Helen Martin: Innocents, not racists, liked gollies

Perhaps young people think those of us old enough to have had a golly were five-year-old bigots, but they don’t appreciate gollies were as loved as teddy bears. We didn’t think of a golliwog as a black “human”. He was a toy, unlike our beautiful black dolly babies we “nursed” alongside our blonde ones.

In 50s Scotland, most young kids had never seen a real black person or even heard of slavery until they studied colonial history at secondary school. The only black character they knew of was little black Sambo, a much-loved literary hero.

That’s the history from a non-global time – we were innocents, not racists.