Rewriting history books will lead to an unhappy ending
NOW I know why I have grown up to be such a bigot – it is all those evenings tucked up in bed in the 1970s reading the adventures of the Famous Five. Or that is what English Heritage seems to want me to think. It has just published a “reappraisal” of the author Enid Blyton, whom in 1997 it honoured in a blue plaque on a building in Chessington, Surrey, in which she once lived.
She wouldn’t get a blue plaque now, for sure. The online information “informs” us that “Blyton’s work has been criticised during her lifetime and after for its racism, xenophobia and lack of literary merit”. Citing the decision of the Royal Mint not to put Blyton’s work on a special edition of the 50 pence coin it calls her a “sexist” and “homophobe” to boot.
My, that is quite a litany of charges. It is hard to know where to start. But from my own recollections I seem to remember the Famous Five going sailing, drinking copious quantities of ginger beer and, by good luck, helping police to arrest a criminal or two.
I don’t remember them once going on a National Front march, insulting a gay couple or telling a female character not to get above herself or that her rightful place was in the home.
IT IS true that some of Blyton’s stories involved what – if they are allowed to be mentioned at all – now tend to be known as “gollies”. They wouldn’t be allowed in today’s books – and I can’t say I would argue with that – but the soft toys were ubiquitous in children’s toy boxes when Blyton was writing.
I can’t say I know what was going through Blyton’s head when, late in life, she penned a story called the Little Black Doll in which a child starts to love a toy only when its face is cleaned by the rain. But I suspect it wasn’t white supremacism, more a bossy way of telling children to wash their faces before bed – using admittedly unfortunate imagery.
To single out Enid Blyton as a racist on the grounds she failed to observe the orthodoxies of our own day is ridiculous. She simply reflected the world in which she lived. There is nothing in her private life which suggests she harboured extreme political views.
As for trying to belittle her “literary merit”, what is the point of that? Blyton’s books have sold 600 million copies and been translated into 90 languages. You don’t achieve that by being a bad writer. They are books written to enliven the imaginations of children, not to impress an English don. I don’t think she was either trying, or expecting, to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
No doubt someone at English Heritage feels they have justified their own existence by attacking Blyton.
But, really, the Government needs to get a grip on the organisation – and on other quangos, too, which receive large quantities of public money without being accountable to the public.
ENGLISH Heritage isn’t a body we can easily ignore – it has been entrusted with the care of some of the country’s greatest treasures.
In addition, it received £13.1million grant-in-aid funding in the last financial year.
It cannot be allowed to wander off on its own ideological path, nor to be used as a platform for the woke brigade to try to place its stamp on English society. It is not acceptable for its chief executive to write, in
the foreword, that the body needs to address “issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement”. Black Lives Matter is a political movement – and one which has aims, such as defunding the police and abolishing capitalism, which are at odds with the vast majority of the British public.
What is English Heritage going to do next: demolish Stonehenge on the grounds that it was very likely built using slave labour? It is hard to think of a single ancient building with which it is entrusted which did not have its origins in racism and xenophobia.
Even before its diversion to woke causes I had serious misgivings about English Heritage. Its attempt to close off the surroundings of Stonehenge and limit access to people who buy pre-booked tickets at a cost of £23 per adult is a disgrace.
The nation’s heritage belongs to everyone – not just to a welloff elite with woke values. What I used to love about the Famous Five was that they seemed to be able to roam and have their adventures everywhere, without being told off.
They would have clambered all over Stonehenge – not stung several weeks’ pocket money to trudge around an approved path while being lectured on racism and sexism in ancient Britain.
‘Enid Blyton simply reflected the world in which she lived’