Happy birthday Sindy!

 September 6th (apparently) marks Sindy's 60th birthday, so obviously as a big Sindy fan I had to mark the occassion somehow. 

Especially considering pedigree themselves can't be trusted to do anything. 

For instance, for Sindy's 50th Pedigree made a big song and dance about how there were "exciting things" coming. We got some cute artwork and a website teasing said artwork, but nothing else. In fact, all Pedigree DID do was release some bedspreads and calendars.... in Turkey.

So forgive me if i'm not optimistic this time will be any different. 

But let's not let saltiness put a damper on our girl's celebration. 

I decided to get my dolls out and do a little time line/retrospective sort of thing, and in the process figure out precisely which dolls i'm missing from my collection so I can have a nice strict wishlist. (how long do you think that'll last? HAH) 

this is gonna take a while... we have got 60 years to get through after all. 

 

Tammy, Sindy's inspiration:

So in the beginning there was a doll named Tammy. "The doll you love to dress". She was made by Ideal, an American company. 

The story goes that Pedigree were looking at maybe licensing Barbie to distribute her in the UK, but before they entered into agreements with Mattel they did a survey of British mothers to see if there was a market. For whatever reason they gave them a selection of different dolls to pick from and the winner was Tammy who mother's preferred for her sweet girl next door appearance. So Pedigree went to Ideal and came to an agreement. They couldnt' use the name, but they could use the tagline. 

And thus Sindy was born. With an S for trademark reasons. 

 Isn't she sweet? 

Tammy is very difficult to find here in the UK. My girl came all the way from the US. 

Sindy and Tammy look very very alike. They have very similarly shaped bodies and very similarly shaped faces, but i've never been able to find any information either way about whether the deal with Ideal also included the molds or if they sculpted her using Tammy as a reference. 

I feel like Sindy has a slightly wider jaw so maybe the latter? 

Both dolls feature large side glancing eyes. Tammy's are grey, Sindy's are blue. Both have lovely red lips and came with different hair colours, much like Barbie did at the time. 

The Swinging 60s:

In the case of Sindy she came in chestnut as featured here, a yellow blonde and a very very dark almost black brown. 

Her hair tends to be a little dry after all these years and her lip colour tends to fade to a sickly orange or disappear almost completely. 

This girl is from 1963, commonly referred to as "made in England" or "MIE" Sindy because that's what her markings say. 

Her legs are hollow plastic, as is her body while her arms are a softer vinyl like her head. She has a tendency to lose fingers due to her widely splayed soft squishy hands. 

Sindy came wearing an outfit called "weekenders" which features a red white and blue striped jumper, blue jeans, white sneakers and a red elastic headband. 

Variations of this outfit exist as pedigree changed up their materials. The older style is a printed cotton fabric while later versions of the top the stripes are woven. Likewise her jeans have either printed on stitching or real stitching with the real yellow stitching being the older. 

Like a lot of old doll clothes, the button fastener on the jeans goes to the front, not the back, like a real human fly. This is something I have seen confuse a lot of people, because doll clothes from the late 70s onward tend to have fasteners exclusively at the back where they won't be seen. 60s and early 70s doll clothes however were constructed a lot more like human clothes. Some old Ken trousers even have working zippers! 

DO NOT wash this shirt. It runs... badly. 

Sindy was revealed to the world on September 6th, in a short tv advert. Our Sindy Museum in fact claims she was the first UK toy to be advertised on tv which is a pretty lofty achievement. She was a huge success for Pedigree who worked like hell to keep up with the demand, which may explain some of the iffy quality control I often joke about. 

I can't find a clear confirmation of how much she cost. One catalogue lists Weekender Sindy at 25/3, another at 24/11. The tv ad didn't help me at all. You can watch it here but be warned, that damn song is an ear worm. 

The Sindy Bazaar leaflet that Sindy came with lists her price at 22/6 so yeah... confusing. 

Now my "Old Money" isn't great, but I think that's shillings and pence. Why the hell British money is done so bizarrely back then i'll never understand. But post decimalization prices from the 1973 Argos catalogue list Sindy's RRP as £1:75. That was a fair bit of money back in the 60s and 70s, equating to somewhere between £20-30 in today's money. It's in a way, reassuring to see that the prices we pay nowadays aren't too different to what they were back then. 

And yet, despite the hefty price tag, Sindy sold very very well. 

I also love her description according to the leaflet she came with.

What does "free, swinging, grown-up girl" MEAN? 

Gotta love 60s slang. Or more specifically, old men trying to sound hip to the kids by using the slang of the time lol. 

"up-to-date as the morning". Oh god, I love it. 

in 1965 Pedigree changed things up by giving Sindy rubbery limbs with wires inside so she could pose. It... kinda works. But it does put a lot of stress on the soft vinyl and it doesn't look all that natural. 

She also came wearing Weekenders, and any differences in face really comes down to the hand painted nature of these dolls. One of the things I really love about old dolls is how you can see the brush strokes, particularly in their eyebrows and lashes. That obvious human touch just really appeals to me, but it also results in a lot of variation. No two Sindy dolls from this era look exactly alike and I enjoy that a lot. 

Tammy sadly ceased production in 1966, unable to compete in the competitive Barbie dominated US market.

Sindy however, had become the best selling doll in the UK and was only getting stronger. 

 

 

While Tammy's run had ended, 1966 saw another new Sindy. 

This is "Made in Hong Kong" or "MIHK" Sindy. Pedigree had shifted production away from the UK and to Hong Kong like many companies at the time. Cheaper labour and easier access to things like the fabric markets and such were likely a large motivator. 

Hong Kong Sindy has more hair than the previous dolls, a large bubble cut that falls around her face like a halo. 

like the previous dolls she came in the three hair colours. Her limbs bend like 65 Sindy's and she generally uses the same body shape including those large splayed hands. 

For some reason the MIHK dolls are harder to find than the MIE ones, but I don't know why. Certainly they're more expensive and as a result I only have the one. 

However, 

that move to the Hong Kong factory was not, it appears, without some teething issues. 

These are "Mini" Sindys, so named because well... yeah... 

the story goes (and take it with a pinch of salt because I don't know the veracity of it) that the new factory got their mixture wrong which resulted in the soft vinyl parts shrinking more than expected. They also went rock hard as they shrunk, something that also, incidentally, happens to "acetone shrunk" doll heads which is a big reason why this all sounds very plausible to me. Vinyl goes hard as it shrinks, the more it shrinks, the harder it gets and mini Sindys have heads like ROCKS as well as arms and legs that are similarly shriveled and cement-like. It's likely these mini dolls were made with a mix that had too little plasticiser (which is what makes the plastic squishy and soft) in it and that's why they shrank too much.

Of course, to prove this we'd need to actually experiment with vinyl mixes. I'd love to see someone who had the materials do it though, if nothing else to see how quickly the stuff shrinks and hardens up.

The torsos are made of hard injection molded plastic, and so remain unaffected by this screw up. As you can see here, the bodies are the same, but all the limbs and the head are significantly smaller. 

This also means none of the parts fit their sockets. The legs and arms have gaps and the head wobbles in its seating. 

However, one side effect of this is that these dolls have incredibly bright faces and their paint tends to remain far more intact than their squishy headed sisters. They are very very pretty.

Now of course, Pedigree were left with a batch of dolls that were all wrong and didn't fit any of the clothes they had ready for them. So what were they to do? 

why, alter the clothes to be smaller, that's what! Or you know... just stick her in clothes too big and hope nobody notices. They did that too.

I've never seen a boxed Mini, so i'm not sure if they also managed to make teensy shoes but I do know that standard Sindy shoes do NOT fit her dinky little feet. 

Curiously, mini Sindy comes in two variations. The MIE style with the shorter bob and MIHK with the puffy bubble cut.

I don't know why this is. 

The Hong Kong ones are more common, presumably because they're the ones that they were SUPPOSED to be making. I wonder if the few MIE ones i've seen over the years were some sort of transitional doll as they moved over to the Hong Kong factories. 

Whatever the case, Mini Sindys are one of the many oddities we got from Pedigree. 

And the weirdness only gets more inexplicable. 

 

(*insert photos here*)

 

Pedigree had a tendency to use up old stock, which results in a fair few "frankensteined" dolls who use parts from previous years. Usually though, they at least MATCH right and left limbs.

But I suppose sometimes you just want to clock off early and have stopped giving a fuck.

Now I know what some of you are thinking. "How can you be sure she came like this?" and the truth is, I can't. But having recently attempted to replace a Sindy leg, I can tell you that doing so without damaging the torso is really difficult and even when these dolls were new and not as brittle, I don't think you could do it without a lot of know how and having the knack. I doubt many parents had "the knack" and any collector I seriously doubt would select limbs that are SO mismatched. 

it's quite possible that this girl didn't look as strange when she was boxed up. We don't know how long the shrinkage of the vinyl parts took to happen after all. There's every chance that these limbs looked about the same size when they were attached and the several decades have made the shrinkage more obvious. 

Which is also true of the mini sindys but my counter to the theory that they looked normal when they left the factory is their face paint. Look again at the photos of mini compared to regular Sindy, her head is about half the size. Now, if you painted that head like normal and then it shrank you'd expect to see that impact the paint, either causing it to peel or wrinkle or if nothing else, no longer fitting the sculpt surely? But the paint on the minis is PERFECT. Which makes me think the shrinkage happened early enough in the production line that by the time they got to painting and dressing (also remember some minis have altered clothing to fit them, with thread that matches the factory thread exactly suggesting it was done by them and not a parent at a later date) they'd already shrunk. 

it's possible that when they were put together they weren't and the shrinkage happened at some point as they went through the different stations but while mini Sindy at least generally has matching limbs and at least LOOKS fairly normal (beyond her seriously wobbly head), FrankenSindy doesn't. 

so did she really leave the factory like this? Did they notice? Why was she never returned as defective? If this was done later in her life, WHY?

We'll never know this particular doll's story, but honestly I love her anyway. My poor asymmetrical girl. 

One day i'll make her a wedge/platform shoe so she can actually stand up. 

As the 60s drew to a close we saw one more change to Sindy, and this was a big one. 1968 saw the release of "New Look Sindy", often referred to as "side part Sindy" due to her hairstyle.

This girl had a very similar face but now included rooted (actually just a strip slotted into a slit) spiky lashes (which tend to fall out because they're not actually secured in the slits very well) and longer hair rooted in a "flip" style. 

These dolls tend to suffer the worst for wooly hair. The longer style is far less forgiving than the bobs of the earlier dolls for a start, but Pedigree also appear to have changed what they were using for the hair. This stuff ends up brittle, dry and frizzy. 

Compare her to MIHK's hair which is still shiny and fairly smooth. Poor Side Part has hair like cotton wool.

Sindy also got a new body. The arms and legs look about the same, but she has a new torso with a waist joint. Her new torso also features a more cinched in waist than previously, giving her a more wasp-like figure. 

She came in several different hair colours just like previous versions. We had a yellow blonde, a chestnut (auburn) shade and a dark near black but now also got platinum blonde too. 

In fact, quite a lot of these dolls appear to be platinum blonde. I've seen more in this colour over the years than any other. 

We got a platinum blonde "hong kong" girl the year before, the very rare and hard to find doll referred to by collectors as "Marilyn" because her short white blonde hair is reminiscent of the actress. Like "new look" sindy, she also suffers from wooly frizz. She's also prone to fading, her face often turning white. Oh dear. 

1968 catalogue. Special thanks to TLSM for this archive of old pamphlets

"New Look" Sindy was sold in one of four outfits. I've seen three of these but I don't know that i've ever seen "Beach time girl". 

Image source unknown. From BBC article

 

I always liked that purple dress.

She also came with a charm bracelet. You could get extra charms via mail aways or with some of Sindy's friends (which were often also mail away deals). Sindy often is seen wearing this bracelet like a necklace as it's quite small, being designed for a young child's wrist and all. 

This particular catalogue above is curious because it lists Sindy as being manufactured by "rovex industries" rather than Pedigree. Looking into it, Rovex was, by the sounds of it, another part of Line Brothers, the parent company of Pedigree. "Rovex" were their plastics manufacturer. I wonder why they cited Rovex rather than Pedigree. Very odd.

1970 saw a minor change for Sindy. Her hair parting moved to a center part.

She's otherwise identical to the 1968 "Side part". 

As is the case with all these old girls, there's a lot of variation in limbs. Some have bending limbs, some don't. Sometimes they'll have one wired limb and one not. Pedigree didn't seem to really pay that much attention there. Lol. 

Because these girls are a little slimmer in the waist than the previous girls they can fit into later Sindy fashions a lot better. Centerpart here for example is wearing a dress from 1978 which is a little tight in the arms but otherwise fine. 

on the flip side, some of the trousers and skirts from the earlier dolls can be a little ill fitting in the waist on "new look" Sindy.

in just 7 years Sindy has seen several changes and refinements. As well as dolls Pedigree had also pushed out a lot of fashion packs ranging from deluxe sets with accessories, budget mix and match pieces, shoe packs and even house work sets with aprons and cleaning supplies. 

She also got her very own car, a very swish red convertible as well as a huge amount of furniture.

She had a horse, she had a moped, she even had her own record. As in, a real album with music on it by Cliff Warwick and the Dollybeats. You can listen to this here. The old radio accent, oh my god. The actual song itself. I am dying. 

I'm not convinced Cliff Warwick is actually a real person either. But who the hell knows. I can't find any info on the artists behind this promotional stuff so um. Certainly Pedigree pumped quite a bit of money into promotion for the first few years and it's a shame the actual real artists didn't get credit. I suppose that's how it goes though.

Moving on from that madness.... (like seriously, WHY? Why a record? Why an audio drama? I'm so confused! In fact, isn't this the same song from the ad? Different lyrics but.... I think i'm going mad.)

Sindy had a piano, a tent, a bathtub and shower, though she'd have to wait til 1976 for a toilet. 

TLSM has a fantastic collection of vintage Sindy catalogue images to browse. 

But I have to share this one

What the fuck is she bathing IN? Slime? Gatorade? Nuclear waste? 

also, how did she get her dressing gown BEHIND the tub? 

What are you doing girl!? 

This image is just... there's so much to unpack here. 

The bathmat that's half IN the Gatorade, the arm that's defying the wall's existence, the dressing gown behind the bath, the random alcove, the lack of taps, the floating coat hanger, the non euclidean angles of the room itself, the inexplicable chunk of tile behind her head that seems to serve zero purpose, how SMALL the tub is compared to her, her slenderman proportions, the slime itself.... 

I think I might love this image. It's terrible and I can't stop looking at it and finding more wrong. 

It's wonderful.

1963 - 1970

Closing out the decade Sindy had cemented herself as the best selling doll in the UK. 

She had been given several friends and family members as well, but few of them survived into the 70s when Sindy struck out solo.

We'll move on to the 70s next time. As I said, there's a lot to cover and i'm not the expert. I'll share photos, any interesting stuff I find and of course all important links for your enjoyment (there's at least one more record, fair warning bwhahahaha). 

For now, Happy 60th Birthday Sindy.