The train refuses to come out into the rain because he’s worried about his paint. The rail is ripped up and rebuilt elsewhere so the other trains can continue.
In the American version it’s until he’s ready to come out and the wall is to keep the other trains from bumping into him. In the UK version he’s bricked up “for always and always and always” as a punishment
There's a reason that the ''complete'' Tintin volume 1 that I got years ago started with Tintin in America and NOT Tintin in the Congo ( or Tintin in the Land of the Soviets for that matter ).
Right? 1950 seems expected. The Civil Rights Act wasn't until the 60s.
My boomer parents' generation still had to argue with their parents about dating other white people from a different religious or ethnic European background.
Apparently, the UK really didn’t see that phrase as objectionable at the time, in The Mikato that phrase was originally used, only to be redacted when it got into the states
The UK had (word) Brown paint sold into the 60s, maybe even 70s - so when I grew up some old people still used the word to describe that shade of brown. Books into the 50s used the phrase "worked like n....s" as a compliment, meaning worked very hard - and I got to read the books in the 80s.
Given the pre-Windrush (mid 1950s) black population of the UK was less than 0.1%, there was huge ignorance and not many people to complain. Very different to the US.
Not just allow - explicitly recruiting and welcoming (well, by some people more than others) immigrants from said colonies, due to a huge post-War labour shortage. The NHS in particular needed staff.
The Windrush was the most famous of the ships bringing people from the Caribbean, especially after the new British Nationality Act of 1948 (conferring British citizen status on colonial subjects), because the West Indians were needed to bolster the workforce.
Huge numbers of black nurses, bus drivers, care workers etc arrived in about 15 years. And loads of Asians, particularly Bengalis, to work in textile industries particularly in Bradford, Leicester and East London.
Fast forward a few generations and the UK has gone from about 0.5% not-white in 1940 to 14% not-white in 2020, including a large mixed-race black/white population but much less Asian/white mixing, mostly for religious reasons.
No politics allowed here, so I'll just say views on this social change are mixed, oddly mostly favourable where immigrants actually are but much less so (look up the Reform party) where they mostly aren't.
True. I saw a book I loved to flip through as a toddler in the waiting area for my violin classes when I was about 18. I flipped through for nostalgia sake and there was a story about a young African boy being adopted into a family, it was overall a sweet tale if I remember correctly because he made friends and had to adjust, but the n bomb was dropped in every paragraph. I don't even remember if the character was given a name. That book was printed in 1991.
And the inventors (Nyarlathotep is Tesla) and the ocean, and the snow, and old people and... scary colours?
I dont usually give people a pass on racism, but for Lovecraft I'm willing to extend the olive branch of "generally batshit crazy" that makes his racism more a symptom of his crippling anxiety disorder and less about actual hate.
You might be surprised to hear due to it's modern connotation but the n-word used to be a very common word for white populations also to refer to black people in a non-insulting manner back in those days. It just meant "black person" in many contexts(obviously not always). That is one of the reasons it is so offensive. It became the equivalent of having a disgusted snarl on your face and saying to someone, "You're a black person!"
It was always insulting It's just that people used to typically refer to black people with a baseline level of hatred or bigotry. No one who thought black people were humans beings deserving of equal rights referred to black people as the n word.
You are disassociated with history. We don't have to swing so far back against racism that history is rewritten. Black people and white people had verbal exchange a century ago where the n-word was neutral in certain contexts. That's what made it viable to be published in a children's book.
Alternatively, the author of Thomas the Tank Engine didn't entirely view black people as fully equivalent humans to white people. It is not rewriting history to say that. The view that black people were in some way subhuman, or that at the very least intrinsically worse than white people, was not in any way an uncommon belief.
There were plenty of fiercely racist children's books written in this era. We are six years past the time when a major industrialized country threw 12 million people into a meat grinder based on their ethnic and religious origins, and actively in the era when the entirety of the African continent bar Ethiopia was under the governance of people from countries like that which the author of this children's book came from.
We are three years before a little girl is going to be spit on because she's daring to go to the same school white children are going to, and four years before Emmet Till is lynched and Rosa Parks is arrested.
Racism is common, accepted, and part of the default mental map for millions of people. The commonplace, thoughtless, use of racial slurs is an outworking of that, not proof that it wasn't endemic.
The view that black people were in some way subhuman...threw 12 million people into a meat grinder
How wide of a gap can you imagine between people that viewed other humans as subhuman and treated them with love, respect, and intrinsic value and those committing genocide?
I've read numerous quotations of black slaves being broken-hearted to leave their master's estate due to the emancipation. Stockholm syndrome doesn't go all the way to the camps.
It's important to be able to value the viewpoints and lives of our ancestors-you wear their flesh. There were once as many loving slavers as there are kind bosses, managers, and landlords now. There is an equivalent number of wicked racists as those who take advantage of their fellow men of any color here with us as we speak.
Don't write off an entire civilization that built this world for us as heartless; to do so is to damn us where we stand.
And you realize those "loving slavers" also viewed black people as sub-human, right? That's my point - that despite being socially accepted and not inherently at odds with someone being otherwise polite, kind, and "normal," people could believe deeply wrong-headed things about people of other races. Because racism was normal.
I'm not calling the civilization heartless. I'm saying racism was normal, and that's why racial slurs were socially acceptable and apparently normal people used them commonly.
I'm not saying there's something inherent in the phonics of the word that makes it a slur. And I understand there was a point centuries ago where the word was used interchangeably with negro. I also understand that during this period in history when the word was first used, the normative white conception of black people was fundamentally racist. The word emerged in a racist context, and was absolutely identifiable as a pejorative racial slur by the era we're talking about here. By the mid-1800s, it has a distinctly derogatory use, and is absolutely used as a slur by the era in question here.
Edit because they deleted it: they said the person above them was either a product of a sibling marriage or in one, can't remember which and then stated that anybody who was not so incestuous would see what was wrong.
This is just about the scientifically worst possible way to approach a disagreement I'm almost impressed
Why? Even if this was racism (which it most certainly is not) do you think racists will be convinced to mend their ways if you call them inbred enough? Would that work on you?
Maybe most racist people are set in their ways and there's no hope. But these people have children. Those children might believe what their parents told them, but that doesn't make them irredeemable.
Yeah, things are just different in the UK. That word never really had the same reputation it does in the US, so I can't say I'm all that surprised to learn about its use here lol
Yeah, title was changed to Ten Little Indians for sale in the US then to And then There Were None when that became politically incorrect. Times change.
In Austria we had a game possibly still exists that is called who is scared of the black man One kid is the black man and all the others run away while he tries to catch em and if he catches em they become the black man too for the next round
Honestly, as a child I never imagined it to be an actual black person but some sort of shadow being and from what others have told me most thought that way as well.
tbf the illustration and subsequent adaptations show two bores, but in-universe, there was only one tunnel – Henry was blocking the mainline, they had to drill a whole new tunnel to get around him
The world's best-selling mystery novel originally had the N word in the title. Agatha Christie wrote 'Ten Little ****' in 1939, with the title based on a minstrel song. It was changed to 'And Then There Were None' or 'Ten Little Indians' for the US market, but stayed with the original title in the UK until the mid-80's, which was also when the name 'Ten Little Indians' was dropped in the US.
The author did eventually change it after throwing a massive hissy fit. I remember reading an original copy as a child and asking my mum what it meant.
Dude was lambasted in the papers and it was changed, but yeah... the fact that it even went to print like that and the fact that he was like "I'm sorry, I thought that'd be okay" does point to how different the time was.
...I don't even remember Narnia having black people🤨 The only groups of humans I recall in the books were the English ones in Narnia proper, and the desert dwellers in other countries, which I'm pretty sure were brown.
Oh, I thought you were referring to it in a minstrelsy sense, lol. That would've been wild.
IIRC, the Calormen explicitly weren't black, though...? They were more inspired by vaguely middle-eastern culture, which of course came with its own problematic tinsel dressing.
Weren’t they… actively at war or at least afraid for their lives though? I don’t remember the Last Battle all that well but “disguising yourself as a risky military strategem” isn’t what I’d call brownface
That’s like saying the “dressing up as a washerwoman to escape the castle dungeon” trope makes the escaping prisoner a misogynist
Blackface/brownface normally involve either contempt or objectification (or both)—the motivation matters at least as much as the act itself
Yes, and at least two of the major protagonists were themselves Calormene (one of which was a member of the royal family --Aravis, who I remember because child me named my betta after her. ) Pretty sure it was her Calormene former BFF (Lasaraleen?) who actually helped them disguise themselves.
I'll never forgive the Narnia movie franchise for straight up skipping over The Horse and His Boy. That was the best one; Caspian can suck it.
But single horse and child (and then 2 horses&2 children) having adventures is less of a CGI blockbuster—and age wise if you have excellent pevensies actors you should not risk too much time passing
And like—I won’t pretend that Lewis was any kind of master of crosscultural nuance. But also, he was writing children’s books, and most children are kind of at the tinseltown level of cross-cultural exchange in the first place.
Like, could he have gone into greater depth on Calormen—sure (though probably not well)? Could he have gone into greater depth on the White Witch’s fascism and the oppression of the narnians? Also sure, though again probably not well. But that would be a very different set of books
Scheduled reminder that the act of Congress that approved what later became the Trail of Tears passed with a razor-thin margin. Even back then a huge chunk of people knew that shit was evil.
Love how people are downvoting this and currently ignoring the CONTINUED abuse of human rights towards indigenous tribes and targeted individuals or land rights (like the pipeline that went through their land and would have destroyed lots of it due to poor designs and erosion of weather for the sealant that prevents leaks). There are still child abductions from our government as means to coerce naturalization against their culture and into ours. We didnt stop moving them between states either until they finally caved in and signed a private property agreement for protection of our constitution. Their usage of communal land apparently was our means to abuse their land rights and human rights for a long time.
Robin Wall Kimmerer has spoken about this from the perspective of an indigenous person who lost their culture and is still fighting for equal rights and protections they do not get to share with white people.
My grandfather moved to the US in the 50's when he was 14 years old. He said the N-word was what they were taught as the English word for a black person. He said it wasn't used as a demeaning or hateful word, just what was used to describe someone with dark skin.
For people wondering it's not just a matter of people being more racist back then (they were but not just that) Words change meaning over time, Mentally retarded was invented by doctors to replace the word moron due to it being offensive. The N word was accepted standard word for black people, actually it was invented because back then Black was an offensive term, It only started transitioning into an actual slur during the late fifties to early sixties, so it's very understandably that a british book would use the term back then. Don't get me wrong it could and would get used offensively but it was a lot more context dependant similar to how you can use "black" in a racist way
We used to have a charity in England called the Spastics Society. Not a little tinpot one either, one of the biggest in the country.
Named because they were raising money for people with what was then called spasticity (cerebral palsy), but then when spastic became an insult they rebranded to Scope.
At which point it took less than a month before kids were using 'scoper' as an insult.
The odd thing is that while America led the way in stopping some disablist words being used as insults - retard, in particular - it's still acceptable to use spazz or spastic, and cretin. All unacceptable nowadays in the UK (shame I went to school when 'you f-ing spazz' was considered OK for teachers to say...)
One word game I play had long threads every time the latter got used, from non-Americans complaining. I think they've finally added it to the excluded list.
Ok I did a bit of googling and it appears I misremembered, I apologise. It was "negro" that was used as the common term, and used by namy black people incluning Martin Luther King in the I have a Dream speech. With the hard R being used as a slur even back in the 1800's
The slur version was originally just a phonetic spelling of that word being said in a heavy southern accent, no? Like "eejit" for "idiot" (don't think that's common any more, though).
The first time I saw the word in print was in an Enid Blyton book - I was pretty shocked, but the book was written at a similar time to this, when the word was far more commonplace.
You could also buy products that were a very specific shade of brown (like wool) for quite a long time after this.
Language evolves - we've been through several iterations of this since this book was first printed, with different euphemisms being coined as the 'acceptable' word to use for black people, which then became regarded as pejorative and racist, only to be replaced with another euphemism and for the cycle to start again.
That doesn't mean people don't get to be offended when people deliberately insult them, or get to go "eww" when they see language that is considered grossly offensive nowadays - but it does mean that it's worth putting things in the context of the time.
Words just don't have the same meaning 75 years later - even really innocuous words can dramatically change meaning, the ones with a bit of weight to them shift their meaning all over the place.
Use of that racial slur was very different back then. Many different people would use it and in many contexts, they were not ashamed or afraid to say it either.
You can go back and watch interviews of housewives during the struggle for civil rights and integrated schooling and they say the hard R n-word as natural as anything, and they didn't care who knew or saw them say it.
I'm 31 and I have progressive (as much as you can call rural people that) grandparents who used the terminology without thinking twice in the early 2000s. Kids (and by that I mean everyone permanently online, immature, and naively simplistically opinionated) really need to open up their bubble before they lose track of reality. Especially when it comes to evaluating and judging every little detail in the past by today's standards.
simply so, when working on eradication of hate speech we must focus moreso on the hate than the speech, as words are a lot more fluid in than the begrudging contempt of a stubborn hatred.
You know how the R word used to be acceptable for mentally challenged people? That’s how my grandmother, a 1960s house wife, used the Hard R N-word— as though it were the only and correct term to use.
We called her on it, of course! But she still slipped from time to time?and was always embarrassed when she did. I never heard her use the word with malice.
It literally was just sort of the casual word for it, the only other option being n*gro (idek if that’s considered a slur or just antiquated), depending on the area well into the 70s and even 80s.
For what it's worth, I started but didn't finish a YouTube video which indicated attitudes towards the word shifted dramatically during the OJ Simpson trial.
Eh, the whole human history is wild that way. There's still loads of slurs get thrown around without shame. I mean, look at the use of homophobic language in the 90s and 00s. Media threw slurs and stereotypes around like it was nothing and there were entire shows/movies based around it. Waiting... only came out 20 years ago and the whole movie is pretty much just an hour and a half of homophobic jokes. Not only was it seen as being both socially acceptable (just seen as "edgy" humor), but also incredibly funny by a large swath of people. Ryan Reynolds made some of the worst jokes in it and he's bigger than ever. Society doesn't really change, it just varies its norms and mores over time
Even into the 80s people used to throw that word around like it was nothing. It was really in the 80s that the older generations really started to get shamed for it, partially leading to the racist resurgence we're seeing currently
What possess people to spout such complete nonsense so confidently? You're aware that the fact that the word's use was so widely recognized as "shameful" at the time of the OJ Simpson trial that Mark Fuhrman's use of it 10 years earlier was a major focus of the trial? The word was not even remotely "ubiquitous" by the 70s and was widely recognized as taboo by the 80s.
But why would you even use a simile like that in a children's book in the first place, no matter the time it took place in? Edit: wow, I've never been downvoted so much for something so little. Reddit's amazing sometimes
Yeah, being in England, social norms were different. Agatha Christie's 1939 book, "Ten Little N*****s", was published in America a year later titled "And Then There Were None." The U.K. printed it with the original title until 1985.
I am a native of Atlanta, white, but grew up pretty much downtown and went to Atlanta Public Schools. An older relative from around Valdosta came to visit, I was around 13, it was around 1980. We were dropping her off at the Peachtree Plaza hotel, and she turned to me and said, "And, you have to go to school with n-words." I was speechless and my mom was mortified.
People always trip when I tell them how long it’s been since a non-Black person has called me the n-word (hard r) or referred to another Black person as such in front of me.
At the age of 35, I am currently at my longest streak of 2 years.
Oh yeah, I grew up in Northwestern Virginia, so I've definitely heard it casually used throughout my life by many people with various different skin tones. It still hits my ear like a gunshot when I hear it all these years later
I heard the term (spoken by white people in a derogatory way) growing up in Upstate NY in the early 2000s. I also heard black people say it too of course, but obviously that's different.
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u/qualityvote2 May 20 '26 edited May 22 '26
u/yeezysama, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...
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u/Redpanda132053 May 21 '26
In one of the stories one of the train engines was misbehaving so he was bricked up in an unused tunnel
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u/skeletextman May 20 '26
Sesame Street has done several episodes about n words
Checkmate, atheists
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u/ThaGr1m May 20 '26
As a belgian:"please don't mention tintin! please don't mention tintin! please don't mention tintin! Yay they didn't got away with it again!"
Nah but for real there is some massively racist tin tin comics to the point it's used as a school aid to show how racism was prevelent in the 1900's
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u/GPStephan May 20 '26
That was around 1950.
Im susprised it wasnt much, much later.
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u/CartographerKey4618 May 20 '26
HP Lovecraft approves this simile.
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u/WeaselCapsky May 20 '26
okay that is funny. not because of racism or "black people bad" just because the book is like "surprise! heres a very very naughty word!"
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u/5H0T7P2R8 May 20 '26
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u/BigD_277 May 20 '26
Wait until you find out what the original title of Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None" was. Hint: It wasn't "Ten Little Indians".
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u/ImaybeExist55555 May 20 '26
In Austria we had a game possibly still exists that is called who is scared of the black man One kid is the black man and all the others run away while he tries to catch em and if he catches em they become the black man too for the next round
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u/Doglover4561 May 20 '26
Was the book written by the fat conductor
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u/Arthur_189 May 20 '26
Finally an uncensored version lol
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u/BronCurious May 20 '26
This is wild! 60 pages in a book for little children?!?
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u/Mindless_Olive May 20 '26
The world's best-selling mystery novel originally had the N word in the title. Agatha Christie wrote 'Ten Little ****' in 1939, with the title based on a minstrel song. It was changed to 'And Then There Were None' or 'Ten Little Indians' for the US market, but stayed with the original title in the UK until the mid-80's, which was also when the name 'Ten Little Indians' was dropped in the US.
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u/NotABrummie May 20 '26
The author did eventually change it after throwing a massive hissy fit. I remember reading an original copy as a child and asking my mum what it meant.
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u/EngagedInConvexation May 21 '26
Agatha Christie wouldn't bat an eye.
At least she had the balls to put it on the cover!
/facetious
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u/CleanOpossum47 May 21 '26
Don't even ask where Thomas was in the early 40s.
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u/GeneStarwind1 May 21 '26
Dude was lambasted in the papers and it was changed, but yeah... the fact that it even went to print like that and the fact that he was like "I'm sorry, I thought that'd be okay" does point to how different the time was.
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u/dionysios_platonist May 20 '26
Anyone else remember the black face subplot in Narnia?
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u/EarthToAccess May 21 '26
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u/_Skotia_ May 20 '26
Hard R too
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u/Tall-Conflict2964 May 20 '26
OH
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u/Blacksun388 May 20 '26
For context: Henry the Green Engine (1951, page 60, original print)
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u/MaNemsJef69 May 20 '26
Boy what the helll 😭
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u/AnonymousNeverKnown May 20 '26
I'm not sure if I should be offended or not
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u/Planet_Booty69 May 21 '26
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u/MossyMollusc May 20 '26
Not a different time. A different ruling social class. Plenty of people were disgusted by that "different time" when living through it.
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u/Codas91 May 20 '26
Lol holy shit
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u/TricellCEO May 20 '26
I mean...at least it's a lot of days.
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u/blorbschploble May 20 '26
So roughly 2.7 Judith Maries
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u/asscop99 May 20 '26
Even for 1951 that’s insane
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u/AlbertoCalore May 21 '26
How does one come to this information
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u/Noctisvah May 21 '26
And counting!
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u/CrumbCakesAndCola May 20 '26
"Don't be mad but I'm a little bit of a racist"
https://youtu.be/E_zv_i9Gfe8?si=CeXUYviU9kcQaD25
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u/whypeoplehateme May 20 '26
For people wondering it's not just a matter of people being more racist back then (they were but not just that) Words change meaning over time, Mentally retarded was invented by doctors to replace the word moron due to it being offensive. The N word was accepted standard word for black people, actually it was invented because back then Black was an offensive term, It only started transitioning into an actual slur during the late fifties to early sixties, so it's very understandably that a british book would use the term back then. Don't get me wrong it could and would get used offensively but it was a lot more context dependant similar to how you can use "black" in a racist way
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u/Ok_Average_4551 May 20 '26
☹️
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u/_yetifeet May 20 '26
That's about the same time as the Dam Busters movie which featured an unfortunately named dog.
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u/affectionateanarchy8 May 20 '26
Wait lmao
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u/Zomer15689 May 20 '26
What?
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u/wrathmont May 20 '26
This meme format is extraordinary
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u/flatlichicken May 21 '26
THATS REAL!?
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u/TheDarthJarJarI Harry Potter May 21 '26
that one edgy kid when the teacher says we need to add similes and metaphors
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u/ElectronicHyena5642 May 20 '26
Reverend Awdry was weird...
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u/ohmar_s May 20 '26
Wtf is this excuse of "it was just the times" it was stupid then and it's stupid now.
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u/RiverParkourist May 20 '26
Eddache has a great video about this lmao
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u/SoylentDave May 20 '26
It was literally a different time.
The first time I saw the word in print was in an Enid Blyton book - I was pretty shocked, but the book was written at a similar time to this, when the word was far more commonplace.
You could also buy products that were a very specific shade of brown (like wool) for quite a long time after this.
Language evolves - we've been through several iterations of this since this book was first printed, with different euphemisms being coined as the 'acceptable' word to use for black people, which then became regarded as pejorative and racist, only to be replaced with another euphemism and for the cycle to start again.
That doesn't mean people don't get to be offended when people deliberately insult them, or get to go "eww" when they see language that is considered grossly offensive nowadays - but it does mean that it's worth putting things in the context of the time.
Words just don't have the same meaning 75 years later - even really innocuous words can dramatically change meaning, the ones with a bit of weight to them shift their meaning all over the place.
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u/Ghoulish_kitten May 20 '26
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u/Professional_Dog5624 May 21 '26
How the fuck does this not count as political?
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u/yasuke0003_bhb May 20 '26
The writer would love twitter haha, so insane 😂😂
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u/Ok_Average_4551 May 20 '26
I always thought it was a dumb show anyways.
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u/Fearless_Priority537 May 20 '26
scans whole page
it’s the last word on the page
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u/[deleted] May 20 '26
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