Enid Blyton gift shop owner is banned from window dressing competition for having a GOLLIWOG featured on her trinkets

AN Enid Blyton giftshop has been disqualified from a window dressing competition for displaying novelty golliwog tea-towels.

The two large tea-towels sparked controversy when displayed in the Corfe Castle shop’s window with organisers of the annual festival deciding to ban the Dorset shop from its competition.

Purbeck Arts Festival organisers held an emergency meeting over the issue, deciding that the golliwog, which is seen by many as a crude racial stereotype, offends people and the festival did not want be associated with it.

But shop owner Viv Endecott argued she had sold thousands of the controversial rag doll from her Ginger Pop store, saying the black dolls were synonymous with Enid Blyton books like Noddy and they were part of English culture.

She said: “It is about time the English started celebrating our culture. The golliwog is a part of our culture and no one needs to be offended by it.

“You cannot ban bits of history you don't like, history is part of our country.

“I sell thousands upon thousands of golliwogs in the shop every year.

“There are so few places to get one thee days because most people are too frightened to sell them.”

Viv Endecott today expressed her disappointment at being disqualified from the window display competition.

She said: "I'm so disappointed that an arts organisation of all things should choose to be censorious.

"After the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, millions of people took to the streets to assert the Western value that no one has the right not to be offended.

"The arts, it was said, were a precious arena where freedom of speech could challenge narrow mindsets.

"It would seem that the lessons of Paris have not filtered down to this sleepy corner of Dorset - where my shop window display has been withdrawn because it 'could be offensive to many' despite there being no record of it having caused offence to anyone.

"Freedom of speech is about persuading others to your way of thinking by robust and reasoned argument through any medium - my medium was words on a tea-towel with a golliwog motif.

"I believe that the golliwog has become totemic of the identity debate, that banning him has been a tragic own-goal by the anti-racists and an appalling act of anti-liberalism by the trustees of Purbeck Art Weeks."

Miss Endecott explained that she suffered racist bullying at school because of her ethnicity. Her late father was Indian and her mother is English.

She said: "As someone of mixed race I can understand that there is often more than one story in life, and the golliwog represents that.

"I was the first non-white pupil of Dorset primary school and suffered name-calling and general bullying because of it."

Charlotte Heath, a spokesman for the Purbeck Art Weeks, said: “After discussing the issue with the other trustees we came to the unanimous decision that we cannot endorse the use of golliwogs and therefore Miss Endecott has been removed from the competition.

“We want to make sure that Purbeck Art Weeks is disassociated from anything like that and if people have been offended we would like to apologise.

“She is not obliged to take it down which is why we have excluded her.”

The festival’s theme is 'Midsummer Dreams' with Miss Endecott’s entry themed the 'English dream of freedom'.

The store owner designed a tea-towel filled with words that she either agrees or disagrees with.

Terms such as 'freedom of speech' 'liberty' and 'tolerance' appear in red while disapproving words like 'slavery', 'political correctness gone mad' and 'ignorance' are in grey, with an image of a golliwog in the middle.

The items are displayed in the window of her Ginger Pop shop, a shrine to Blyton who lived locally.

It is not the first time the Enid Blyton giftshop has courted controversy with Ms Endecott previously receiving hate mail and verbal complaints when the store first began to sell golliwogs almost a decade ago.

The display has also been criticised from the Dorset Race Equality Council who say the stuffed toys are widely recognised to have racist connotations.

Adnan Choudry, the chief officer of the council, said: “Golliwogs don't just offend black people, they're offensive to people of any race.

“People used them as a means to abuse black people in the 1970s and 1980s - people still remember those days.

“I thought we had all moved on but obviously not.

“I have had dealings with her in the past - I have told her my opinion, that they should not be sold, but goes on selling them.”

The golliwog was a popular children's toy throughout the 20th century after it first appeared in a children's story by the writer Florence Kate Upton.

It was popularised in Britain when jam manufacturer Robertsons adopted it as a symbol for its products in 1910.

By the 1980s it was increasingly seen as an offensive caricature towards people of African descent and Robertsons dropped it in 2001.

In Blyton's Noddy books, the golliwog owner of the garage in Toytown has been replaced by a Mr Sparks while the book The Three Golliwogs is now The Three Bold Pixies.