by James Curran
However, as our own research showed, Hackney council had never in fact issued any instruction, memo or report about the use of the word ‘manhole’, nor had the word been the subject of any formal discussion within the council, although it did have a policy of avoiding words such as ‘fireman’ and ‘foreman’ which might give the impression that certain jobs were reserved specifically for men. Nor did the council employ anyone named Tom Jordan. So where did the story actually come from? Our researches eventually led us to the Fleet Street News Agency, which circulated the story on 27 February. Its then editor, Leif Kalfayan, who was shortly to move on to the Mail, admitted that his recollection of the story’s origin was poor, but insisted that it had come from the Hackney Gazette. However, our own researches show that the paper had never run the story, and when we raised the matter with its local government correspondent, Tim Cooper, he vehemently rejected Kalfayan’s claim and insisted that the story had originated from the agency.
Whatever the case, it’s important to note that the source which was used by both the Standard and the Star to boost the credibility of the story was the deputy leader of Hackney Council, Jim Cannon. However, the quotation from Cannon by no means confirms the story, since nowhere does he state that the council has banned the use of the term ‘manhole’, simply remarking that: ‘I don’t see anything wrong in calling a manhole an access chamber’. Cannon told us that that he returned home one night at 1 a.m. to find a message asking him to ring a journalist ‘urgently’. When he did so, he was surprised to be asked how he would react if the council were to ban the use of the word manhole. He recalled saying that he thought the use of language a serious issue, adding that the journalist surely had more important issues to investigate. Now, anybody who has ever been interviewed by a journalist absolutely determined to elicit a quote which will fit the story they’ve already written (as well, of course, as suit their newspaper’s political line) will understand the difficult position in which Cannon found himself. However, it also needs to be borne in mind that he was relatively inexperienced in these matters, having only just been made deputy leader of Hackney, a borough in which there may well have been Labour supporters so ideologically pure that they did indeed believe that all language should be purged of any conceivable sexist or racist connotations. In these circumstances, Cannon may well have wondered if the word ‘manhole’ really had been banned, or perhaps he was unwilling to alienate any Labour purists by stating outright that if the council were to pass such a ban it would make itself a laughing stock. But, for whatever reason, he made the absolutely fatal error of answering a hypothetical question in such a guarded and equivocal manner that it enabled the journalist to stand up (after a fashion) the highly dubious story which they were clearly determined to publish.9
‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’: Hackney
The most well-known of all the ‘loony left’ myths is undoubtedly that of the alleged ‘ban’ on schoolchildren singing the nursery rhyme ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. This story first appeared under the by-line of Bill Akass in the Star (15 February 1986) with ‘Now its Baa Baa Blank Sheep’. According to Akass:
Toddlers have been ordered to stop singing Baa Baa Black Sheep … because it is racist. Staff at a nursery school in Hackney, London, claim the traditional nursery rhyme is offensive to blacks. At first they wanted the 30 children aged between one and three – only two of whom are black – to sing Baa Baa White Sheep instead. But now it has been banned altogether at Beavers Nursery in De Beauvoir Road. Leaders of Left-wing Hackney council welcomed the ban last night. A spokesman said: ‘We consider playgroups and nurseries should be discouraged from singing the rhyme. It reinforces a derogatory and subservient use of the word “black” among our youngsters in their formative years. This is particularly important because the majority of children in our nurseries come from black and ethnic minority communities’.
This view was contrasted with that of ‘one outraged mum’ who stated that ‘I think it’s bloody stupid. What will they do next?’
The Star story was taken up by Tim Cooper in the Hackney Gazette (18 February). Under the headline ‘Baa Baa banned’, with the strap ‘Councillors object to ancient rhyme being recited in nurseries’, this stated that ‘children in Hackney have been banned from reciting the nursery rhyme – because Labour councillors think it is racist’. It then goes on to quote the above council spokesman. However, what happens here is that the reaction of the council spokesman on being presented by Bill Akass with his original story has metamorphosed into the reason for the imposition of the alleged ‘ban’ in the first place. However, the story also contains a quote from one of the playleaders to the effect that ‘we’re run by parents and if they want us to stop singing it, we would. But there have been no complaints so far, though someone once suggested it could be racist’. In other words, no such ban had been imposed by the nursery school, as claimed by Akass, whatever impression may have been given by the Hackney spokesperson.
Entirely typically, the Sun simplified all of these ambiguities. Under the headline ‘Lefties baa black sheep’ (20 February) it asserted that ‘Loony leftwing councillors have banned children from reciting the nursery rhyme … because they claim it is racist. One nursery has even reacted by writing new words which begin Baa Baa White Sheep’. This version of the story duly appeared in the Irish paper the Sunday World (23 February), which also suggested some galumphingly unfunny new nursery rhyme possibilities, such as Senior Citizen MacDonald Had a Rural Collective, Old Socially Disadvantaged Single Parent Hubbard Went to the Cupboard and other such would-be witticisms.
The story received further attention in the letters columns. In the Hackney Gazette (28 February) a correspondent suggested a new version of the rhyme: ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep, censored by a fool. Yes sir – yes sir, another sheepish rule’. On 4 March the Gazette ran a contribution from another reader:
Some Labour, Militants and SWP are trying to create a racist problem where it does not exist … Stop this phoney antiracist campaign. Banning Baa Baa Black Sheep, black coffee, white coffee, etc. … is to reduce a noble battle for justice and equality for all races to a trivial pursuit in semantics.
The Gazette published yet another letter three days later, offering ‘Baa Baa Grey Sheep, have you any wool? Yes person, yes person, three containers full (bags is an offensive term for women)’. The Ilford Recorder, 6 March, featured a letter under the headline ‘Baa! Protest that has no rhyme or reason’, whose author exclaimed:
What about this latest nonsense in Hackney about children learning ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’? It’s as pathetic a complaint as wanting to remove from the marmalade pot the friendly golly kids love … What of the many white people whose surname is Black? … And some black people whose surname is White? … Will we be expected to feel odd when buying a ticket to – dare I say it – Blackfriars, or even Whitechapel?
Later, the story was even to appear as the subject of a spoof in Knitting International (4 April), drawing explicitly on the Sun’s report. This reported the activities of a ‘Campaign Regarding Equal Tonality in Natural Sheep’, under the headline ‘The white sheep of the family’.
The story thus enjoyed considerable and widespread, indeed global, coverage. But despite constant repetition, evidence was nowhere adduced to make the story stand up. Nor were those, journalists and letter writers alike, who repeated the story able to point to any solid, factual evidence which backed up their assertions. Only the black paper, The Voice, emphatically rejected the story and offered an explanation of its genesis and purpose. Under the headline ‘Hackney humbugged’, it argued that ‘the row over Hackney Council’s alleged banning of the nursery rhyme … is not so much a storm in a teacup as a deliberate attempt to discredit the work that the council does in increasing racial awareness’.
The actual facts of the story are as follows. When Bill Akass discovered what he alleged to be a ban at Beavers Nursery on ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, he rang Hackney press office in order to find out the
council’s view on the matter, even though the nursery was run by the parents, and not by the council (as Akass’ story could be read as implying). Furthermore, as can actually be judged from the Hackney Gazette article, there was never any ban on ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ at the nursery; instead, and for reasons quite unconnected with racism, ‘Baa Baa White Sheep’ had occasionally been sung simply as an alternative version of the rhyme, and with numerous other lines changed for humorous effect. Martin Bostock, at that time press officer for the council, takes up the story:
It was possible for the council to say: ‘We don’t know what this nursery is doing, but whatever they’re doing it’s up to them’. This was the advice we took to the then leader of the council [Tony Millwood]. I had a long discussion with him. He, however, wanted to take a bullish attitude and show support for the alleged ban at Beavers. And, between us we arrived eventually at a statement saying that we supported what they’d done, although making it quite clear that it was not a council nursery and not a council ban.
From here, of course, it was but a short step for Tim Cooper of the Hackney Gazette to visit Beavers and ask parents for their reaction to Hackney council’s apparent support for the alleged ban; indeed, as Cooper himself said to us:
I think [the council] really shot themselves in the foot. I think they issued the statement because they, or the council leader at the time, believed the ban was in force and tried to justify it. I think they were wrong. There was no ban in the first place. By issuing the statement they virtually created the story, which obviously snowballed from there.
And, in many respects, Martin Bostock agrees:
The council allowed itself to be led by the nose into the story in the first place … We allowed ourselves to be drawn in and comment on it. We didn’t have to, but we did. However, I think that the newspapers concerned were guilty of turning our support for the alleged ban into a council ban. We were accused of instituting a ban, but, however naïve we may have been as a council, and I think we were over this one, we did not ever say that we had banned or wanted to ban the rhyme.
Thus, the genesis of this story has a great deal in common with that about manholes analysed above, and can be explained not only in terms of certain newspapers’ news values and ideological/political positions, but also of a certain ideological rigour and rectitude on the part of certain council representatives themselves. To quote Bostock again:
There was a tendency to compound what were in my opinion undoubtedly conspiracies by some journalists to create these stories. We, the Labour councils, I’m afraid to some extent compounded that by being more than happy to jump in and comment and add our voices to things that had not been properly checked out. And that we had no need to comment on at all. A story can be quite easily fabricated in that way. Someone denying something immediately becomes a story instead of just having nothing to do with it.
On the other hand, one really does have to consider why on earth such minor parochial matters in certain London boroughs should be considered newsworthy by national newspapers in the first place
‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’: Haringey
However, this episode in Hackney was only the beginning. According to Anthony Doran, writing in the Mail (9 October 1986), under the headline ‘Baa Baa, Green (yes green) Sheep!’, Haringey Council had ordered playgroup leaders to attend a racism awareness course, on pain of grant withdrawal if they refused, at which they were instructed that the council had banned the rhyme as racist. In future, children would have to sing ‘green’ sheep instead. An anonymous playgroup leader is credited with the story. Parents, teachers and Kenneth Baker at the Tory conference in Bournemouth, were quoted as condemning the alleged ban.
The story appeared the same day in the Birmingham Evening Mail, where it featured twice, under the headlines ‘Silly bleat’ and ‘Green sheep? They’ve got to be joking’. In the latter, a local race relations leader is called upon and denounces the alleged ban as ‘ridiculous’ and as raising ‘a great danger of turning the whole subject into a joke’. The story also appeared in the Liverpool Echo (‘Black sheep in the dog house’) and the Yorkshire Evening Press (‘So sheepish’), which advised its readers to ‘enjoy laughing at this potty behaviour. But let’s not be too carried away with hilarity. It’s funny, yes. But is it not also sinister?’ The Birmingham Post (10 October) followed suit with ‘Racist sheep are a joke’, an article in which local parents were quoted as deriding the ‘ban’.
The Sunday People (12 October) likewise reported on the ‘ban’ and the ‘compulsory course’, commenting that: ‘With loonies like this running the schools, the future for education in Haringey looks extremely black. Sorry. Extremely green’. The same day’s News of the World announced a ‘Green sheep take over’ in an article which began with the words: ‘Labour has promised to step up the numbers of coloured immigrants. That’s a mistake’. Following this introduction, the ‘green sheep’ story is reported, along with the aside: ‘But what if it turns out Martians are green?’ A Tory MP in Birmingham lamented in the Sunday Mercury that ‘it makes you weep that loonies get elected to councils’. Carlisle’s Evening News and Star (13 October) ran the story beneath ‘Bernie bleat barmy’, claiming that the alleged ban ‘will probably cause a storm of protest on Mars’. The Yorkshire Evening Courier (14 October) also carried the story, warning: ‘But it is no joke that parents must watch the thinking that has abnormal sexual quirks as acceptable and should be taught so in schools, that political indoctrination is part of their social studies’. The Liverpool Echo (15 October) returned to the story with ‘Just barmy’, whose author opined that ‘I’m surprised they haven’t also condemned it on grounds that to subject a sheep to intrusive personal questioning over whether it has any wool is an offence against animal rights’. The same day Ipswich’s Evening Star ran ‘A load of wollies!’
The facts of the story, which were never reproduced outside the black press, were that the racism awareness course had been requested by playgroup leaders in Haringey, that attendance was not compulsory and that the council had issued no such ban. There is no evidence that the rhyme was ever mentioned on the course. Haringey went to great lengths to counter the ‘green sheep’ allegations, initiating legal action against the Mail (which, as so often happens in such cases, it was forced to drop for financial reasons), and taking statements from fifteen people alleged to have been involved in the ‘ban’. What appears to have happened is that a number of playgroup workers who attended the course did not appreciate what they took to be some of its arguments about the racist connotations of everyday language. They then complained to the Mail, infamous for its vigilance for the merest hint of a ‘loony left’ story, that next they would probably be forced to stop children singing ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. In its sustained attempts to stand up the story, the Mail, as is its wont, phoned or door-stepped about twenty playgroup workers, one reporter claiming to be a Haringey parent looking to place a child in a playgroup which did not practice racism, and others posing as Marks and Spencer or Tesco managers wanting to put on racism awareness training courses. Most disobligingly, none confirmed the alleged ban on ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’.
The council’s considerable efforts to defend itself were ignored by the press for some time. In the Haringey Advertiser’s ‘Black sheep still in evidence’ (16 October), the council’s rebuttal made its first appearance in print. A council spokesperson was quoted as saying that ‘the frequency with which stories like this appear in the Mail seems to suggest that it is trying to discredit the council’. But the fiction had by now been uncritically reproduced across the entire country. That same day, it even appeared in a satirical piece in Men’s Wear, which pointed out the need to don ‘green ties’ for formal occasions. Three days later The Sunday Times (19 October), featured a letter beneath the headline ‘The blacking of Comrade Black Sheep’. Haringey was subjected to a mock critique for failing to realise that the rhyme ‘encapsulates the socialist principles at the heart of our caring, lov
ing society … Green sheep don’t exist. If they did they would probably live in a world far removed from our galaxy, probably called Haringey, whose cultural heritage would be rather different from ours’. Auberon Waugh, writing the same day in the Sunday Telegraph, used the ‘ban’ to demonstrate how, compared to the US, Britain is ‘pretty well a nation of loonie lefties’. Two days later a Times leader, ‘Exploiting race’, warned that ‘it is a common fallacy to suppose that what is funny must be harmless’.
The story cropped up yet again on 23 October in the Hendon Times under the headline ‘Stop stirring up trouble’. The Sunday Times (26 October) featured a letter headed ‘Colour bar’ which claimed: ‘It is clearly no longer permissible to black a job … To describe a certain skin affliction as blackheads is completely unacceptable’. That same day the Mail on Sunday featured a similar letter, which argued that an example had been set for ‘fellow lefties’ in the north, with Manchester now to be noted for its ‘Green Pudding’. On 30 October, the Mail returned to the ‘story’ with a leader drawing parallels between Haringey Council, the Spanish Inquisition and Nazi Germany. The Haringey playgroup leaders themselves issued a statement deriding this editorial in particular and pointing out the hypocrisy of the fact that the Mail itself had ardently supported Hitler right up until the outbreak of the Second World War. This statement attempted to set the record straight on ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, but was reproduced only in the black press (Asian Herald, 3 November; West Indian News, 5 November). Nothing daunted, however, the Economist (1 November) was perfectly happy to feature the story among the list of ‘loony sins’ that Tory Central Office could use to pin on the ‘ever-so-moderate Mr. Kinnock’.
‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’: Islington
On 20 February 1987, the story resurfaced in the staunchly anti-council Islington Gazette under the headline ‘Bye bye black sheep’, with the strap ‘Mum’s fury over ban on “racist” nursery rhyme’. Attention, this time, was focused on an angry mother’s removal of her handicapped son from an Islington council nursery because his teachers objected to his singing ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. The article quoted from the child’s report which stated that ‘we do not encourage the rhyme Baa Baa Black sheep because it has been identified as racially derogatory and is actively discouraged by Islington Council’. It then went on to give a good deal of space to the mother’s negative reaction to her son’s report, and the piece concluded with a council spokesperson stating that ‘it is not council policy to ban Baa Baa Black Sheep, but if individual nursery workers find it offensive the council is not in the business of forcing them to teach that rhyme rather than others’. It also added that ‘the council appointed an anti-racist adviser for the under-fives in 1985’.