Oh Golly! Bag off Bartram!...

I wasn't going to mention the Golly doll debate on Tonbridge blog but, now that that prat Bartram has actually fanned the flames by appearing with gawky grin, defiantly cuddling a giant Golly I just can't stay quiet on the subject. It is, I'll admit, debateable whether they cause much offence to many black people. After all why should they; the dolls were invented during the slave trade and always presented as harmless, friendly and more than a little dim! Is that how Mr. Bartram sees black people, I wonder? Robinson's jam and marmalade Gollies are highly collectable, as are some of the old dolls and books, containing stories of Golliwogs such as Rupert Bear annuals and some early Enid Blytons. The most famous and collectable of all Golliwogg books are those written and illustrated by Florence Upton; she wrote a whole series of them from 1895 through to about 1910 including such gems as Golliwogg at the Seaside, Golliwogg in War! and Golliwogg's Polar Adventures. Some of these titles can fetch up to £500 in good condition, which means they must be highly sought after by the collector. So why then is Mr. Bartram wrong in his assessment of the situation? Probably the worst reason is that he naively thinks they do no harm, when, by selling them as cheap new dolls, he just perpetuates something that was clearly from a different age and has no place in modern society; secondly he's probably only doing it now for the publicity for his bad bag shop. The difference between the new toys and the collectable old book or doll is that they already exist and are collected, in the main, by people who take a nostalgic view of these out-moded toys. There are worse things in life which demonstrate our inherent racism than Bartram's cheap dolls but they do, in their small way, contribute. The best thing that people can do to avoid seeing these anachronisms in shop windows is to stop buying them and to stop supporting John Bartram....