CAROL THATCHER could be described, in the words of her own kind, as an "all round good egg". She is also switched on and clued up enough to know that there can be no justification whatsoever in this day and age for referring to a black person as a "golliwog".
So I cannot understand why such a woman (who has proved that in terms of popularity at least, the apple can indeed fall far from the tree) has refused to apologise unreservedly for the offence her "green room" comment caused.
Yet for many, the mos
t bewildering question is why BBC blogs and call-ins have been chock-a-block with contributors defending golliwogs and insisting it's all a storm in a teacup.
Nothing shows up the age gap in modern Britain more than the humble golliwog. Young people are flummoxed that such a toy and jam jar embellishment, a parody of black ethnicity, ever existed, probably deducing from a 2009 vantage point that the Britons of the Fifties were cruel, Imperial racists who thought nothing of exploiting and mocking people of colour.
It is not quite as simple as that. While I can't condone Carol Thatcher's stubborn refusal to say "sorry", it does behove us all to try and understand why older people have such affection for gollies.
When I was born in the Fifties, the world was a very different place. Eggs had just come off rationing. Steam trains still whistled across the land with white-linen liveried waiters serving tea and coffee out of silver pots to first-class passengers. Very few people had televisions. And despite black troops being among US forces during the war, and a black population in London, none of my friends in Scotland had even clapped eyes on a real black person.
American movies didn't count. America might as well have been Mars and their black people spoke English and wore clothes.
All we knew, we learned from comics in which brave explorers fought off spear-wielding savages; or from church reading books featuring missionaries taking the word of the Lord to heathens.
Enlightenment began with a reading book featuring a little black boy with a bone through his nose. He lived "somewhere in Africa" in a mud hut with a roof of reeds. His mother wore a grass skirt.
The most astonishing thing about him was that despite his different lifestyle, he was just like us. He was good, he was naughty, he had adventures and his mum called him home for tea.
Then someone gave me the famous Little Black Sambo book, still required childhood reading in the Fifties though it was written in 1899! Sambo did wear clothes and triumphed over naughty tigers, turning them into butter.
Until I read these, any stories about black people usually involved putting a white man in a cooking pot!
Sambo and golliwogs were gentle, benign, friendly characters who played their part in smashing, for me at least, the image of the scary, savage, cannibal.
Every child had a much-loved golliwog just as they had a teddy bear.
Jam was still a luxury and the golliwog on the jam jar was the first example of direct marketing to children. Save up the labels and you could send off for a golliwog badge. They were the Teletubbies or Care Bears of their time.
Meanwhile, the "education" went on. Every primary school held collections for "black babies" in Africa. I don't recall being taught precisely why we were collecting, just that they needed money.
On emerging television, along came the Black and White Minstrel Show, a bizarre sort of Al Jolson variety turn where white men blacked up with huge white lips, wore straw hats and striped trousers and serenaded blonde English roses . . . no wonder we were confused.
Good lord! You are thinking. How old is this woman? I am "only" 56. And that's how it was.
We started from a pitifully ignorant and innocent base. At breakneck speed over the next ten years things changed so quickly (including the Notting Hill riots of 1958) that by the Swinging Sixties the old Britain was almost unrecognisable. By the end of the Sixties, those children who had been gently introduced to Sambo had become teenagers hero-worshipping the black artists on Tamla Motown. Today we have a black US President.
There is still a long way to go before racism is eliminated, but when it comes to race awareness, no generation will ever have to learn and grow so much so quickly. None of that excuses Carol Thatcher, but sometimes we have to look back at how shameful our ignorance was and how far we have come in order to ensure we continue to progress.
If it means understanding why kindly grannies and doting aunts still love golliwogs and why, until last week, they were still on sale in royal gift shops, so be it. That's real education and history, without which political correctness is pointless.
The full article contains 840 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
