I was spurred into checking the context of the ‘blue rinse’ quote from Punch (which I found in the OED) by the unease I felt when I realised, belatedly, that the quote also included the word ‘coons’.
One of the perils of cut & paste – you do not necessarily pay the same attention as when copying out by hand.
I had assumed that the quote referred to a British election because we are now so used to blue rinse meaning elderly lady member of the Tory party, & also because Northern liberals (free trade, Non-conformist) are a recognisable English species too. But I do not remember coon being used in common parlance in 1960s England, even by those who intended to give offence.
A search of the Times Digital Archive for the years 1945 to 1970 produced 2289 hits for the word coon. However on closer examination most of these turned out to be misreadings of words such as soon, common, lagoon!
I found 4 definite uses of the word coon; 3 related to (already dated or defunct) music hall acts & 1 was a reprint of an article from 1847 which referred to a ‘gone coon’, which I think is much the same as a dead duck. There were large numbers of hits from the sports, especially the racing, pages which I did not check – most of them seem likely to be misreadings.
The OED told me something else I did not know before – the familiar abbreviation of racoon had been used from 1839 as a nickname for a member of the old Whig party of the United States, which at one time had the racoon as an emblem.
The OED of course also records its use as another derogatory racist term, but finds no English quotation more recent than from the Westminster Gazette of 1903: "possibly ‘coon’ is not the right word, which, however, is accepted here as modern slang for a nigger."
None that is, except for a quotation from a 1969 edition of Oz, which need not detain us
