Last Night in Great Yarmouth

Friday 23 August 2002. It was our last night in Great Yarmouth. Tomorrow would see us leave after breakfast and a morning coffee in our favourite beach hut cafe.

There was still a long row of amusement arcades along the seafront road, but sadly gone were the days when you caould find half a dozen or more pinball machines in every arcade. I think we only found two such machine the whole week and predictably one of them wasn't working all that well.

Instead the arcades were full of video games which simply required a good memory for the sequence of challenges rather than the skills to aim balls at various targets through an understanding of the laws of physics. Crane machines full of overweight stuffed toys and pushers with far too much weight of coins to be pushed forwards made up most of the other machines. Miss Franny armed herself with coins and spent the night trying to increase her haul of Winnie the Pooh keyrings. She came home with five...

Our childhood was spent playing the pinballs of the 1950s and 60s, the earlier ones with wooden rails before steel began to be used. They had weak 2-inch flippers that often didn't have the power to send the ball further than halfway up the playfield. The earliest had no flippers at all and targets were just a nail with a surrounding coiled spring that completed the circuit with the nail when pressed against it. The early machines also had gobble holes which scored - but you lost your ball down them for good.

The 1960s were a heyday for pinball players. Rows and rows of them would fill an entire wall of amusement arcades. Spinning score reels replaced the system where bulbs would light in different places on the scorefield to show your score - rows of ten bulbs for millions, 100 thousands, 10 thousands... You had to add them up to get your score. The space created on the back boxes (backflashes) of pinballs by score reels allowed animated features to be added - a lift door opening to reveal the passengers, or a small bagatelle firing tiny balls to signify the launch of a space rocket...

It would be another decade before pinballs became computer controlled, two decades before Gorgar became the first pinball to talk. Elvira - Scared Stiff was the pinball to go to this week and was a good game.

Great Yarmouth 2002 Index

The Golden Mile in the 1970s

When I came to do the index page for Blackpool's Golden Mile, I was sad to see just how few dedicated posts there were to it. So I'll sort out a few more as we go along! Actually I'll be doing that for most of the index pages and not just the Blackpool ones!

This one was taken in 1975 from the pedestrian bridge over the Promenade. The Golden Mile Centre was the first of the purpose-built large amusement arcades and at the time a section had been taken over by a large exhibition of puppets, props, costumes and models from the many Gerry Anderson TV programmes from the 1950s, 60s and 70s. THey started with Twizzle, Torchy the Battery Boy and Four Feather Falls and then went through all the favourite futuristic series: Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds, Joe 90, Captain Scarlet etc. all the way through to the live action shows, UFO and Space 1999. The rest of the Golden Mile amusement arcades were still inside the old original buildings, hotels and somewhat ramshackle sheds built onto the front of them. They occupied what had been a row of gardens at one time.

As the more unsteady buildings were demolished, small temporary spaces were soon filled with kiddies' rides and roundabouts, until building commenced on the next modern project. This photo was taken in 1976 and a helicopter roundabout, a version of an octopus ride and a full dodgems ride fills the space next to the Golden Mile Centre, extending from the Promenade right back to Bonny Street.

To 1977 and inside the arcades, Fran's brother Bob with our nephew Chris playing a Peppy the Clown puppet game.

Fran herself was into fruit machines. It was around this time they started to get more complicated. With the old ones, you simply pulled the handle and hoped. Then as electronics came along the Hold feature came along, swiftly followed by Nudge and then a whole host of jackpot options until you needed a university degree to understand how to play...

1978 and still not a single video game in sight! Pinball machines (it was an American phrase that was just taking over - during the 1950s and 60s we had called them Pin Tables in the UK) were my favourite coinslot obsession. The best machines would have a queue of people waiting to play. A row of sixpences or shillings lined up along the side rail of the machine would secure your place in the queue.

A glimpse inside the newly opened Coral Island in 1978. With sumptuous carpets and neon lights and a couple of life-size mannikins swinging from trapezes up in the ceiling, it was a step change from the arcades we were used to.

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Fourth 1977 Blackpool Photo Album, 2: The Golden Mile

Blackpool's Golden Mile features on today's flashback to 1977, with reminders of the Dr Who Exhibition, Lewis's department store, the building of Coral Island and the Golden Mile Centre.

I start with the Lewis's store as the only shot that is less oriented towards the holiday maker. Though it did draw them in their thousands of course. The store, which opened in 1964, is still fondly remembered in the town and added considerably to the aesthetics of the Promenade with it's turquoise tiling and backlit frontage. In 1977 it carried red, white and blue ribbons for the Queen's Silver Jubilee. It closed in 1993.

Another fine sight on the Golden Mile, though a brand new use for the building, was Ripley's Believe It Or Not Odditorium. Celebrating the startling and freakish amongst both nature and achievement, it was fun to visit and brilliantly stand-out at night when the large signboard lit up with bright red neon. A short time later Ripley installed a glass tube that fed water from a pool below to a huge tap that, as the water cascaded from the tube seemed to be flowing from the tap. The water then obscured the pipe so that the tap seemed to be suspended on a column of falling water. It was very effective. Sadly I have no photograph of it.

An out of season shot of Ripley's, also showing the Golden Mile Centre.

This was Blackpool's first large purpose-built amusement arcade. It would eventually become Mr Bee's and today houses the Sea Life Centre.

Together with Ripley's it dominated the Central Beach area of the Golden Mile. The bright blue and yellow of the Silver Jubilee commemorative tram passes by and the two port-a-cabins towards the left are the Lost Children's Centre (white) and a first-aid post in blue. There's a Wall's ice cream kiosk on the beach and I think the other one is selling seafood type rubbish for the southern visitors...

Why anyone would eat jellied eels and whelks is beyond me, though the practice of putting unidentifiable pap on meals and sandwiches is sadly spreading northwards. When people in the south say "we'll eat out" I invariably hear it as "we'll eat owt..." The number of times I went to London for work and had to point at something on a buffet saying "what the hell is that???" doesn't bear thinking of. But for all their culinary short-comings (they seem never to have heard of a crust for instance), the people are remarkably likeable!

For a couple of years the Golden Mile Centre hosted an exhibition of models and puppets from the Gerry Anderson TV portfolio. Twizzle, Torchy the Battery Boy, Four Feather Falls, Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray (Whoopee - colour!) (Waah! We still had a black and white telly!), Thunderbirds, Joe 90, Captain Scarlet, UFO, Space 1999... I used to go in and just lap up pleasure until it got dark and they threw me out...

An early season shot before they installed a massive and animated ogre figure over the end of this building to advertise The Horror Crypt. My goodness gracious, that steamed up a lot of people in the council who shouted their disgust and distress loud and clear, ignoring the fact that it was carrying on a great tradition of the Golden Mile. Farther into the distance are the green girders that would later hold up the roof of the new Coral Island centre, due to open in 1978.

The Devil's Den was a short-lived exhibition next door to the Brunswick which has opened a self-service fish and chip cafe. Self-service in those days meant you got a tray and slid it across rails whilst you gave your order and then waited for it to be plated before sliding the tray to the till. It wasn't too many years since this would have been unthinkable - that your order wouldn't be taken and served by a waitress in black with starched white apron. "What do I do? What do I do???" muttered people helplessly as others sat at empty tables, fuming because they had been there half an hour without anyone taking their order... The same people a few years later let food go cold in MacDonalds whilst they searched for cutlery...

The old-style open sheds full of flick-ball games, Ber-o-Mat one-armed bandits, pinball machines so old they didn't have flippers etc. were in their last throes. The old houses and hotels behind them that they were built onto had been neglected so long that they were in danger of collapsing. Nothing above ground floor level had been in use for decades.

The kiosks at the front of the arcades were the last bastions of those oh-so-scrummy hamburgers (which now had to be called beefburgers due to advertising law) which were fried on a griddle and then propped up in a row on the back of the griddle plate amongst a pile of fried onions that kept them hot. Asking for lettuce (even though it would have been lettuce and not some sort of weird-looking "salad leaf", then still correctly thought of as inedible) or pickle or a slice of tomato would have earned you guffaws of hysterics. Only recently was it becoming acceptable, though not yet the norm, to ask for a slice of cheese. You had your bun, a burger, lots of fried onions and it was normal to put ketchup or mustard or possibly both on it.

Youngsters have always wondered why old people get so grumpy. And I can now say that for every generation it's because everything that has been familiar and comfortable and good seems to get swept away by following generations. To those youngsters who read this I can say with all surety that you will feel like this yourself when you get older. Sadly though the generation between mine and yours is doing their best to ensure you will never get chance to do this yourselves because they are destroying things for you already, having got into power and now looking after their rich chums whilst dancing with their fingers in their ears in case they hear something that might prick the last remaining vestige of conscience they might have. Robin Hood, we need you back more than ever...

The other reason older people are grumpy is that it is, actually, quite good fun...

Down at Chapel Street, opposite the Central Pier. At the end of the building is an exhibition of props and costumes from Dr Who. The entrance is the Tardis itself, which can be seen halfway down the side of the building. Another of those bits of Blackpool's past that seems to be lovingly remembered. Incredibly almost, we were still only on the fourth Doctor at the time. Tom Baker played the Doctor from 1974 to 1981, lasting not quite as long as did the exhibition which lasted from 1974 to 1985.

As I write it is New Year's Eve. Tomorrow will be 2016, so a Happy New Year to all my readers! I hope it will be / is / was!

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High Days and Holidays

We were incredibly lucky as kids in that Grandad had a car and then later Dad got one as well. That meant that trips out were perhaps a bit more frequent and to far-off glamourous places like Blackpool! Holidays for many still meant working but someplace different - strawberry picking or hop picking on farms. There were more Bank Holidays then, but some of them were religious holidays and even those of us not involved would turn out in our best clothes to watch as the procession went by.

Whitsuntide was one such. On Whit Friday there was a carnival parade and we would all go to the "Whit Friday Field" which was just "a field" for the rest of the year. On Whit Friday, however, it was packed - and I do mean "packed" - with families, eating sandwiches from waxed paper parcels and drinking tea from flasks. The kids would have lemonade or my favourite, dandelion and burdock. Packets of crisps with a twist of blue paper containing a small measure of salt which you poured over the crisps and then shook them up - "Oh no! Hold the bag SHUT!!!" Many years after, in the days of "ready salted" crisps - yes, that's where it comes from - they tried to bring back the nostalgia of those days by bringing out "Salt & Shake", though the salt now came in blue paper packets which had to be torn open. Ha! Just plain sissy! Then a game of catch or football with Dad. On Whit Sunday the churches all walked - the Whit Walks or Procession of churches and Boys' Brigades, with a band if we were lucky. If we were unlucky we just got lots of morose looking choirboys and two people holding up a huge flag on poles, struggling in high winds whilst rows of children to the front and back held streamers attached to the tops of the poles.

Visits to the park were common. Here my Grandad is pushing me on the swings. There seemed to be lots of small parks - I suppose most of them still exist really! It was a treat to go to the "big" park, which for us was Springfield Park on the road between Rochdale and Heywood. It had a large duckpond and a putting green and a miniature train that you could have rides on! Most parks had swings, roundabouts and a slide. Some had huge witches hat roundabouts, shaped like a cone that swung sideways as well as going round. You stood on a giant ring at the bottom and held on to the rods which made the side of the cone.

There were gardens, sometimes a small forest and grassy areas where families would sit for picnics or couples would lie to smooch. We'd make for grassed hills to play at lying down and rolling down the hill, covering ourselves in grass stains, ants and mud from the mucky patch at the bottom... This activity was normally undergone just after drinking orange squash and after a while we would feel sick and have to stop...

During school holidays we would go round to friends' houses, sometimes disappearing for the day. We had to tell Mum where we were going but apart from her knowing where that was and walking there herself, she had no way of getting in touch with us. No mobile phones, not very many houses with phones come to that, and certainly no computers and emails! During holidays when we were at junior school we would often be round at Alan Telford's house. He lived next door to a classmate of Frank's called Kenneth Clegg if I remember rightly. They had rigged a two-way radio link between their bedrooms with a toy electronics kit and a wire thrown from one window to the other! It had started out of course as two baked bean tins joined with string. This really worked and was a staple piece of kit for spy games!

We played football and cricket in the street. Grown ups didn't like you kicking balls at their house walls but no one thought it necessary to put up signs everywhere saying "No ball games"... Were we that much more reserved with the power that we kicked balls, or are today's adults that much more intolerant and self-centred? Perhaps a bit of both. I can't remember Frank or I ever breaking a window with a ball anyway.

In the photo above, Frank is batting and I'm about to bowl. The photo was taken by Mum who had the unfortunate belief that hair had to be brushed just before a photo was taken. She actually came outside with a hairbrush for this - I remember being mortified... We had a tricycle that we shared. I haven't seen one for years. There were three of them in our street when we were about 7 or 8 years old and five kids to take turns riding them. The two who were not riding played at being policemen on point duty. I haven't seen one of those for years either - traffic lights weren't as common then!

Trips to the seaside, whether day trips or a week's holiday were always exciting things for Frank and I. Day trips meant Blackpool, Morecambe or Southport and holidays in the 1950s and early 60s meant Blackpool, Bridlington or Great Yarmouth. Blackpool was an hour and a half away (the only bit of motorway in existence was a short stretch of the M6 at Preston) but Great Yarmouth was a full day's travelling. Mum and Dad used to settle us in the back of the car in our pyjamas in the early morning hours and we would travel through the rest of the night, stopping to get dressed and have breakfast in Newark, with the river on one side and the castle on the other. "Are we nearly there yet?"

We played for hours on the beach - everyone did. It was free, it was fun, Blackpool and Bridlington had great sand for making castles and sand pies, but Great Yarmouth was rubbish as the sand never got covered by the tide and was always too dry! But it had shells and stones and a low sea wall that was great for jumping off onto the sand. We used to make "boats" in the sand, complete with seats and then the spade stuck in the "dashboard" for a steering wheel. Those early buckets and spades were metal too - jabbing one onto your bare foot could do real damage to your toes!

Arcades were full of Edwardian machines like one-armed bandits, Allwins and Bryan's Clocks. Then there were fortune telling machines, strength meters and punchbags that told you how strong a punch you had. Early electric games were rifle galleries and pinball machines.

Just about every arcade had a jukebox that played the latest records. Sixpence a play or three for a shilling! We would spend hours around the jukebox, watching the records change and watching the bubbles or colours, depending on the make and model. They only disappeared in the later 1970s when electronic games started making noises of their own.

Waking in a hotel at the seaside was wonderful. Seagulls would scream and yakk once it got light. They were hardly ever seen inland in those days, that came later with landfill sites! Early morning coffee shops would open with - oh what memories this brings back - clear glass cups and saucers! Teasmaids were yet to be provided, if you wanted an early morning coffee you had to go out for one! Of course the cafe too would have a jukebox to play!

On a week's holiday we would go to at least one live show. Chart-hitting big name artists would appear at the end of the pier theatres in those days. We saw Cliff Richard and the Shadows a few times, Rolf Harris, Cilla Black, Morecambe and Wise, Mike and Bernie Winters. They were second only to Morecambe and Wise. However, more of this in an entry about live theatre! What I will recall here is how people used to dress up for the occasion of going to a show. Best suits and dresses would come out!

We would want to visit the Pleasure Beach or fairground every day at least once too! Blackpool Pleasure Beach still has a section of smaller rides for the kiddies. In my day it included roundabouts of cars or boats, both of which have long since gone. Still there however, is the fairy grotto with the mechanical man playing the organ. (This article was written in 2006. In 2010 the Pleasure Beach have announced this ride would be demolished to make way for new attractions.)

I loved the Big Dipper and the Grand National as soon as I was tall enough to ride them! There were no sissy harnesses to keep you in then - we had to hold on. Another case of having responsibility for ourselves rather than expect to be looked after. It would help if judges stopped granting pay-outs to people who behave like idiots. In those days if you brought it on yourself it was your own lookout! If this seems like a repeated theme here, sorry but I despair when I see a bag of roasted nuts labelled "This product contains nuts"! It's not that the makers think people don't have the brains to work this out - it's because they know some judge will fine them if it's not there and someone with an allergy is taken ill and sues.

Anyway, moving on! Most people set off for home at dinnertime at the latest after a holiday. Mum and Dad used to wait until much later so we would travel through the night again, when it was cooler and the car not as likely to overheat (it was a regular occurrence with cars in the 50s and 60s, of which again... more to come!

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Blackpool After the Parade

A couple of days ago I published an entry about a Marching Bands Parade which took place on the 26 July 1981.

Once the parade was over I turned the camera onto Blackpool itself and a couple of entries have already used some of those photographs. Cinema USA was an inflatable dome on the Central Pier which showed short films on a large scale (the wall of the dome was the screen) before IMAX came along. The other entry - Blackpool's Golden Mile 1980s Style describes how the Golden Mile evolved from house gardens to the ramshackle add-ons and extended porches that we see in the above photograph and described some of the activities you may have seen in the heyday of the Golden Mile in the 1930s.

By 1981 many of the old Edwardian penny slot machines had gone. There were still the odd one or two knocking about but most of the All-Win flick-ball machines had disappeared and the old pinballs without flippers from the 1940s and even the 1950s wooden-railed pinballs had disappeared. Pinball was experiencing a bit of a heyday though. The move from the old electro-mechanicals (where electricity powered lots of relays and levers) to electronics (which had computer boards inside) was well underway and the newer games allowed more than one player to compete with each other with the game able to remember all the previous achievements of the player.

In 1979 Gorgar became the first pinball to speak - though its vocabulary was limited to just seven words which could be delivered in various combinations "Me Gorgar, beat me" to "Me got you" to "You beat Gorgar" with the initial deliciously chilling phrase uttered when you pushed a coin in: "Gorgar speaks!". The other word in the vocabulary was "hurt".

It was not unusual to see a row of 15 pinball machines in arcades at that time. They were fun, they required skill and they were a nightmare to keep in good working order. They started to disappear once video games came out in greater variations than the tennis game. But the impact that the tennis game with its two rectangles for bats and a square ball was unbelievable. People queued up to have a go as they previously had for the better pinballs. It was practice to place your coin on top of the machine whilst a player was playing their game. The popular machines could have a whole line of coins and people standing waiting.

For the Golden Mile itself, the future would look more like this. The old houses swept away and a purpose-built arcade with modern styling and neon signs erected in their place. The Penny Booth would later change its name to Funland and the old style of arcade would eventually disappear altogether. Inside the atmosphere changed as the electronics machines filled the air with piercing shrieks and snatches of tunes. High pitched sound effects, amplified to annoying levels for anyone who wasn't actually playing, replaced the gentle gongs and chime bars of pinball and the soft mechanical whirrs and kerchunks of one-armed bandits.

Jukeboxes, which had been a feature of most arcades (seldom played loud as it stopped you having more than one to take money) almost disappeared overnight from the Golden Mile. Arcades became far more than in the past a haunt of the teenager only.

The Golden Nugget Bingo was a poor substitute for the fantastic billboards claiming (but not really delivering) the flames of Hell in Dante's Inferno or the Two-Headed Giantess. Perhaps the Trades Descriptions Act of the late 1960s did for Chard's Theatre in the end. Or perhaps the police, from their new headquarters in New Bonney Street in the rear of the photo were now close enough to take an active distaste to the shows which were hinted at on the hoardings with phrases such as "The naked truth!" or "In the flesh!" or "Laid bare to be seen!"

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Old King Cole Spending a Penny

What an irreverant title for a blog entry covering a character who has become a favourite nursery rhyme but who existed in real life and obviously made such an impression on the people of his time that his name was carried on down through the centuries.

The Spending a Penny bit however comes from this being one of many remembered penny slot machines in the arcades of the 1960s. This was never a favourite of mine personally as by the time it came out I was that bit more mature - I was six in 1960 for Heaven's Sake! By then I was wanting to push the buttons on the similar Pepe The Clown machine as on that you could control the puppet's hand and leg movements!

A penny well spent in this machine played a record (normally a naff one as I remember...) and the puppets jiggled about a bit, further tarnishing the good King's reputation, lovingly kept intact for some 15 centuries up to that point... He was King of Rheged, one of Briton's major kingdoms of the Dark Ages, stretching from the Caledonian Forest down to the River Ribble, so taking in today's Cumbria and north Lancashire.

Whilst I'm featuring arcade machines, here's a variant of a hockey game that I've featured previously. The game in my previous entry had a swivelling hockey player at each end, controlled by the two players. Here, the presentation is a little more basic with two simple rods acting as bats to both defend your own goal and try to direct the ball towards your opponent's goal.

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First and Last

Thursday 8 August 1996. We drove to Lands End. On the way we saw a column of smoke and a few yards farther on found a car on fire. A fire engine was approaching on the other side of the dual carriageway and I stopped to let the firement run across to fight the fire. Frank was driving behind me and pulled into the other lane to stop traffic getting past us in case they hadn't seen the firemen. The owner of the car was sitting on the grass at the side of the road. He didn't look too pleased...

By the time the firemen let us carry on, his car was a wreck, all the paint had cooked brown and blistered round the bonnet and the inside of the car had filled with smoke. On the positive side it was very entertaining for us...!

The rest of the journey was fairly non-descript after that. From the north of Newquay down to Lands End is around 43 or 44 miles straight down the A30 until you end up at the end of the peninsula where the only way to go is back the way you came. Everything here is described as the first and last in England - first and last inn, first and last shop etc. Steve was pointing the video at complete strangers and asking what they thought of the first and last public toilets...

The current Longships lighthouse first shone in 1873. 117 feet high (36m) it was installed with an 8-wick oil lamp and only electrified in 1967. On a clear night in 1898 with the lighthouse working perfectly, a ship - S.S. Bluejacket - managed to wreck itself on nearby rocks, almost wrecking the lighthouse as it did so.

An earlier lighthouse was built in 1795 by Lieutenant Henry Smith, who was granted the lease provided he built a lighthouse. In return he could charge a levy on passing ships. The levy would only become due once the lighthouse was working and unfortunately Lieutenant Smith underestimated both the time and costs required to build it and, having had to take out some hefty loans, eventually found himself in the Debtors' Prison.

There is a signpost there that you can have the mileage to your home town put up and you have your photo taken. There is a similar one at John O'Groats up in Scotland but that's probably not a viable day trip from Newquay... We gathered round the post and had a group photo taken.

We went into The Last Labyrynth an exhibition of Man and the Sea and an audio visual display of the Disneyland type. It took an hour to go round the exhibition which was quite good and when we came out it started to rain heavily. Gill had been to a shop and picked an oyster shell from a pool and there was a pearl in it that she had made into a necklace.

After that we had more or less exhausted the delights of Lands End, apart from drinking in the pub. The rain had set in so we made our way back to Newquay and walked into town with Gill and Steve, who took me into the arcades to play on some simulations of skiing and motor bike racing. Never mind the real thing, you have to be fit for these machines! Steering was done by body movements, I felt like an old crock by the time we had finished! Joints screaming for mercy, I crashed my Ducatti into a wall and gave a sigh of relief as the screen went black...

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Shooting the Cats!

A glimpse of a not very politically correct past! It's a while since I featured a coin-operated game so here's one I remember with great affection.

Strange really, because, as a cat lover, I would never dream of shooting cats in real life but then again, this is exactly what is wrong with some of the politically correct pillocks in life - they can't separate the difference between harmless and harmful or vindictive. I'm sure the designers of this game were not expecting anyone to be persuaded by it that shooting cats with a real gun was a good idea!

Anyway, the game was common in arcades in the 1960s and shot very small ball bearings at the puddies who fell over backwards if hit. You had unlimited shots in the space of ten seconds after which you totted up the number of "dead" cats!

Coin Slot Machines Index

Coin Slot Team Play

Now this is a great reminder of seaside amusement arcades of the 1950s and 60s. This cabinet was another of those that could house a number of similar games.

Seen in the Bygone Times antiques centre, Eccleston near Chorley, this model houses a football game. Each of the two players has a team of players and two levers. One lever twists the mannequins so that the ball can be passed from one player to another. The other lever causes the mannequins to kick so that the ball gets propelled in more or less the direction you hoped! The paintwork of the players here had obviously worn badly enough for some long-suffering wife to knit each a jumper!

I've also seen examples housing polo games with horses and players swinging mallets!

Coin Slot Machines Index

Road Racer

An early driving game from the 1950s or early 1960s by Williams. Road Racer had a small model car on a rolling drum which had a road painted onto it.

The car had to be steered along the road as the drum rotated, passing over the correct contact points to score highly on the speedometer-like scoreboard. "Accepted by every type of location" it says on the flyer - points don't mean prizes with this game so it could be placed in sites which did not have a gambling licence.

This was one of many driving games I remember from Blackpool arcades. Another simulated driving at 100mph at night where bends in the road ahead could only be seen at the last second, testing the driver's reactions. It was to be a while before they came with foot pedals, gear levers and seats!

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World Cup Soccer Arcade Game

After the World Cup Rugby Final last night, it's timely to remember this old arcade game from 1968.

My brother Frank and I used to love this two-player game where players could be moved back and forth (but not sideways) by pushing or pulling on the appropriate toggle. The player twisted round to face the direction of travel and pushing the toggle switch down made him swivel, "kicking" the ball forward. In this example, the third red player from the right appears to have suffered a major injury...

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