has many. For example, wog is considered to be an acronym, standing for such phrases as:
Wily Oriental Gentleman, Worthy Oriental Gentleman , Westernized Oriental Gentleman, Wonderful Oriental Gentleman, Working On Government Service.
That last unproven doozy was supposedly printed on the back of shirts worn by Suez Canal workers. Yet no proof, not a scrap of evidentiary historical residua exists to support these claims. No Suez shirt bearing such a phrase has ever come to auction. In all the files about all the various insulting names under which oriental persons have laboured throughout western history, there is no record whatsoever of documents, letters, memorabilia with such phrases short-formed. No person has ever brought forward and presented as evidence a single item with Worthy Oriental Gentleman stamped upon it. Not once.
Therefore be suspicious whenever you are offered a word origin involving a short form or an acronym. The illiterate and the unread don't seem able to imagine language being passed through history, so acronymic pseudo-etymology is often the only path they are able to posit. These are the folks who think that the f word (whose roots are at least 4,000 years old!) is an acronym representing in English "for undue carnal knowledge." No, it is not. And, if you think so, you are an illiterate booby.
Formal Extensions & Derivatives of Wog
Wogland is a derogatory reference to any foreign country. In James Joyce Ulysses (1922) we read “She called him wogger.” He was not Irish. In London in the fall of 2002 I heard, “He’s a woggy little bugger.”
There are, however, alternative ideas about word origin that are worth consideration. Here is one of them written by my friend Keith Thomas, of interest because it reveals an exotic bit of naval history and sparks questions about the formative relationship between the words pollywog and golliwog? Was Florence Upton, when she coined the name of her character, Golliwogg, influenced by pollywog?
Some sources claim the origin of the ceremony is “lost in the mists of time,” but the earliest European references of which I’m aware are from the mid-fifteenth century and mention a religious ceremony, asking God’s blessing, performed on Portuguese ships when crossing the equator.
In the early eighteenth century, based on a 1708 account, the irreverent British merely dunked the uninitiated or required them to pay a fine. But by the end of that century King Neptune had become the key figure, along with his wife, Amphitrite, a writer (naval jargon for a clerk), a barber and various bit players done up in costume.
This is an oral tradition, never formalized in naval orders, so it varies, but nonetheless seems to have had a relatively persistent form from the Revolutionary War until navies got politically correct in the last couple of decades. King Neptune and his retinue arrive with nautical pomp and circumstance and the pollywogs are summoned one-by-one. The writer reads the “charges” and Neptune orders the punishment, which often comprises the barber lathering the pollywog with some foul mixture, shaving him with a large wooden razor and finally dumping him backwards into a large tub of water.
But, at least as often, the punishment involves embarrassment and hazing tailored to individual personalities, especially junior officers. At the end, the writer provides each new shellback with a certificate of initiation, which usually includes commands to Neptune’s various subjects—sharks, sea serpents, etc.—to treat the holder kindly, and to landlubbers and the like to treat the holder with due respect.
The entire court, including Neptune ’s Queen, sometimes with her own female attendants, were played by sailors, of course. One relatively contemporary account from an American sailor says:
“The King, behind his locks of hempen hair and beard, looked suspiciously like the ship’s Supply Officer. A retinue of “Wog Queens,” female sailors, who had avoided our fate by dressing in a most provocative manner, attended him. Some of them looked pretty damn cute, actually. Which was strange, because this was 1987, and there were no females at sea on warships, in those days. And it occurred to me on closer observation that these were not females at all. There were far too many Adam’s apples, among all those Eve’s.
One of the things I never figured out (because I was afraid of what the answer might be) was how it came to pass that these Wog Queens, in exchange for avoiding the more uncomfortable aspects of the crossing the line ceremony, managed to cruise for four and a half months with brassieres, fishnet stockings and stiletto heels stowed away in the very little space available to a Sailor at sea, while waiting for Just This Day!” (http://homepage.mac.com/lexl/iblog/C744401703/E1012632427/ )
But I digress.
I couldn’t find anything on the web to prove the use of the term “pollywog” in the ceremony in Victorian times. It wasn’t mentioned in an 1870 account of the ceremony on a USN frigate, but it seems to have been established in both the RN and USN before the Second World War. I did find a copy of an RN crossing-the-line certificate from 1944 that mentions both “pollywogs” and “gollywogs” as being Neptune’s subjects, so it seems there was some cross talk at work by then between civilian and naval vocabularies. http://www.geocities.com/valsvisuals/filesfaa
/crossline.htm
Vladimir Nabokov & The Golliwogg
For me, Bill Casselman, the most elegantly phrased autobiography in 20th century English is Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and other novels and novellas. A Russian by birth, an aristocrat by temperament, Nabokov’s great ear for the manifold amplitudes of human language permitted him to develop and to wield some of the most pleasing sentences ever composed in English.
top
Vladimir
Vladimirovich Nabokov
Russian author, English author, lepidopterist, chess problemist.
Russian author, English author, lepidopterist, chess problemist.
Two passages from Nabokov’s Golliwoggs: Lodi Reads English 1899-1909 by D. Barton Johnson (available on the internet) detail Nabokov’s love of the Golliwogg and fascinating trivia about the golliwog dolls.
“…Nabokov’s fondest memories of early
childhood reading are reserved
for those large, flat, illustrated books in which the text was adjunct
to the picture story: “I particularly liked the blue-coated,
red-trousered, coal-black Golliwogg, with underclothes buttons for
eyes, and his meager harem of five wooden dolls” (82). He goes on to
recount favorite scenes from several of the thirteen Golliwogg books
that appeared in London between 1895 and 1909. The earliest is The
Adventures of two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg. The story opens in a toy
store on Christmas Eve. As midnight strikes, the toys come to life and
begin to frolic. Among them are several “Dutch” dolls, also called
“penny-woodens,” which have jointed limbs so that they can be arranged
in various poses for sketching. (Often used by artists as models, the
sexless dolls can be gendered and clothed as one wishes.) The two
larger dolls, “Peg” and “Sarah Jane,” immediately set about making
themselves outfits out of an (illegally) ripped up American flag. Peg
uses “the motherly stripes;” Sarah Jane—the pretty stars. (The other,
smaller doll characters, the twins, Meg and Weg, remain unclothed, as
does the tiny “Midget.” ). As the toys prepare to dance, they hear a
sound:
“They all look round, as well they may
to see a horrid sight!
The blackest gnome
Stands there alone
They scatter in their fright.”
to see a horrid sight!
The blackest gnome
Stands there alone
They scatter in their fright.”
More Golliwogiana
This fascinating lore is an excerpt from Nabokov’s Golliwoggs: Lodi Reads English 1899-1909 by D. Barton Johnson.
“. . .Golliwog dolls became enormously
popular in the nursery where in
1903 they were soon joined by the first “Teddy Bears,” named for
Theodore Roosevelt. The Golliwogs appear in many memoirs of Edwardian
childhood’s. Sir Kenneth Clark, the art historian, tells of the joy
brought him by the books, adding that the Golliwogg was “an example of
chivalry, far more persuasive than the unconvincing Knights of the
Arthurian legend. I identified myself with him completely, and have
never quite ceased to do so.” And, of course, Vladimir Nabokov, as a
proper (Russian) Edwardian child, owned a Golliwog doll, together with
the Upton books. French composer Claude Debussy was so entranced by his
young daughter’s Golliwogg books and doll (thought to have been
introduced into the household by an English nanny), that one movement
of his Children’s Corner Suite is entitled “The Golliwog’s Cakewalk.”
First published in 1908, the Suite had on its cover Debussy’s own
drawing of Upton ’s Golliwog. To most people today, the name “Golliwog”
suggests Debussy’s piece rather than the doll—except among collectors
who pay thousands of dollars for early examples.
There is, incidentally, an International Golliwogg Collectors Club, with its own newsletter and web site. Golliwogs were an international industry. According to Norma Davis, Upton ’s biographer, there have been Golliwog card games and post cards, penknives, wall paper, china, pottery, paperweights, and jewelry. In the twenties and thirties, de Vigny of Paris made “Le Golliwog” perfume which was marketed internationally in a Golliwog-shaped bottle using sealskin hair on the stopper.”
There is, incidentally, an International Golliwogg Collectors Club, with its own newsletter and web site. Golliwogs were an international industry. According to Norma Davis, Upton ’s biographer, there have been Golliwog card games and post cards, penknives, wall paper, china, pottery, paperweights, and jewelry. In the twenties and thirties, de Vigny of Paris made “Le Golliwog” perfume which was marketed internationally in a Golliwog-shaped bottle using sealskin hair on the stopper.”
See also
Race and democracy
When will Tories admit that Enoch was right?
Wog violence
Racism and slavery in the deep south
Racism still remains one of USA's biggest problems
Readers
please email comments to: editorial AT
martinfrost.ws including full name