No, It Wasn’t “Politically Incorrect”, It Was Just Racist. Own it.
Plenty of things may still be worth enjoying on their own merits, but accept that they often embody deeply cruel messages.
One of my positive memories from childhood, that I shall always remember, is ‘Rupert and the Blue Moon’. I was raised by my father, a dangerous man with a curdled soul, and, whatever else he said and did to me, I was his proudest achievement. A little him to show off. He also knew I was deeply scarred, both by my mother leaving to escape him and by his own uncontrollable dominance and manipulation.
There were times it seemed to get to him, and in those times it felt almost like he might do anything in that moment to bring me happiness. That’s why he was dangerous, you see, because you never knew which him you were going to get and, as Bane put it in The Dark Knight Rises, for someone to truly suffer… they must have hope.
As a small child I had a few favourite things. Being read to was one of them. Despite this being the mid 1980’s, my father was keen I have many of the same childhood experiences as him and so I was exposed to an enormous number of children’s books from the 1950's.
Sam Pig. Toby Twirl. Muffin the Mule. Noddy. The Famous Five. Anything by Dennis “BB” Watkins-Pitchford (“The Little Grey Men” (1942), “Brendon Chase” (1944)). Chuff’ty-Puff’ty The Jolly Railway Engine (1950).
But my most favourite of all was Rupert Bear, realised through my father’s not inconsiderable collection of annuals.
To the uninitiated, Rupert is a young boy-like bear who lives in an idealised English village called Nutwood. He was created by Mary Tourtel in 1920 for the Daily Express and originally appeared twice-daily; back when newspapers had both a morning and evening edition.
The cartoon initially consisted of one picture, accompanied by a short poem that told that part of the story — including any dialogue. Unlike most comics, “Rupert” didn’t use speech bubbles. Each instalment was part of a much larger story that would run for several days.
This format was later expanded in 1935 when the reins were handed to Alfred Bestall, who would write and illustrate the stories until 1965. The new style included multiple illustrations per instalment, with text as both prose and poetry.
Once a year, these stories were then collected together and published into an annual — an omnibus of several stories, with additional material, usually available at Christmas.
My favourite story, from 1956, was about how, at Christmas, Rupert accidentally broke his father’s beautiful porcelain “spill-holder”. A mysterious visitor appeared from “The Blue Moon”, a seldom-seen world deep in space, offered Rupert the chance to go on a magical journey to get a replacement.
Nutwood, Rupert’s home, was inspired by the Vale of Clwyd; the Sussex Weald and East Devon. It is the quintessential English village, and has stayed much the same over the decades… even as real English villages were reshaped by commercialism and neo-Liberalism, beginning in the 1970's and accelerating through the 1980’s.
For context, most small-ish urban conurbations in the UK now consist of a little nucleus of shops — all national or international chains — surrounded by a de-centralised suburbia of residential areas. At the centre is usually a malnourished-looking train station, and reaching out from it a privatised (and expensive) bus route.
Rupert’s village isn’t like that. There’s a well-kept station, dressed with flowers, and regular steam trains going all over England. A jolly little bus provides access to more remote cottages. The high street (as we call our town centres) has local, independent butchers; bakers; carpenters; blacksmiths; a greengrocer and a school where Rupert and his eccentric cast of chums theoretically get an education. The village is full of little shops and stalls, without a chain in sight, all run by friendly local residents who just want a nice place to live.
I say “theoretically get an education”, because naturally we almost never see Rupert or his cronies in school: they’re usually out exploring the bucolic vicinity, trekking over fields and through woods during never-ending Summers… or having snowball fights in Winters thick with snow.
Strangely, in a decision that would no doubt enrage the UK’s abundance of extreme-Right provocateurs were it taken today, this slice of semi-mythical “Little England” nostalgia is home to a surprisingly diverse cast of pals for the young bear. Despite his home being the poster-child for an imaginary Britain, as pined for by the Far-Right, Alfred Bestall introduced a good number of distinctly not British neighbours.
In no particular order, we’ll start with Nutwood’s pagoda residents: The Chinese Conjurer and his daughter, Tigerlily. Yep, this little village in the heart of Englishness had a pagoda where two very not-British people lived as welcome members of the community.
Obviously, it’d have been truly spiffing if the patriarch wasn’t literally named “The Chinese Conjurer”, and if his daughter didn’t speak pigeon-English, but… yanno… baby steps, I suppose. This was the 1950's.
Next up was a some-times visitor called The Sage of Um, who lived on a distant island but would periodically land in Nutwood in his upturned, flying umbrella. He wasn’t subject to a visa or immigration check… but in fairness he was white.
There were at least two resident Liberal academics: The Professor, inventor of crackpot Raygun Gothic machines, and local Wiccan mystic “The Wise Old Goat” — always ready to add a spot of pagan magic to any situation. Pong-Ping, a friend and classmate of Rupert, was an East-Asian-coded Pekingese who owned a pet dragon. He’d take it out for walks on a leash!
There was a local family of gypsies, including a boy called Rollo, who were all friends with Rupert. The schoolmaster was Dr. Chimp — presumably not a British native since this country has sadly never enjoyed wild chimps in our countryside. There’s a sailor — God knows where he’s from — a helpful and inventive Girl Guides troop and a cavalcade of other human (and animal) creatures across a rainbow spectrum of identities.
So far, so pretty-good-for-the-time. With a little bit of casual mental gymnastics, we can easily convince ourselves that Rupert was actually rather woke. He has several friends from East Asia, he’s friendly with the Romani Gypsies from Eastern Europe, he has no problem taking assistance from girls and he has a diverse cadre of friends. It hardly sounds like the 1950’s at all!
Wouldn’t it be even better if there were some Black people represented, too?
Sadly… there are. And it’s not good. Extremely not good. Rupert, on several occasions, meets islanders from across the seas who are just Golliwogs: minstrel-esque caricatures of Black people.
Content warning, as I shall be including some of these illustrations.
For those unaware, around the turn-of-the-20th-Century, on both sides of the Atlantic, there was a surprisingly long-lived entertainment niche called “Minstrelsy”. It involved White people dressing up like Black people — using face paint to give themselves “blackface”, jet-black skin and exaggerated, clown-like rictus grins — and then doing songs and skits that mocked Black people. They were portrayed as slow, ugly, lazy and possessed of a child’s intelligence; trying to do real-person (ie white) things and comically failing.
It started on the stage, part of Vaudeville, but made its way on to television, too. In the UK, The Black and White Minstrel Show ran until 1978! It’s also a big, unconscious part of British and American culture to this day.
Don’t believe me? “Jingle Bells” was a Minstrel song, the joke being the very idea of Black people in the snow, snuffling about like they are proper people or something. Oof.
Cartoons also have a lineage traceable back to minstrelsy. The design of Mickey Mouse is directly based on an earlier character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and both of them parallel the design of Warner Bros.’ Bosko “The Little Negro Boy”, a minstrel character.
Ever wonder why so many cartoon characters have white kid gloves and a penchant for musicality? Minstrelsy. It comes from Minstrelsy. It just embedded itself in British and American culture, to the point now where we aren’t even consciously aware of it.
Still not convinced? These three were designed in homage to “old” cartoons — tell me they have no relation to Bosko:
Bosko himself, redesigned as a dog, even showed up in an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures back in the early 90's.
Minstrelsy is a winning combination of grotesqueness, self-importance and pathological unawareness on the part of White people. We basically looked at Black people, during eras of extreme prejudice against them, and said “hey, we should bully them for a few laughs!” So we put on blackface, jumped on stage and went “hey dere massa where am dat watey-melon?”
It’s singularly repulsive.
And it turned up in Rupert the Bear, too. Several times.
Holy f*ck..! That’s a sequel-story to this humdinger:
Rupert goes to “Coon Island” and meets some “darkies” who are little, inhuman grotesques with huge lips and paws. Even Rupert doesn’t have paws and he’s a goddamn bear.
Upon which note, I finally bring this little roundabout ramble of childhood reading, Rupert Bear, Minstrelsy, and racism to my point. Here it is:
![A screenshot from the Rupert the Bear fan-wiki, which under “Trivia” notes: [this] concluded early when being re-published in The Daily Express. The ‘PC police’ excised Rupert’s visit to his native chums on Coon Island that featured in the original story. This modern approach in republishing stories unfortunately compromises the racial harmony that has always featured in tthe Rupert stories. It is a sad comment on the snowflake thinking these days.](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*1zcggswmQaNsyYJ-q2IJLw.png)
This simmering undercurrent of resentment even turns up on the official Rupert the Bear website:
And thus I bring down the hammer: no, dear heart, it is not “political correctness”, it’s because those stories are very, very racist and cannot in good conscience be published as children’s stories in the 21st Century.
Let me clarify that further — illustrations like this do not belong in the Children’s section of a book shop:
It’s nothing to do with snowflakes, political correctness or any other snarlword. It is simply not proper for messages like that to be publicly sold in books for children in 2024. Look at it, for Christ’s sake.
That then poses an obvious question: what should we do with these stories? Bury them? Ignore them?
Well in the first instance, they need some context to explain where they sit in British culture of the 1950's. I don’t think Alfred Bestall was a Klan member, and I don’t think that we should dig-up Mary Tourtel and put her corpse on trial. Neither party would have thought anything of these awful portrayals of Black people at the time, because these views were part of the background noise of society. There probably is an argument to be made that Bestall was trying to say something vaguely nice about Black people: apart from a few misunderstandings, Rupert befriends them all and cross-cultural friendships occur.
That said, in the 21st Century, it is rightly — and, I hope, obviously — considered disgustingly racist to portray another people like that. The messaging is not subtle: it shows Black people as tribal savages, more animal than human, and that’s just not okay. There is no amount of mental gymnastics that can make it not racist.
I wouldn’t even say that these portrayals are unusually bad for the time: they’re par for the course, because most people in the 40's and 50's just were racist. Hell, most people in the 70's and 80's were racist. Indeed, I’d argue, most people now are racist.
In fact, I am racist. Let me confess how:
A few years back my husband and I booked a weekend in Paris. We got a cheap hotel for two nights. As we walked towards it, I became acutely conscious that we were walking into (thunderclap) a Black neighbourhood! There were Black people everywhere… in the shops, walking about, and hanging around in groups right outside the hotel door! They were doing Black People Stuff! In broad daylight!
And that… that’s when I got a grip of myself, and mentally slapped some sense into my skull.
I put my brain back into gear and realised that nobody there was interested in me — unless I wanted to buy something or ask for directions, maybe. They were just being, like anyone else. They were chatting with friends and family, making plans for later-on or talking about how work was going. The idea that I was in some sort of danger because I was in a “Black neighbourhood” was pathetic, and it was incredibly racist of me. I am ashamed to have entertained those thoughts and, now I know that they can pop-up, I actively fight against them. That is The Work.
Without letting myself off the hook, I think everyone is at least a bit racist, and it is most dangerous in White people because we have the most power in America and Western Europe. Our countries are like films structured explicitly around us, the main characters. They centre us as the de facto stewards of choosing how and in whose interests our nations run. We centre Western European standards of beauty. We assume anyone that is not White “is not from here”. We cleave to idiotic beliefs like Black people having “thick skin” and being thus impervious to pain. We train our AI systems to misidentify Black people as animals.
We must be aware of all of this, and we must dismantle it actively. The first step is acknowledging where we, as White people, fail and how we can do better.
Let’s take that all on board, and return to the question of how we should manage old newspaper comics about a bear who has adventures...
Firstly: no, those stories should not be available to children — which implicitly, all Rupert publications are. They are children’s stories and, although they may target collectors with their republishing schedules, they are still stocked in the Children’s literature sections of book shops and WH Smith’s. That just won’t do for these specific stories because we now see that they’re not suitable for children.
Secondly: I do believe that they should be available to collectors, historians, enthusiasts and anyone who wants to go looking for them. The Daily Express should publish “Rupert on Coon Island” and all the other racist stories, and it’s for three simple reasons:
- They exist and nobody is served by pretending that they don’t.
- They are historical, cultural artefacts for how society and children’s literature was shaped and organised in the first-half of the 20th Century.
- We, as in White British people, need to take responsibility for them.
Both Disney and Warner Bros. have shown us how to go about this tastefully. With input from Black scholars, they have released some of their previously unreleasable, unedited cartoons. You can watch the ones where Bugs makes fun of Native Americans, or where Jerry blows Tom up and he ends up in blackface as a result. These things are not being hidden. They’re not being kept a secret, like the Ark of the Covenant. They’re not forbidden fruit for Right-wingers to yearn for. They’re available: you want it, go buy it and fill your boots.
The only difference is that these reissues come with an opening disclaimer:
There. That’s how you do it. So, republish those Rupert annuals and make them available to collectors. Just don’t put them in the kid’s section, and make sure there’s a clear note about what is inside so it doesn’t take anybody unawares. A simple dust jacket would do that nicely.
This way, collector’s can get their completed sets, historians can review them, enthusiasts and fans can get a glimpse into the way the world actually was in the 50s, and racists can… I dunno… jerk off to them, I suppose?
As for the rest of us, it’ll help us in starting to pull back the veil on these influences on our society and allow us to properly move forward, together. Because these stories are almost impossible for a modern palate to enjoy, even accounting for their historical context, I think it’s unlikely that one would want to read them purely for pleasure… but they can start to help White British people realise how we saw and treated Black people within living memory and the affects that still has on our attitudes.
In short: Rupert has been pretty damn racist over the years. Own it and stop pretending that it’s the “PC brigade” getting offended over nothing.
Also, you should read “Rupert and the Blue Moon”… obviously, he does manage to get a new spill-holder for his dad in the end, but it’s a fun ride getting there. There’s even a set of origami instructions for making such a holder out of paper! Alfred Bestall was very keen on origami, you see, and it seems to me that pieces of paper can be put to many uses…
Perhaps that’s another subtly positive message he was including.
