The Road to no Return
Part II
By Angie Dobney
Trevor and I don't do things by halves, so as I said, we bought the house that needed
restoring; but at the same time Trevor bought a 1957 Escort, from Consett in the
Pennines (yes, you guessed it, we went there from Essex in a day to get that one)! He
did the car and the house up in nine months whilst I was expecting Michael, our son.
Superman, eh? I did help a bit! Just in case we were bored, we also each had day jobs
and ran a DJ business, where we were out entertaining parties and weddings. Hey,
come on, we don't like watching television!
Anyway, whilst we were getting our collection together, we noticed the local
police were advertising to security mark valuable items. You could just pop down to a
Portacabin they had set up on the main road, and all would be done in a matter of
minutes. They hadn't met us! As we could hardly cart all our collection down to them,
bearing in mind we had jukeboxes, pinballs, pussy shooter, steer-a-ball, allwins and
bandits, we cheekily enquired if they could come to us. That was our first mistake, as
after the first policeman came and was with us for hours, he then brought his mate
back the next day. It wasn't that the job was too involved - we just couldn't get them
off the machines to do any marking. Trevor even ended up driving them back to the
station so they weren't late for their shift. They eventually gave us a couple of pens to
do the marking ourselves.
I'm sure the collectors amongst you have found the same thing, that people are
generally really fascinated by the machines. When we were having carpets fitted in the
house, it took ages because the carpet fitter wanted to keep putting songs on the
jukebox or play on the machines. Such is their magic; funny in this day and age of X
Boxes, PS3s and computers. As Michael grew up, his young friends wanted to play on
the machines, and not on his other toys. It does say something about simple pleasures.
We seemed to be getting quite well known in Southend for our machines, and
were approached by the Southend Pier Museum to do an exhibition for them. This we
did, and they still have some of our machines on display, which is quite handy, as it's
somewhere else to keep them. One is a rather nice Ruffler and Walker Tower Bridge.
Because of our connections with various car clubs, we have given a few talks on the
history of the machines at the Enfield Museum of Power, and they too have our
Hawtins and Carousel all wins on display.
Trevor and I did try to get a unit on Southend pier. We wanted to have some
machines, jukeboxes and pinballs in it and run it like a sixties milk bar. We also
wanted to possibly arrange times when local school children could come and visit and
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