When Toys Became Politically Incorrect

   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.