Police investigating an alleged hate crime over the display of golly dolls in an Essex pub are to examine online messages by the pub’s landlord in which he apparently joked about Mississippi lynchings alongside an image of the racist dolls.
Christopher Ryley, the licensee of the White Hart Inn in Grays, Essex, regularly posts on Facebook to express far-right views and share content from anti-immigrant commentators such as Katie Hopkins.
In March 2016, in a Facebook post still online, Ryley uploaded a picture of golly dolls hanging from his bar with the comment “We have our golliwogs, yaay.” Commenting on the post his wife, Benice Ryley, asked: “Are you sure this is legal. lol.”
The landlord replied: “They used to hang them in Mississippi years ago.”
Essex police confiscated the golly dolls last week after receiving a complaint about an alleged crime.
The force has now confirmed that detectives conducting the investigation are aware of Ryley’s Facebook posts. It is understood the posts are being reviewed as part of the investigation.
Ryley is due to be interviewed by Essex police next month when he returns from the family’s holiday home in Marmaris, on the southern Turkish coast.
It is believed the investigation is focusing on establishing whether he intended to cause offence by displaying the dolls. One other possible line of inquiry is whether his posts flout the 1988 Malicious Communication Act.
Earlier this week, a source close to Suella Braverman suggested Essex police had been reprimanded by the home secretary. The police force denied this.
In 2018 Ryley was asked by his local council to explain the dolls in the pub’s bar but denied they were racist. Posting about that on Facebook, he said: “Today I’ve had a call from our council licencing dept because some ‘Snowflake’ has decided that they think they are racial. They have even gone to the police to complain that it could constitute ‘racial aggrevation’ I never invited this person in, if they are not happy, go elsewhere. Our customers bring these items in from their travels. We have a lot of ‘coloured customers’ who have never complained.”
In July last year he complained about the prospect of a Muslim prime minister, in an apparent mistaken reference to Rishi Sunak, who is a Hindu.
He said: “We now have the prospect of a Muslim PM, along with … other Muslim mayor’s throughout the UK. Don’t get me wrong, I choose to live in a Muslim country, here in Turkey. Did all the UK population agree to live under a Muslim regime? Muanmar Kadaffi said in 2008, we don’t need guns or bombs. We will simply out breed Europeans.”
In May 2021 Ryley complained about media coverage of the US police murder of George Floyd, writing: “Why are MSM dragging up George Floyd a year after he died? What about our own ppl who have died, Lee Rigby, why does he not get mentioned. Sorry, I forgot, he was white. That don’t count.”
In 2017, Ryley likened the C2C train line connecting Essex to central London to an image of an Indian railway engine with dozens of people clinging on outside. That year he also shared a photograph of activists from the far right group Generation Identity unfurl a banner that said “Stop Islamification” from London’s Westminster bridge.
On Tuesday, Benice Ryley denied the dolls were racist and has since replaced them. Christopher Ryley has been approached for comment.
Meanwhile, Chris Philp, the policing minister, speaking about the confiscated dolls, said it was “up to police to decide how they respond to incidents”. Asked on LBC why it took five police staff to remove the collection, Philp said: “I’m not going to answer yes or no because they’re operationally independent and it’s up to police to decide how they respond to incidents, not up to me to tell them what to do or to offer comments after the event.”
Sunder Katwala, the director of the integration thinktank British Future, said: “It is important that police can do their job. These Facebook posts are important because they suggest the intent of displaying the golliwogs is to depict a lynching, or hanging, which takes us into much stronger territory of harassment and racially aggravated hate crime than the impression some people have that they were just teddy bears and golliwogs sitting on a shelf.”
He added: “Saying this is just a joke is clearly intended to be quite aggressive and intimidatory. It isn’t the sort of joke that the council or the police should allow in a pub.”
• This article was amended on 13 April 2023 to rename the dolls in line with style guidance.
