These two little dolls are Daisy on the left and Scarlet on the right. They are the sole survivors of a dozen dolls that Naomi and I had in 1965. They are about 3 inches tall and their limbs and head are strung with rubber bands. They were, of course, made in Hong Kong where most cheap toys came from at the time.
As you can see they are not in the best shape but considering that they were involved in some quite rough play it is incredible that such fragile little dolls survived at all. I can’t imagine that children under eight years old would be given dolls like this today. I don’t know if that is a good thing or not.
Originally the girls had glued on fabric outfits consisting of a strapless top and a skirt, each doll in the set had a different colour scheme. Daisy had a yellow skirt and white top, Scarlet also had a yellow skirt but more of a lemon shade than Daisy’s, her top was a red print design and is where she got her name. She quickly became my favourite and had many adventures including sailing on my toy boat in the wading pool. Needless to say, many soakings loosened the glue and she lost her clothes, Daisy’s eventually went the same way. The dolls often lost limbs due to broken rubber bands but mum could always fix that problem. I mended both of them again when I retrieved them from storage. If you were not careful though their legs would snap at the ankle and sometimes their eyes fell in and had to be glued back making them incapable of sleep.
The red ring around Daisy’s neck is nail polish. When her head came off while we were sailing to Australia and the little hook broke mum borrowed our cabin mate’s nail polish to stick it back on again. Scarlet has a broken neck too but hers was repaired with Tarzan’s Grip, mum’s favourite glue for repairing things. Her shoulder has been repaired with the same product. I have no idea how Daisy got the yellow mark on her head.
Before we had this set of dolls I had a set of similar ones who wore plastic outfits. These were more durable but the poor dolls could not sit down. Naomi found a replacement set of these for me.
Dolls, Dolls, Dolls 
I used to collect old tin dollhouses. I had half a dozen at one time, but they took up a lot of room and I wound up selling them. I still have the one we built, but never finished in the attic. I always found it weird that the dolls never fit the furniture.
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Those tin litho dolls houses did have nice graphics but they were not too fussy about scales. Some of ours are in 1:16 scale which was a common play scale when we were children but we had some 1:24 scale furniture too. I think that it was felt that it didn’t matter too much for children’s toys. 1:12 is the most common scale these days for people who build dolls houses. We used to find it weird that in our toy farm set the ducks and chickens were often as big as the cows.
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Marx a maker of tin litho houses used to supply little plastic people in various positions for their houses. Mine were full of little plastic babies.
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My sister probably was the one who owned the doll like this that we had,but I still have her. She was sort of a cross between the two types you had. She was about 6″ tall and could sit, but she came with the plastic clothes.
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I think I remember seeing larger ones of these. My plastic skirt ones can sit but not while wearing the skirt.
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I remember these little dolls too. I used to get a small ten cent doll in the dime store as a child and got many baby dolls in cribs and potty chairs and wrapped in blankets made similar to these. I believe I only had one adult doll, like yours, so she ended up with many children!
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We had numerous babies too. Pink ones, black ones but also red and green ones. A real multicultural society.
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I tot lots of smiles and chuckles from your post. It sounds like Daisy and Scarlet gave you numerous opportunities to play doctor. Isn’t it amazing how simple dolls can provide so much imaginative play value.
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That should be “I got ….” 😦
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I think mine are four inches w/ plastic skirt and bra. Havent tried to make them sit as I fear the skirts might not go back on.skirts pink and violet.
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The skirts on mine have a little plastic button clip but wth dolls so old the plastic might be brittle and break if you tried to undo them so you’d have to decide if you want to redress them in something else.
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