Doll-A-Day 2017 #6 Aunt Sally from Worzel Gummidge by Pedigree

  Today's doll is Aunt Sally by Pedigree.

Aunt Sally is approximately 19" tall. She has a soft vinyl head and a soft stuffed body and limbs.

Her dress is a one piece dress/apron combo. Her shoes are part of her legs. Her clothes and bonnet are removable though.

 Her hair is fairly thinly rooted. I think it was originally in a bun or some sort or something. If it were done that way the thinness wouldn't be as noticeable.

 Aunt Sally was a character in the "Worzel Gummidge" children's books and TV series. 'Worzel Gummidge' was the first book in a series that eventually ran to 10 books.

The books were written by Barbara Euphan Todd, and the first was published in 1936. Today's doll,Aunt Sally, was made in the early 1980's, to coincide with the TV series "Worzel Gummidge".

An Aunt Sally in her original box.

'Worzel' was a live scarecrow,made by a mysterious man known only as 'The Crow Man'. He was also loads of trouble. The Crowman was constantly having to get Worzel out of trouble, and send him back to the field to do his scarecrow duties. Some of the threats he threw at Worzel if he didn't behave were pretty horrifying,such as throwing Worzel on the compost heap, burning him, or making it so that he couldn't come alive any more!Pretty rough stuff for a kids' series!
An 'Aunt Sally' was originally an ugly wooden head on a stick used in a fairground game.

There's a link to this site below. Go there for an explanation of the Aunt Sally game.

 The description of the game and it's origins is pretty long and detailed, so I am going to direct you HERE and HERE  if you want the full story. I'll just say that the head had a clay pipe in it's mouth,(and later in holes in it's ears and nose.), and the object of the game was to knock the pipes out. Later 'Aunt Sally' became a dressed wooden figure. Then 'Aunt Sally' was simplified to just a blank piece of wood. After being quite a popular, if localized game,(Centered around Oxford,England.), the game of Aunt Sally eventually went out of favour.
 In "Worzel Gummidge" the character of Aunt Sally was a wooden fairground Aunt Sally doll who could come alive.

Aunt Sally as she appeared in her wooden form.

 

 The doll resembles the wooden Aunt Sally more than the live one.

Not bad likeness to Una Stubbs either though.

 She was both Worzel's love interest, (His opinion.) and nemesis,(Her opinion.). (In the books she is a minor character and Worzel is not in love with her, being married to someone else.)
  We know about Worzel Gummidge in our house because Ken,who had watched the show when he lived in England, introduced the show to Ivy when she was small, and she loved it. We ended up with the entire original series, the later New Zealand series "Worzel Downunder", and a Christmas special on DVD. So owning the doll is a connection to Ken's life in England, and Ivy's childhood.
  The series starred Jon Pertwee as Worzel,and Una Stubbs as Aunt Sally.

Other than the print, I think they captured the dress pretty well. The thing is, the real fabric design is very simple and would have been easy to recreate. I guess they didn't want to have to make their own fabric and used something readily available.

If Jon Pertwee is familiar, it's because before being Worzel, he was the third doctor in Doctor Who, from 1970 to 1974.

Jon Pertwee,(top) as the third Doctor,pops out of the Tardis with Patrick Troughton as the second Doctor.

Una Stubbs may be even more familiar,as she is currently appearing as Mrs. Hudson on "Sherlock".

  There were some great toys produced to go along with the Worzel series,including two sizes of the Worzel and Aunt Sally dolls like mine, small figures and 12" dolls. Worzel had different heads for different things: his thinking head, his reading head, his maths head,etc. The 12" dolls of Worzel and Aunt Sally, and the small figure had several heads which could be changed.

Unfortunately the doll and heads are made of foam, and haven't survived the years very well in most cases.

Aunt Sally was able to come alive, at which point she was Una Stubbs. When she was made of wood she was played by a wooden dummy. The 12" Aunt Sally doll had a couple of extra heads too. One is the wooden head, and the other I'm not sure about.  Ivy says it's for sleeping.

The one on the right is her wooden head.

 As i said,I think they did a great job of recreating the costume on my Aunt Sally doll.

  The doll's hat is woven plastic instead of straw, but still looks convincing and is much more durable that way.

Some of you may remember seeing Aunt Sally before.

 That's because she had a narrow escape a few years ago when our basement flooded. I thought I had managed to rescue everything that got wet, but a few days later Fuzzy found a box buried under some things in the back of the basement. In it was Aunt Sally. She was soaked, but I washed her and hung her out to dry in the hot sun. She turned out just fine. You can read about the ordeal HERE.
  One more day of cloth dolls and we'll be into a week of fashion dolls. See you tomorrow!

Every time it rains it rains...in my basement

                                                                                                                                         
  It has been an exhausting couple of weeks. I have The Neighbors From Hell and they have been living up to the name lately.I won't go into detail, but they are taking years off my life.In addition, it has rained every day for almost three weeks. Seriously. Every day. I was about to start building an ark and taking in two of everything (except Demon Neighbors.) After so much rain the ground decided it couldn't drink another drop and started storing it in my basement instead.
  Tuesday morning there was a little water on the basement floor in one room. It was nearly all gone by Tuesday night. Ivy, my thirteen year old, and I were going to get our baths and play some games and watch tv. Around 8:00 I was about to take my shower when I decided to check on the basement one more time. When I went down I screamed. There were two inches of water on the floor and water was pouring in the old chimney flue. I started grabbing things up, trying to save them from the rising water. I had everything up off the floor, which gets damp even at the best of times, but as the water rose it just wasn't high enough. I called Ivy down and we were rescuing everything we could. At some point Fuzzy, my 18 year old, came home and we were all schlepping stuff upstairs. The water was still rising and I was literally rescuing things just before they were engulfed by water. One example is a Victorian velvet and celluloid photo album, with photos, which I grabbed up just as the box filled with water. It survived untouched, luckily.

  Eventually the water was nearly up to my knees, which, ok, that's not that high, but it was high enough that entire tubs, with other tubs on top of them, (So you'd think the weight would hold them down.) were FLOATING.I know one of the kids showed me a box of wooden dollhouse furniture that was taken somewhere to be dried out later, and I have no idea where it went. I only hope it wasn't the box with the vintage wood dollhouse living room set with velvet cushions that my husband paid more than he should have for me at an auction recently.
  The next day we were clearing out some of the wet things we hadn't saved or noticed the night before, and Fuzz found a Pedigree Aunt Sally from Worzel Gummidge, soaking wet, under some things in the back corner of the basement. By now she has been totally dried out and survived her ordeal unscathed.

 

                                             Aunt Sally is relieved that it's all over.
  Ken grew up watching Worzel Gummidge in England and passed his love of it on to Ivy, who owns the whole series on DVD, so it's nice to have Aunt Sally around.
   This array of international ladies all got wet to varying degrees, with Miss India fairing the worst. All are dry now and don't seem to have suffered any lasting damage.

 

  On top of everything else, the pilot light was washed out on the water heater and couldn't be relit. We managed on what was in the tank at 1:00 in the morning when we were finished and the water had started to recede. Ken spent most of the next day drying out the pilot with a hair drier and trying to relight it. It was just too soaked though, so Ken and I took icy showers, while Ivy resorted to a bathtub filled by pans of water heated on the stove. Yesterday a fan on the pilot most of the day finally got it dried out enough that it let itself be relit and we had hot water once again.
  We were able to save almost everything, and what we couldn't save from getting wet we have mostly been able to dry out by now. I suppose we were pretty lucky. I had recently cleared up the basement and had already rescued my father's box of photographs and had gotten things up off the floor, or it would have been much worse. And we were lucky of course that it was only a slight basement flood, and we didn't lose our whole house, which has happened to alot of people all over the world lately. Our town was built on a swamp, so just living here is asking for it anyway. Nature keeps trying to revert it back to a swamp. It hasn't rained for a couple of days now, so maybe the ground will have a chance to dry out and go back to being absorbent again!