For anyone British of a certain age (no, I'm not yet, thank you for asking), or for anyone who has grown up on the BBC radio programme The Goon Show, the name of Sabrina means primarily one thing, one person.
For those who grew up on repeats of the Goons and never knew the 1950s themselves, their only knowledge of Sabrina is from the scattered, fairly cryptic references in the Goons, when censorship meant they had to be cryptic. We gather she was a popular and attractive young woman of some kind.
Imagine Jayne Mansfield but with breasts about three times the size and five times as pointy, with a tenth of the acting ability. This is Sabrina, born Norma Sykes in Wales in 1938, pin-up girl in 1950s Britain, foil of the wizened little comedian Arthur Askey in two television shows, and appearing in a number of films, all of them forgettable apart from the two set at the girls' school of St Trinian's.
Her measurements were 41 1/2-19-36. Go and look at some photos now; the rest of this write-up is just text. It's not just the size; it's the way they jut out so. In 1957 she insured her bust for £125 000.
http://nylon.net/sabrina/index.html
http://www.goon.org/usgoons/sabrina
The TV show where she played a dumb blonde ("played") was Before Your Very Eyes, on BBC from 1952-1955 and ITV from 1956-1958. Films she appeared in were:
She was supposedly a singer, a bit. This does not appear to have been a very successful line. People wanted to look at her, sure, so she got audiences. She made an advert for Caltex in Australia in 1961. She was always big there. And so the career went. This seems to have been it really. At some point she was married to a doctor in Los Angeles; lately she is reported to be living in Sydney.
The Hawker Hunter aircraft has a conelike contraption under its machine guns to capture spent cartridges. This is called the Sabrina.
"She's a fine big girl" - Bluebottle, from the Goons.