Toys were
simply toys when I was a child and there were few to be found in wartime in the
shops of Gravesend. That’s not to say they were totally absent of course and older
boys being always drawn to catapults invariably made their own. This fascination for weaponry had for many
of them grown out of years of practice constructing bows and arrows, some of
which were very effective. Many clever mothers could make Red Indian
headdresses out of chicken feathers and were definitely expected to especially
around Christmas time. The less
creative boys carried out in depth searches of local bomb-sites and gutters for
odd lengths of wood or metal to rapidly convert into rifles and six-shooters. Therefore the ongoing sagas of violence
between various indigenous American tribes and the newcomers keen to destroy
them were never in serious danger of disappearing.
Knitting
mothers turned their hands to teddy bears and there were many and varied
patterns they could follow if necessary.
The particularly adventurous also produced elephants and monkeys and the
unimaginative simply made snakes. Sewing mothers trawled the haberdashery
counters at Woolworths where from time to time forlorn little heaps of moulded
and starched linen faces lay begging to be made into proper dolls and rescued
from what looked like a serial killer’s fantasy world. And, dare I say it, the now much maligned
Gollywog was still regularly produced in the homes of Northfleet and Gravesend
if the desired scraps of suitable colours could be found on the wool
counter.
Back then we
were as one totally unaware that Gollywogs should never have been permitted in
any shape or form in the first place and that might have been because we did
not actually see them as representing those we now call People of Colour. Nobody bothered to kindly explain the
history and provenance of these dolls to us as they might today. If they had there is some doubt as to
whether anyone would have listened. Those
thoughtless and inherently racist WW2 knitters might in a more sophisticated
age have been selected for compulsory education on Woke Parenting but back then
women were also busy doing shifts in factories replacing all the men already gone
to war. Considering the circumstances no-one would
have seen the idea as a productive use of time and resources.
A number of
my aunts were working at Vickers in Crayford, doing what my mother said was
dangerous work and she wouldn’t do it herself for all the tea in China but they
said the pay was so good it was hard to refuse. I was glad she stayed home because those cousins
with working mothers had to spend time with Old Nan being what was called
Minded. My grandmother was not terribly
fond of her grandchildren and it was best to do as requested and firmly button
your lip when at her house and sit as still as possible so you didn’t get what
she called a Backhander. She didn’t ever
play games with us but she did talk to us about the past and said that during
the First War female factory workers were called Munitionettes and that someone
called Mrs Pankhurst had persuaded them to take up the work. Mrs Pankhurst had thrown her lot in with a
man called Lloyd George and for the life of her Old Nan couldn’t understand why
he would trust her because being the cow she was, she had once put a bomb under
his house. She came to the conclusion
it was because he was Welsh and the Welsh were known to have no sense
whatsoever. None of us found this a
particularly interesting story.
Overall we
didn’t pay a great deal of attention to our grandmother’s assessments of social
situations because she was known to lag well behind the times. For instance it was to be years before she
truly trusted the use of Penicillin, as late as 1950 telling us that a tea-leaf
poultice for infection of any kind was as good a remedy if not better. But much more importantly to me back then was
that she had no ability or interest as a toy maker.
My mother on
the other hand was quite good at making toys when the raw materials for doing
so were available though for this reason she didn’t completely blossom in this
area until the post war period when her ability to produce a range of dressing
up clothes out of crepe paper and old blankets impressed the entire
neighbourhood. At around this time of
her creative notoriety more toys were slowly entering the country in time to
fill Christmas stockings for those lucky enough to have been born into families
with money to spare. Many of them would almost certainly find
themselves on the Banned list today. Astonishingly Christmas 1948 saw a number of
mechanical smoking dogs and cats. These
caused a lot of amusement though Uncle Harold said it was a bloody waste of
good smokes. As well as not
understanding that Gollywogs were disgusting back then we thought that smoking
was definitely acceptable if you could afford to. I couldn’t wait to become grown-up enough to
start which my cousin June said could be fourteen.
In fact smoking
was so acceptable that the toy cigarette had become much sought after and the
most popular variety were those made of sugar that could be eaten before they
were confiscated by the classroom teacher.
If you could acquire a discarded Wills Woodbines or Players Weights packet
to contain them then all the better. Over
several years they were definitely much in vogue and when Jean Taylor and her
best friend Wendy Selves somehow came by some that actually, in a truly magical
manner, produced realistic smoke we were all most impressed even though they
could not under any circumstances be eaten. Keith Dyke tried to do so and was sick. Molly from No 31 told me on the way home from
school that although the smoke producing ones were interesting she would still
rather have the edible variety any day of the week and I agreed with her.
As the war
years receded factories got back into the business of producing toys once more
and home made bows and arrows were among the first iconic items to be discarded
for commercially produced ones. This trend continued and toy guns for homicidally
inclined young boys became many and varied.
My brother was particularly fond of those that could be loaded with
reams of caps that were as noisy as possible and he happily roamed the
neighbourhood with his friend of the moment, Hedley Davis, annihilating both
the armed and the unarmed. By this stage
he was also the owner of various cowboy and Indian outfits courtesy of our
mother which he generously shared to maintain his popularity. Nobody expressed the slightest concern that
this form of play, bent as it was largely on human destruction, was in any way undesirable.
In fact it
was to be many years before some parents began to doubt the wisdom of it and misgivings
wriggled their way into the minds of those who Meant Well. The first time I stumbled across such
reservations was at a Playgroup Mothers coffee meeting in Ladbroke Grove, West
London. It was 1970 and the end of
Ladbroke Grove closest to the station had already become fashionable with the
young and upwardly mobile. The mothers
were generally of the stay at home rather than go to work variety and the
children all had fashionable names like Polly and Fanny or Samuel and
Hugo. One ultra-earnest young woman in
a Barbour jacket who had furnished every room of her home from Habitat was gravely
advising the group that she and her husband had quite decided that Oliver would
not under any circumstances ever be allowed war toys and in fact at the age of
four he had never expressed any desire to play with guns. There did not seem to be overall sympathy
for the stance as far as I can recall and toy guns were still one of the gifts
of choice to hand out to all boys under ten. In fact it was rumoured that young
Oliver was known for extreme violence towards other gun owners in his fervent desire
to possess one.
Change was definitely
in the offing. For two decades girls had
been able to choose to own black, brown or white dolls and did so, and by 1970
Chinese and Minstrel make up sets were very popular. It’s hard to imagine what might happen in
toy shop aisles if such items made their way onto the shelves today. It simply did not occur to well meaning
aunts and grandmothers that a time would come when such toys would be fit only
for the funeral pyre. That doesn’t mean of course that these odd
notions were totally dismissed and in fact at times they provoked a certain
amount of animated debate but they were still seen as largely the province of Vegans
and the those who supported the abolition of the prison system. In fact there was more general approval for
activists on the Circle Line who were at that time inclined to throw paint onto
women unwise enough to wear furs.
A decade
later when I had children with a joint obsession for Playmobil kits, a pirate
ship sent from a relative in Germany complete with shackled slave did not cause
any comment in New Zealand apart from envy from those with similarly addicted
offspring. We were in fact then a woefully
un-Woke nation where war toys were still very much in vogue despite being
harder to find in London. By the late eighties those who lusted after
Barbie could avail themselves of the Spanish Bullfighting version and did so
for a number of years. My daughter who
as a general rule maintained that she hated Barbie at one stage in fact
expressed an interest in one although she did so in a low voice.
In the interim however the unhappy and
bewildered Gollywog had reached the bottom of the Politically Incorrect
Plaything heap and had even been removed from Robertson’s Jams. He
and his like had been whisked with enormous efficiency from the shelves of all
Decent toyshops and even the Church Fete hand knitted variety was likely to
find itself seized and destroyed and then adversely commented upon in local
newspapers. It was hard to believe that
things could get worse but inevitably they did - so much so that in thoroughly
modern 2021 sensible people look askance if the G word is mentioned at all and
those who want to maintain their place on the Playcentre Parents’ Committee
might even pretend not to hear you should it trip from your tongue.
Despite the
general odium towards him you have to hand it to Golly because he never
entirely disappears and is inclined to pop up with resolute regularity
regardless of the decline in appreciation of him. Every few months you can be sure to witness a
Beautiful Media Person, fully Woke and filled with formidable venom, spitting
out information that a version of this vile and racist toy has been uncovered yet
again at another fund raising event. A
twenty second clip of uniformed persons oddly reminiscent of the Third Reich
and intent upon ridding the area of all traces of the unfortunate toy might
even flash across our screens or perhaps our imaginations.
Either way we
are assured that once again society is made a safer place for the playtime
hours of the young and the Right Thinking Woke among us will breathe a joint
sigh of relief. But Wrong Thinkers
like me and maybe one or two of you, who remember the Gollywog from his heyday
can only extend a symbolic hand of comfort in his direction because it’s hard
not to feel enormous sympathy for him.