Sitting outside my workshop the other day, I began to feel as though I was being covertly observed. Someone or something seemed to be peeping at me through the other side of the keyhole.
What I liked about The Palace Pier, Brighton, the most when I was a kid was the left-over penny slot machines from Edwardian times and the 1940s. I really liked the .22 rifle range slung beneath the boardwalk too, but it was too expensive to be anything other that a treat with my half-crown a day pocket money. Six shots in that would mean spending the rest of the day watching the sea in boredom.
My favourite moving tableaux machine was 'The Haunted Graveyard'. As soon as the big old penny dropped, the church would begin to strike midnight and the dead would rise out of their graves, watched by the red-nosed drunken tramp slumped on a wooden tombstone. Twelve seconds of suspended disbelief.
I also like 'The Condemned Man'. First, a judge shakes a finger at the forlorn felon, then he is led up the scaffold by the gaolers, and finally a priest makes a blessing as he drops the few inches to his death, dangling on the end of a piece of well-worn string. I wonder how many times he has been hanged over the last 100 years.
A more expensive entertainment was the aircraft gunner experience. The back half of a real machine gun stuck out of a large wooden structure, and there was a set of goggle-type eyepieces which allowed you to watch real film footage of a WW2 dogfight in which you were always the winner.
Rough and grainy celluloid footage of the tail-end of a German plane came into view and when you moved the gun, a cross-hair aiming device moved with it. When you squeezed the trigger the whole wood box shook with the muffled knocks of the gun. Eventually, a plume of smoke came from the plane in front and it nose-dived out of shot. Dogfight over.
One day, a kid told me that if you gave the wooden box a big thump with your knee, the whole thing would start up as if you had dropped a coin in. By the end of the Summer my knee was blue and I had a limp. I think that might have been the beginning of the problems with my right knee which I am experiencing today, 55 years later. War wounds.
Yes, I did once furtively try the What The Butler Saw, but found it deeply disappointing.
I liked the telescope where you could look out to sea. I had to be held up to look through it before the money ran out after everyone else had had a look. This was at Yarmouth.
ReplyDeleteI liked the idea of telescopes but they were always crap.
DeleteI was little and anything was exciting whether I could see or not. Eventually my mother withheld the coin for it so I guess she considered it a waste of money and then we used to just gaze out to sea and spot ships going by like that.
DeleteThat was probably a clearer image than those crappy telescopes, but I understand. You wanted to look through them.
DeleteOh my God ..... I loved those penny machines especially the ones you described ..... they were my favourites plus the axe man.( same as the hangman but with an axe and block and axe man with mask ! ) Our parents used to take us to The Kursaal and, when you walked in, there was a long walkway to the big rides lined with penny machines. Then there were the other ones where you flipped a silver ball and if you got it in the right hole you won a tube of fruit pastilles or Refreshers !!! Then it was on to the big dippers and the water chute. I still love roller coasters. XXXX
ReplyDeleteBrighton had a Guilotine and a laughing policeman.
DeleteThis description of your childhood antics explains a lot! Half a crown a day pocket money? I thought I was rich on half a crown a week.
ReplyDeleteI used to get 2 shillings a week but more on holiday.
ReplyDeleteI was thinking exactly the same as Weaver! I got half a crown too, a week. I mostly spent mine in one go on a half hour pony ride. I used to muck out the stables so I could still be near the ponies.
ReplyDeleteI got a nickle a week, until I started school. Then I got a quarter, which I considered a big nickle. However, all went into my bank, which was a wooden shoe, which had many children and the old woman and flower gardens painted around. Now I wonder if my dad made it.
ReplyDeleteThe Butler seemed only ever to see a semi-dressed woman, sitting on a bed, pulling on her stockings. Hardly titillating.
ReplyDeleteGood job you found "The Butler disappointing. As a hormonal teenager you might otherwise have had another member bruised and aching with use (and it wouldn't be "limp" !
ReplyDeleteVery interesting story. Do you really think problems with your right knee track back to 55 years ago?
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