You don’t normally think of children’s literature as taking sides in the struggle between capitalism and communism. But Rev. W. Awdry, (known as the “Puff-Puff Pastor” [I kid you not]) the English country vicar who created the Thomas the Tank Engine series for his children many decades ago apparently did.
If you have young children as I do, then chances are yours have fallen for Thomas and his railway mates as mine have.
We’ve tried to keep the Thomas mania within limits but we still manage to have the Thomas the Tank Engine: the Complete Collection, a few other smaller Thomas books, two Thomas videos and numerous Thomas train cars. Luckily, my son has discovered far better children’s entertainment like Peter Pan, Mary Poppins and the Wizard of Oz. But there was a time a year ago or so when Thomas was on the telly just about every day.
I found the videos narrated by George Carlin to be pretty insufferable (how miscast can he be attempting to sound like antique English railway engines?). The stories in the Thomas books were also odd. Awdry seems to have built up an imaginary class system even within a group of imaginary railroad engines and carriages replete with petty bickering and jealousy, competition for status and position, and just plain nasty behavior. I find all of this pretty suspect as wholesome children’s entertainment. But who am I to be the arbiter of what children like? What do I know? I hate the Wiggles too but it hasn’t seemed to hurt their careers much.
All this is leading up to perhaps the strangest Thomas story of all: Bulgy the Bolshevik (copyright Reed Internation Books Ltd. 1996). Bulgy (sounds like “Bolshy”) is a “huge red [get it?] bus” whom none of the other trains seem to have ever seen before. Bulgy’s first words to Duck are:
“Pah! Enjoyment’s all you engines live for. taking the petrol from the tanks of us workers. Come the Revolution, railways’ll be ripped up. Cars ‘nd coaches’ll trample their remains.
“Free the roads, he growled. “Free the road from Railway Tyranny!”
Who’d have thought that Thomas and his friends would unmask the Bolshevik conspiracy to take over English mass transit??!
Bulgy promptly plots to steal the railway’s passengers for his own nefarious purposes (“Look at Bulgy! He’s a mean Scarlet Deceiver!”). By displaying a false Railway Bus destination sign, he inveigles passengers to hop aboard. Then he promises to take them on a short cut to get to their destination before the trains. But he only manages to get himself wedged under a bridge from which he cannot extricate himself. The passengers come to understand Bulgy’s deception: “He tricked us, they complained. “He said he was a railway bus, but wouldn’t accept our return tickets. He wanted us to think railways are no good.”
Bulgy’s crime in the eyes of the railway cars: telling “whoppers.”
But he never learnt sense. He told “whoppers” till no one could believe his destination boards and no passengers would travel in him.
He is a henhouse now in a field beside the railway. If he still tells “whoppers” they can do no harm. The hens never listen to them anyway!
Imagine if Ronald Reagan had only known that Thomas and his friends had prophesied the irrelevance and fall of modern Communism (“he’s a hen house now in a field beside the railway”) in a children’s story so many decades before he did!
See Gender, Race and Class in the Writings of the Rev W Awdry for a rather odd and totally off-base defense of Awdry’s social attitudes.
