Amusements to be had in Sunny Rhyl

Nineteen seventy-five, when I was a twelve-year-old having moved from Stoke-on-Trent to Kinmel Bay near Rhyl, North Wales with my family, saw me running back to Stoke every time there was an argument, usually with no money in my pocket and nowhere to stay. After a few months and being caught repeatedly at Crewe railway station without a ticket, I began to settle down and realised Rhyl had more to it than the, by now, exhausted beach. I attended Blessed Edward Jones High School on Cefndy Road and soon realised that ‘fiddling’ was the name of the game and the amusement arcades offered much more than amusement (perhaps it helped that I had always been cheeky hard-faced).

When using our bus pass out of school hours, others would hold their pass out for a long time for the bus driver to examine, only for the driver to realise it was invalid at that hour and so would not let them on to the bus. I, on the other hand, would whizz past the driver like lightning, flashing the pass for a split second viewing so the driver did not have time to scrutinise it. I would then head straight to the back seat of the bus where I would usually light up. I was definitely not the diffident type; as a twelve-, thirteen- and fourteen-year-old nothing or no one seemed to faze me.

It was then cursorily deduced that one didn’t put money into the slot machines; one took money out. It began with waiting for the pennies to fall from the penny pusher due to a lucky vibration, to banging the machines to make the pennies drop, to inserting paper clips into the slots of the wheel-emin, to the five and the one trick, then advancing to the Yale lock master key scenario which opened up the cash boxes to the kiddies’ rides. The arcades recalled are the Carousel, Pleasureland, The Brightspot and Sands Arcade (the latter of which can be seen in the 1973 film, Holiday on the Buses).

Banging the machines had inevitably escalated to lifting them up and dropping them down, so the pennies would fall over the edge of that little cliff inside the machine. The Flipper Winner penny pusher saw piles of pennies on two levels and when undertaking the lift and drop mechanism the pennies just cascaded down into the tray below, but you had to make a quick getaway, which was doable because the machine was right next to the entrance/exit and was not alarmed. The wheel-em-in stunt (where you had to roll the penny down the slot to fit it in between those lines in order to win) was the most curious. We would buy paper clips and open them out into the letter S. Then we would insert one into the slot of the wheel-em-in, where you were supposed to put your penny, blow down the slot and the paper clip would then be seen inside the machine on the moving circuit. Oddly enough, when the paper clip got to the end of that circuit and disappeared over the edge out of sight, the money would keep gushing out from the top of the machine and roll down the glass into my eager outstretched hands. I don’t know why this happened; I just gleefully mopped up the loot in unison to the clicking sound of the coppers being pumped out. The five and the one trick was when you put a 5p piece into the change slot and a 1p piece in the standard slot of a one-armed-bandit at the same time; you then pulled the arm lever as if to play, at the same time, and for some strange reason, pennies dropped out.

The best way to get rid of your newly-accrued wealth, which was by now weighing down your pockets, was to walk up and down Rhyl promenade asking holidaymakers, “Have you got a ten pence piece, please?” to which you would dump ten penny pieces on them. I don’t recall anyone ever complaining about being dumped on. Then there was bingo, where we would ‘play in the dark’ (without putting the 5p into the slot to light up the board) and if you won, you would put your 5p in and shout house at the same time to muffle out the sound of the coin dropping in to light up the board. Another ruse was that if we knew the bingo checker from school, they would shout out false numbers when checking a bogie call, one school friend was also a bingo caller and would call out our numbers.

If you were clocked by an attendant (sometimes in grey overalls) on the fiddle in the amusement arcades the local saying was ‘knicks’. A school friend rasped this expression when on a fiddling expedition with an acquaintance who had possession of the master key. This Yale lock key opened most of the cash boxes fitted with Yale locks on children’s rides that cost 5p or 10p. After splitting up, as a result of calling a false knicks (while holding the key) he swiftly got the key cut and then of course I got a cut of the key too. We had struck arcade gold and had advanced into the big time.

Not content with emptying the cashboxes in the Rhyl area, we went out as far as Abergele, Talacre and even Blackpool, but our speciality was a children’s ride called Pongo on the main road in Towyn. In the winter months when there were no holidaymakers to fill up the cash boxes, we would often laugh and scrap for Pongo’s last 5p. Yes, I have fond memories of my mate Pongo even when times were hard. No doubt all good things come to an end, and as a sixteen-year-old I was rumbled just inside an arcade next to the Brightspot. I used to hide my key in the waistband of my trousers and after I tried the lion ride outside the arcade (you had to see if the key would open it) an attendant became suspicious and brought me inside to search me. As I then walked out, a little chime was audible as my key hit the deck. I did not dare to turn around and acknowledge it. So that was that.

After leaving Blessed Edward Jones in 1978, some would argue I had obtained not just a good state education but had also graduated via the Free School of Machine Coinage and had gained the equivalent of a First in Arcade Culture (both theory and practice). Although Carol Vorderman was also a pupil at Blessed Edward Jones High School and went on to attain a third class degree in Engineering at Cambridge University, I can’t imagine her having to perfect her mathematical enumeration by counting (the lack of) 5p pieces in Pongo’s cash box – can you?

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