Cheer for Fear: Billy Langsworthy and Deej Johnson discuss I.D.I.O.T. winner David Fear

So Deej – here we are again! We’re discussing another I.D.I.O.T. winner that’s not yet done an interview: David Fear. But it’s not that we can’t find him?
No, quite so. I’ve been in touch with David. He hopes to do an interview at some point – just not now… But of course, we do want something on the site in time for the Inventors Dinner’s 40th anniversary…

Perfect. To give people a sense of what David Fear is all about, what’s he like?
Interesting place to start! You know, I quite like something Pete Kellond said about David… That – when it came to toy invention – David was the most passionate man he’d met. They worked together at Hasbro where David would smoke his pipe thoughtfully throughout every meeting. Worth remembering, Bill, that people used to be able to smoke at work… Pipes, cigarettes, cigars… Kippers sometimes!

Ha! These are creative people!
Pete describes David as a “quiet gentleman” but says his whole demeanour would change when he saw a toy he liked! He’d laugh and get tremendously excited. Consequently, he’d fight hard to keep items he liked. He’d also get very passionate if it looked like an item was going to be dropped for a disagreeable reason… A lack of attention, or something that didn’t make sense. And, interestingly, Ben Rathbone also used the word “gentleman” to describe David – adding that he has a great sense of humour.

Ben Rathbone worked with him at Hasbro?
Right! Apparently, David introduced Ben to “the wonderful world of Inventor Relations”. Ben says he still looks back at that time “with many fond memories of working with some of the greatest inventors of the time.” In fact, he goes a bit further than that… Ben credits David with teaching him how to be a great partner to the inventor community and how to be their advocates to the company they represented. So David was clearly a huge influence on Ben.

So David was at Hasbro with Pete and Ben – both fellow I.D.I.O.T. Award winners, so people can read interviews with them here and here… Where else did David work?
He was also at Bluebird and Tinker Toys. Perhaps most memorably, though, he was a product manager at Pedigree Dolls and Toys back in the sixties and seventies. Now, dolls are very much not my area, Bill, nor yours… And I don’t think Adam Butler has much to say about them either! That being the case, I’m going to draw on some of David’s friends and other resources to discuss this! First, an interview that David did a number of years ago in 12S magazine…

12S? What is that?
12S was a Sindy fanzine. 12S stands, I believe, for the size of the doll and its name: 12 inches; S for Sindy. And 12S, issue six, written and edited by Thom and Hilary Sewell in 2002, had a really in-depth interview with David Fear. I’m delighted to say Hilary’s given us permission to reproduce the article – it’s absolute gold! You can read see it in full here.

And actually, their headline was ‘Without Fear’ which is wonderfully ironic! But this is relevant because David contributed immeasurably to the development of Sindy. Sindy – for the benefit of younger and overseas readers— was the British Barbie. Or rather, she wasn’t! So for this, we need to go to the early 1960s when Lines Brothers was still a huge force in the toy industry…

That was one of the parent companies of Pedigree Dolls and Toys… Tri-ang Toys?
Right – John Reynolds talks about this in his I.D.I.O.T. interview here. As well as dolls, Lines Brothers made pushchairs, prams, rocking horses, go-karts… They owned Scalextric, Dinky Toys, Hornby, Meccano… Huge brands! They also owned the London toy shop Hamleys for a time.

I know Lines Brothers was run by three brothers in the Lines family – and that’s how Tri-ang got its name… Three Lines made a triangle.
Absolutely right! And in the early sixties, one of the directors – Alan Cathcart –was offered Barbie for the UK… But they had cold feet about it. So instead of jumping all in, they did some market research, which was unusual at the time…

What it showed was that English girls didn’t care for Barbie. They liked the idea of a fashion doll, but not what David described as the frilly, “full-busted, sugar-and-spice” Barbie. She was too American, basically. British girls couldn’t relate to her. So Pedigree set about designing a doll that would appeal to the UK market – one with what you might call a girl-next-door look.

More wholesome?
More wholesome, less severe; a larger, rounder face… And these wide, sideways-glancing eyes. It’s those – this is my opinion, not David’s – that made her look much younger and less confident than Barbie. And in relation to the rest of the Pedigree line, the eyes were somewhat radical because I believe they were their first eyes that didn’t automatically close when you laid the doll down…

Sleepy eyes…
…so Sindy was distinctly different. Also, her scale was important because although teenage dolls were popular in the 1950s, they were usually much bigger… Somewhere between 15 and 20 inches. Just as critically, they didn’t have fashion outfits that you collected, mixed and matched – and Sindy’s clothes were based on fashions of the day. That made her very relatable: little girls saw their big sisters and other teenagers wearing similar outfits. So Pedigree really nailed that and the accessories.

When did Sindy launch, Deej? And was David part of that?
He was a HUGE part of that; he co-ordinated the actual launch. And Sindy launched on September 6th, 1963. It didn’t go particularly smoothly, though… Not least of all because there wasn’t enough budget for Pedigree to launch nationally. Instead, they concentrated on the London area. Even then, sales of other fashion dolls had dropped off tremendously – so retailers were overstocked with old product. That made them a little gun-shy. But on that, I’ll just mention something interesting that formed part of the launch! Pedigree sent retailers a promotional record, a 45rpm gramophone, to introduce Sindy.

Wait a second – like a vinyl record? With music?
Well, yes and no – a vinyl record, yes… But the content was the jingle from the TV ad intercut with a chap speaking with a cut-glass English accent; received pronunciation. So for a little over four-minutes, it promotes and explains the Sindy range. We should put in a link to Our Sindy Museum here because they have the recording – it’s quite extraordinary. Actually, maybe we can transcribe it as well… Put that down the bottom. That being the case, I’ll just say that the TV jingle was produced by a now-dissolved company called Charles Hobson and Grey.

Okay, so the launch didn’t go well. At what point did things turn around?
The interesting thing here is how David explained Sindy’s TV adverts. Granted, they were limited to the London area… But, until then, it’d been customary for Lines Brothers to take 15-minute TV segments. They then showed the company’s whole new range in one go! But Sindy was advertised, as David put it, “like soap powder”. So the ads were short, frequent and focused.

And arguably, that worked rather too well! Despite retailer indifference, Sindy was a hit with the public almost immediately. In Colette Mansell’s book, The History of Sindy, the author says that – during the last three months of 1963, Pedigree delivered 200,000 Sindy dolls. The Daily Mail reported that it was the biggest selling toy that Christmas. But retailers were caught off guard – and the demand on David and the rest of the team was huge. They really struggled to keep up.

Wow…
So in next to no time, Pedigree found themselves with a hit. They quickly expanded the universe with an accessory range called Scenesetters – the name David gave it. Also, one of Sindy’s friends was called Poppet after the nickname of one of David’s girlfriends… Because by 1967, Sindy’s boyfriend – Paul – and little sister, Patch, had been added to the range, followed by Mitzi, Betsy, Vicki and Poppet to help make Sindy even more appealing in the rest of Europe. But Scenesetters in particular was a huge success! The furniture, play-scene accessories and vehicles Sindy started to accumulate outstripped the demand for clothing. And actually, there was an amusing story that David told in 12S…

It seems David did a presentation to distributors in Portugal. It was going pretty well until he showed Sindy’s horse – which was greeted with confusion. It turns out that the price of the toy horse could easily have bought you a real donkey over there! So that item needed a bit of a rethink. Ha!

Ha! Just to clarify, though… David didn’t design the toys? He wasn’t a product designer?
No. He would certainly speak with designers and, as he put it, say, “That’s not quite right”, or “Why don’t you do this, that or the other…” So he’d steer the ideas. A great example of that might be a horse cart that launched in 1982. It was called a gig in the UK, and a buggy in the USA…

Like a two-wheeled horse carriage?
Yes, exactly. My understanding is the design of this was researched by one of Pedigree’s R&D team, Peter Bing. At David’s urging, Peter went down to Regents Park early one Easter Monday to look at carriages in the London horse-harness parade. He took hundreds of photos of horses and carriages!

When he got back, David decided on which of the images the new buggy would be modelled. So by all accounts, he spent a tremendous amount of his time working on the styling, the packaging, the names and so on. Because – as you can imagine – Sindy evolved over the years; her look and movements were always developing. In fact, David instigated a ‘new look’ Sindy in 1968 that I think was rather bold!

In what way?
Just that the original was such a huge success… So any kind of tinkering runs a risk, I think. But the 1968 Sindy had a twisting waist and more bendable legs. More noticeably, they added inset eyelashes alongside those that were painted on. She had a more glamorous hairdo as well – actually, ‘more glamorous’ is probably the key thing here. Sindy still had that very open face, which many would say was her key feature, but her new look was more glamorous; a little less girl-next-door.

Also, in the mid-seventies, Pedigree launched another concept of David’s: Anna Moore and The Champions. Anna was a 10-inch doll, or just over, but specifically a showjumper… Happytime was her horse. They were modelled on a real-life champion showjumper, Anne Moore. I’d love to know more about the licensing deal there! Those toys were hugely articulated; you could pose them every which way! Naturally, the range included all sorts of equestrian clothes and accessories.

Amazing. We should probably start wrapping things up, Deej, but – of course – the reason we’re talking about David Fear right now is to celebrate his winning the I.D.I.O.T. Award. When did he get that?
I think that was 1994 at The Hurlingham Club in London. The Hurlingham Club is a private club with a stately Georgian mansion, croquet lawns, tennis courts, a botanical garden. Impressive… Naturally, getting the I.D.I.O.T. meant a great deal to him! He told me how proud and honoured he felt; that it was a tremendous honour to be elevated to the level of his industry heroes – including Sir Torquil Norman and Roger Ford.

Both I.D.I.O.T. winners themselves! Okay… Let’s wrap it up there, Deej. I’ll put in links to Sir Torquil Norman’s interview here, and Roger Ford’s here – well… Roger Ford’s is an interview with Max Ford, of course, but I’ll still link to it that way.
And then we can put in the record transcription… Also, I do just need to thank everybody that contributed to the piece: Hilary Sewell, Annie Jalili and Kathy Weatherhead at oursindymuseum.com… Pete Kellond, Mary Danby, Ben Rathbone, Colette Mansell, John Reynolds, Jon Morse at the V&A – and David himself!

And David himself. Done.

Launch Record Transcription

Take an S, take an I,
Take an N, D, Y,
And what have you got?
You’ve got Sindy!

You’ve got Sindy! Sindy: the doll you love to dress. Sindy: more than a doll.
A new rage for girls. Sindy: a completely new concept in doll promotion. Sindy: the doll they’ll ask for by name!

Never before has a doll – or indeed any other single toy – been so widely advertised on television – for children, and in children’s time! Between the 30th of September and Christmas alone, Sindy will appear on television 25 times.
And further vigorous advertising is scheduled all through 1964… Winter, spring, summer, autumn. Children will be hearing the catchy Sindy song – and singing it – and asking for Sindy by name. Maybe you’d like to hear it…

Take an S, take an I,
Take an N, D, Y,
And what have you got?
You’ve got Sindy!

The doll you love to dress!

Who is the belle of every ball.
Who wears the prettiest dress of them all?
Who is the girl they all love best?
It’s Sindy:

The doll you love to dress!

Who steals a scene at every show?
Who is the best dressed girl you know?
Who is the girl they all love best?
It’s Sindy!

The doll you love to dress!

Get Sindy and start collecting all these wonderful outfits. They’re beautifully made, like this duffle coat – perfect in every detail.

Who’s got a record player? Brush and comb?
A little doggy – all of her own!
Who is the girl they all love best?
It’s Sindy!

The doll you love to dress!

Sindy!

Sindy is a free-swinging girl. Every little girl’s dream of what she longs to become. Sindy has a beautiful wardrobe, designed by leading fashion experts. Matched and made with exquisite care. Perfect miniature replicas of the clothes worn by today’s young women… Sports clothes, glamour clothes, everyday clothes. Eight full outfits and more to come, each complete with accessories: a dog, skates, a gramophone… Everything a girl could want!

There are separates too! Eight individual items to supplement Sindy’s wardrobe, which are bought on their own. All Sindy dolls and outfits are beautifully boxed and presented. Sindy: the doll they’ll love to dress. The doll they’ll ask for by name… Catchy tune, wasn’t it? Like to hear it again?

Who’s got a record player? Brush and comb?
A little doggy – all of her own!
Who is the girl they all love best?
It’s Sindy!

The doll you love to dress!

Sindy!

Well, we’re selling Sindy in the home – now it’s up to you. This is your big chance to make profits higher than ever before. Remember: Sindy – the doll they’ll ask for by name. Be ready for them…

Our representative will be calling soon – but to make sure of supplies, fill in the reply-paid order form now. There’s a free display too with your first stock order, to provide a central tie up with television at the point of sale. Who is the doll they all love best? It’s Sindy the doll you love to dress…

Take an S, take an I,
Take an N, D, Y,
And what have you got?
You’ve got Sindy!

The doll you love to dress!

Who is the belle of every ball?
Who wears the prettiest dress of them all?
Who is the girl they all love best?
It’s Sindy:

The doll you love to dress!

Who steals the scene at every show?
Who is the best dressed girl you know?
Who is the girl they all love best?
It’s Sindy!

The doll you love to dress!

Get Sindy and start collecting all these wonderful outfits –
they’re beautifully made! Like this duffle coat: perfect in every detail…

Who’s got a record player? Brush and comb?
A little doggy – all of her own!
Who is the girl they all love best?
It’s Sindy!

The doll you love to dress!

Sindy!

–

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