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Enid Blyton

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I have no idea if this tidbit of literature is an Urban Legend/hoax or not, but it's a great deal funnier than Timmy the Dog ever was.

The Chocolate Cock by Enid Blyton.
Once there was a piece of chocolate in the shape of a cock. The chocolate cock stood right in the very middle of a sweet-shop window, and all the children came to look at him. He was very proud of himself indeed.
"I am the Chocolate Cock!" he crowed. "I am the Chocolate Cock! I am the handsomest bird in the world, for I am the Chocolate Cock!"...(From "The Talking Teapot and Other Tales" by Enid Blyton [London, 1938]. Spotter:Michael Moon)
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Source.
 
Not encountered that one, but I can remember reading a Famous Five book which described George's "curly nob" sticking out of the bedclothes. Well, she always wanted to be a boy...
 
Ah, those more innocent times.......

When people feeling gay had nothing to do with sexuality.....

When Biggles smoked.....

When golliwogs weren't racist, just a rag doll.....

(As a kid, I had a story book called 'Little Black Sambo' - harmless stuff for 4 to 7 year-olds. Well, it was then.......:( )
 
Yep, Little Black Sambo was just a story. I bet it will be worth a lot one day.
 
And Agatha Christie's 'Ten Little Niggers' which became 'Ten Little Indians' now rejoices in the title 'And There There Was One'. Don't know how they've got around the nursery rhyme though

I had a golliwog. I loved my golliwog. And I had a black doll once, but I hated dolls so it didn't last long. None of them did.
 
Back to old Enid, and I found an old copy of "The Mountain Of Adventure" in a charity shop recently, during one of my attempts to regain some of the lost books from my childhood. This one features an offensive black stereotype; all "where am dat watty melon" accent, and the children have a rather suspect approach to him as well!

My cousin's got a reprint from a few years back, and I commented that I'm surprised that they could get away with it. On a closer look, all his dialogue's been rewritten and described as a catch-all "American" accent. Not even sure they made reference to the colour of his skin either...

For my money though, the most suspect old children's story I've come across is in an old 1930s "Just William" book I used to have. Entitled "William and the Nasties", the story has William and his gang playing at being nazis, or "nasties". William, naturally enough, has to be Hitler, or rather "Him Hitler", as he doesn't like the feminine conotations of "Herr". As they know of the anti-semitism of the real nazis, they decide to victimise a Jewish sweet shop owner, but instead discover, and foil, a robbery. Cue lashings of tuck all round from the grateful confectioner! I'm amazed that this got published, even in the 30s!

On a sort of related note, does anyone know if anything came of the recent plan to re-write the CS Lewis Narnia books, taking out all of that bothersome religious allegory? Reckon if they did that "The Last Battle" would be about fifteen pages long!
 
Johnnyboy said:
On a sort of related note, does anyone know if anything came of the recent plan to re-write the CS Lewis Narnia books, taking out all of that bothersome religious allegory? Reckon if they did that "The Last Battle" would be about fifteen pages long!
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Think that was just somebody's hare-brained suggestion, not an actual plan. Lewis's works are still in copyright (till 2038, by my reckoning), so they'd have to get the full approval of the Lewis estate for it.
 
Still Enid Blyton's 'The Land of Do As You Please' is one of the classics of anarchist utopian literature.
Fave bit of dialouge from the Famous Five 'Oh come on Dick, show us some spunk'
 
I used to love the Malory Towers books, I always wanted to stay in a boarding school when I was a kid (thank God my working class parents would never have sent me to one even if they could have afforded it!)

I had a skim through the M Towers books a couple of years back and the difference between the classes was quite noticable, altho' I never noticed this when reading the books as a child. It was all a jolly good wheeze then.

Wizard, I'll get the bikes!

Carole
 
There's a Danish lullaby where an elephant mother is singing to it's child. There is a line that mentions "Tommorow you'll get a negroby, and you can use him as a rattle" or something like that. It has been changed to sugarcane in the new version. Why it is considered racist I don't know, they were elephants, the kids down there _are_ black.
 
Anything people ust to get called during the days of the british empire is often considered raceist, probably cos most of it was derogitory nicknames given to people by people from other cultures who couldn't be bothered to remember or prenounce their names.
Until recently the welsh got this kind of thing happening to them a lot if they had moved to england; if they had a name deamed by their new peirs as being to hard to pronounce (such as dai [imajane the confution as to weather it is pronounced die, day, da etc.{incidentaly it's pronounced Die}]) they would probably get called Taffy after the river taff that flows through the capital Cardiff and south east wales. as this is the equivelent of calling an english man 'Themsy' or a french man 'Seiny' you can see why this pissed people off and got labeled raceist.
 
Xanatic said:
There's a Danish lullaby where an elephant mother is singing to it's child. There is a line that mentions "Tommorow you'll get a negroby, and you can use him as a rattle" or something like that. It has been changed to sugarcane in the new version. Why it is considered racist I don't know, they were elephants, the kids down there _are_ black.
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Are you sure it hasn't been changed because using a small child as a rattle is fairly unacceptable regardless of the race of the child?!:eek!!!!:

Razorwire
 
No I am pretty sure it was a race thing. But the word "neger", which is the Danish word for negro isn't really considered racist. Politicans might try and avoid the word and such, but no black people I know have a problem with the word. That poem by Agatha Christie is more understandable, but shouldn't it now be "Ten Little Native Americans"?
 
Xanatic said:
That poem by Agatha Christie is more understandable, but shouldn't it now be "Ten Little Native Americans"?
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[slight hijack]

It's actually not just a poem, but a full mystery/suspense story. It's one of my favorites of all time. It is also sometimes known as "And Then There Were None". There was also a movie of it.

[/hijack]
 
When I was a wee one, I read a series of books by Ruby Ferguson, the first of which is called Jill's Gymkhana. The lead character, Jill, had a pony called Black Boy. In later editions, they've changed the name - and the colour - of the horse to Patch. As a kid I thought this was a travesty, and I honestly couldn't understand why. After all, the pony is black!

Did you hear of that bright spark of a young copper who got the name of the Black Museum changed to the Crime Museum?
 
I seem to remember that the film "The Dam Busters" was censored last year, the dodgy bit was the name of Guy Gibson's dog "Nigger" which was also the code word for the breaching of the Mohne dam.
 
Yeah, didn't they use that clip in the video of Pink Floyds 'The Wall'?
 
David said:
I seem to remember that the film "The Dam Busters" was censored last year, the dodgy bit was the name of Guy Gibson's dog "Nigger" which was also the code word for the breaching of the Mohne dam.
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The way PC is going, pretty soon 'Dambusters' will be a science documentary - Barnes-Wallis's bouncing bomb - all reference to WWII will be un-PC and edited out (they were Nazis once, but now they're Europeans - like us!)

And before you all start shouting, I have several German friends, who - like me- view the world wars as history, and a lesson. (And who, last time I was there (3 years ago) were saying that we should have taken Saddam out when we had the chance - bloody evil dictator!)
 
ha, ha

Johnnyboy said:
For my money though, the most suspect old children's story I've come across is in an old 1930s "Just William" book I used to have. Entitled "William and the Nasties", the story has William and his gang playing at being nazis, or "nasties". William, naturally enough, has to be Hitler, or rather "Him Hitler", as he doesn't like the feminine conotations of "Herr". As they know of the anti-semitism of the real nazis, they decide to victimise a Jewish sweet shop owner, but instead discover, and foil, a robbery. Cue lashings of tuck all round from the grateful confectioner! I'm amazed that this got published, even in the 30s!
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Did they manage to organise the final solution? The night of broken glass (my german is crap), and did William have stupid facal hair.

Sorry for the spam.
 
whipped and whipped and whipped......

Sorry if this a little off-thread but it sprang to mind.

In the early 1970s the Tutankhamun exhibition was held in London and Britain went Egypt-mad. I went in a school party to see it and was suitably awestruck.

At the time there was a paperback book called just 'Tutankhamun' which I desperately wanted to read but couldn't afford. A few years ago I picked up a second-hand copy and was astounded at what sh*te it was, in particular the chapter about the everyday lives of the Egyptians. Their main diversion was, it seems, whipping their slaves and each other. When they were bored, they would summon a slave girl who would lie face-down on the bed and be whipped.... and whipped... and whipped. The house would echo to the cries of the slave girl who was being whipped and whipped and whipped. There was even an illustration of the various whipping methods employed, including a man chasing a semiclad girl with a whip and a Pharoah-ish looking chap sitting comfortably on the ground enjoying the spectacle of another unclothed girl tied to a post being, you've guessed it, whipped and whipped. And whipped.

What sort of a mind invents this kind of drivel to present as history? And didn't the publishers notice anything untoward about the writer's obvious and troubling fetish?

I laughed myself silly when I finally read this book after all those years, and happily admit that I didn't really miss much!
 
Talking about cultural sterotyping, a friend of my taught Englsih for a few months in Moldavia.
He bought back a little handbook they gave students explaning all about British culture.
My favourite passage was 'the favourite Englishman's pastime in the evening is to go to his local pub, where people gather to play billards and sing songs of the last war'.
 
chatsubo said:
Talking about cultural sterotyping, a friend of my taught Englsih for a few months in Moldavia.
He bought back a little handbook they gave students explaning all about British culture.
My favourite passage was 'the favourite Englishman's pastime in the evening is to go to his local pub, where people gather to play billards and sing songs of the last war'.
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But it's true! LOL You should come to the pub I work in one day. Replace billiards with dominoes and you've got it.
 
Slytherin said:
But it's true! LOL You should come to the pub I work in one day. Replace billiards with dominoes and you've got it.
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And change 'Work' to 'drink', replace 'of the last war' with 'by the Beatles', you've got my local. But only when Kenny is in, and feeling nostalgic.......
 
DerekH said:
The way PC is going, pretty soon 'Dambusters' will be a science documentary - Barnes-Wallis's bouncing bomb - all reference to WWII will be un-PC and edited out (they were Nazis once, but now they're Europeans - like us!)

And before you all start shouting, I have several German friends, who - like me- view the world wars as history, and a lesson. (And who, last time I was there (3 years ago) were saying that we should have taken Saddam out when we had the chance - bloody evil dictator!)
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Yes, the Germans do have a pretty balanced view.

Re the Dambusters, it would be worse if Spielberg got hold of it and remade it - then we'd have the Yanks running the whole operation with not a Brit in sight:hmph:

Carole
 
Xanatic said:
Yep, Little Black Sambo was just a story. I bet it will be worth a lot one day.
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I made sure I bought a copy for my twins. It's not racist at all, the name Sambo has unfortunate connotations these days, but I'm not sure it did at the time the book was written. And Sambo is black.

It's a good story for kids, Sambo outwits the tiger and all ends well.

Back to Enid Blyton, my kids went through a phase of reading her books and I noticed that one story had been changed to incorporate a gran and not a cook, as originally written. But I suppose that was a fair enough change, not many people these days have their own cooks!

I don't know what all the fuss is about in these children's stories. They notice skin colour and so on, but don't attach any particular significance to it. At least mine didn't when they were smaller, and they still don't. They would say something like, 'That black man over there has the same sort of jacket as our dad has', just in the same way that any one would say, 'That man with the glasses' or 'That woman with the red hair'.

Kids don't tend to be racist unless they're shown how to be, and possibly the PC brigade might be doing more harm than good??


Carole
 
I do believe that 'William and the Nasties' has been banned for many years and is quite a collectors item (if you're really into that kind of thing. Both the politics and, indeed, the William stories in general always turn my stomach).

Isn't it odd that we desperately try to find disturbing connotations in elderly children's books? In much the same way, we also eagerly light upon unflattering (often apocryphal) anecdotes about the authors. Mind you, Diana Wynne-Jones tells how, as a child, she got a mouthful of unpleasant abuse from an inexplicably angry old woman. Who turned out to be the increasingly disturbed Beatrix Potter.

Can't stand William, Greyfriars, Jennings, Enid Blyton, and 90% of children's literature, which always seemed to me to have been written in 1901. By a strange paradox, I was always a Molesworth lad...Willans, Searle and Roald Dahl, that's what you need.
 
DanHigginbottom said:
Can't stand William, Greyfriars, Jennings, Enid Blyton, and 90% of children's literature, which always seemed to me to have been written in 1901. By a strange paradox, I was always a Molesworth lad...Willans, Searle and Roald Dahl, that's what you need.
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Same here but add dick king smith and his many tail's (poor pun but couldn't resist it) of talking animals to the good authours list for me:D

wasen't there some tinpot articles in the press a few yars ago about Dahl being a raceist? if so how come he wrote about the kids besting the enomous crocodie then? some papers will print any old crap.
 
I have to admit that I've come over all PC-ish and have questioned other apparently racist posts. I have (so far at least) always been proved wrong and just over-sensitive and the other posters have always responded kindly. My sensitivity probably says much more about me than it does about about anyone else :(

Back to old Enid... I don't remember the Famous Five stories being particularly racist or sexist, but then as others have said it's only us daft old adults who read too much into these things. Times change, thankfully - my young niece reads Harry Potter stories and uses strange words and sentences, the meaning of which I know not of ;)

The thing that really worried me about the FF was that Timmy the dog was always allowed to lick to picnic plates "clean". Even as a kid I knew that was wrong!

Jane.
 
Thinking about it harry potter is a little racist against us non magical humans labling us with the derogetory tearm 'muggles' how long will it be before publishers change 'muggle' to 'non-magical individule' to make it more 'p.c.'.
 
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