Ethel-Maud: our early days together...

Ethel-Maud, with her friends Misty and Bridget, in the craft room

When I happened upon Ethel-Maud all those years ago I simply thought that she was a very sweet-but-sad-looking anonymous little cloth doll, but when she dropped through my letterbox she had a label on her foot from a maker called Norah Wellings.  I confess that I'd never heard of this lady before, so turned to the internet to see what I could find out.  During my trawling I came across a blog called Norah Wellings Journal  by Gillian Trotter, who has apparently also written a book about Miss Wellings.  I decided to email Gill to ask if she could tell me anything Ethel-Maud and this was her response:

"She looks like one of Norah Wellings Islander Dolls. You do not say what size she is but looks to be the smaller size of 8 to 12 inches? Norah Wellings was very well known for her wonderful Islander dolls and they were made wearing a mixture of different national clothing but most commonly grass skirts. However as yours has black shoes she would not have had a grass skirt as that particular model had bare feet. They came in sizes 8 to 36 inches , earliest having glass eyes, later painted eyes. Looking at the label on Ethel-Maud she would have been made from 1940 to 1950's (Norah Wellings stopped production in 1959). The same models were used for many years."

Gill has got photos of some lovely dolls on her blog; they made poor little Ethel~Maud look very shabby and down-at-heel 😟 She was in a somewhat battered condition when I got her, with pen marks, dirty and worn patches and re-attached arms (one of which had been sewn on back-to-front!). She also has a very receding hairline and a rather disfigured face; her eyes are wearing away, her nose is non-existent and her poor mouth has been very badly coloured in. My Sherlock Holmes-like powers of deduction lead me to suspect she was a plaything as opposed to a collector's doll 😉

The photos on Gill's blog also show dolls dressed in lovely outfits but Ethel~Maud arrived absolutely stark naked.....

.....for quite some time she floated around in a rather fetching hankie-held-together-with-a-brooch ensemble!  (By the way, sorry the photo above is a tad blurry.  I had to have a hunt around to find some old pictures of Ethel-Maud, all of which are somewhat on the small side, so they have lost their crispness somewhat with being enlarged!)

Despite her sorry appearance ~ or perhaps because of it ~ I really do love sweet little Ethel-Maud and as you will see in my next post about her, I have tried to smarten her up as best as I can 😊