Content warning: racist language and anti-Black caricature.
Our latest “Document of the Week”, chosen by our Content Assistant, Beth Potter, is an article and accompanying illustration from The Bystander. Together, they mark the opening of the 1911 Festival of Empire or Coronation Exhibition, an event intended to celebrate the strength and breadth of the British empire, and to foster ties between Britain and its colonies and dominions.
The article that accompanied the illustration describes the “All-Red Route Railway” as one of the highlights of the festival. As the illustration shows, the “All-Red Route” was a miniature railway which connected parts of the exhibition set across the sprawling Crystal Palace site. On its one-and-a-half-mile long stretch, visitors could travel between specially constructed replicas of the parliament buildings in Britain’s settler colonies, which housed exhibitions of indigenous produce and industry, and other imperial scenes, such as those depicted in the drawing. The "Australian lumber forest”, "sweet little scene on a sugar plantation”, and “Kimberley diamond mines” on the left side of the image reflect the part of the rail route that passed displays of actual “natives at work”. These also included Malay people building houses on stilts, and Maori people in a replica village. Although troubling by today's standards, these human exhibitions were hugely popular at the time, serving as exotic representations of the far reaches of the British empire—regions unfamiliar to many visitors.
Equally troubling are the racist depictions of Black people in The Bystander’s depiction of the festival. The “scene on a sugar plantation” drawing uses a caricature of blackface minstrelsy to depict the Jamaican sugar plantation exhibit on the “All-Red Route”. Meanwhile, the bottom right drawing of the “discovery of the Golliwog” is supposed to represent a scene from the Pageant of Empire performed as part of the festival, in particular, the scene about the formation of the Cape colony. The “Golliwog” is, of course, not a people of southern Africa, but a fictional storybook character invented by Kate Upton, which has since become a widespread anti-Black caricature. In both cases, the illustrator has used a culturally recognisable shorthand to represent colonised Black people at the festival, layering two forms of representational violence, both at the exhibition itself and in its print mediations.
This article and illustration in The Bystander, then, while providing information about the Festival of Empire, also demonstrate how stereotypes that reinforced white hegemony proliferated, and not just in imperial events—they were ubiquitous across media.
Where to find this document
This article is from our collection, The Bystander, 1903–1940. This features over 136,000 images from almost 2,000 weekly issues of the publication, which was owned by The Illustrated London News. The Bystander published articles on fashion, theatre, and sports, as well as literature and illustrations produced by influential writers and artists, such as Daphne Du Maurier and Hector Hugh Monro. The Bystander provides rich material for those working in the fields of literary studies, the history of art, and social history. Visit the collection page to learn more.