Ingenious, mesmerizing, and absolutely revolutionary. Those are only some of the words that we can use to describe the three Dennison sisters and their contribution to England's penny arcades.
When I was a child and my parents would bring me to the mall, there was one place I would always beg them to allow me to go, and that was the arcade. Making my way to that corner of the mall, flashing with neon lights and 8-bit sounds and music, a rush of excitement would fill my heart. I'd go up to the counter and exchange a bill for several tokens, and then I would wile away the time while my parents did their shopping.
A hundred years ago, such establishments also existed, like the Blackpool Tower in England. There, vacationers, holiday-makers, families, and other tourists would visit to see the attractions and find some entertainment in them.
Back then, Blackpool had a thriving tourism industry, taking notes from other places and attractions like Chicago's Ferris Wheel, Coney Island's rides, Berlin's trams, and the Eiffel Tower, a 518-foot replica of which had been constructed as a symbol for the image they wanted to portray of the city.
With all this flurry of excitement, innovation, and spectacle, John Dennison finally gained an avenue and opportunity to showcase his own arcade machines. Using his experience working at an engineering firm as well as drawing inspiration from his hobby of building automatic models, he displayed several of his coin-operated clockwork models of ships and agricultural machinery at Dr. Cocker's Aquarium, Aviary, and Menagerie on Blackpool's seafront.
Later on, when Dr. Cocker's was replaced by the Blackpool Tower, Dennison continued the partnership with the new management, retaining his contract to provide coin-operated working models to the new tourist attraction. The machines turned a profit for Dennison, given the thousands of tourists who visit the Tower each day, who, for a few pennies, were able to find some amusement in Dennison's moving machines.
In 1924, John Dennison passed away at 77, and not wanting the business to fall by the wayside, the three Dennison sisters — Florence (36), Alice (34), and Eveline (28) — continued what their father had started. Florence became the business manager while her younger sisters fiddled and tinkered with the machines along with the scenery, props, characters and their costumes, as well as the plot and setting of the dioramas.
Building on from their father's designs, they added more movement to the characters in the scenario, and provided more exciting plot twists and reveals, which infused their working models with a life of their own and increasing the drama and entertainment experienced by the audience who pinched their pennies into the machines.
The machines grew in popularity, owing to the appeal of their more morbid sceneries like the one pictured above titled "Murder in the Museum", a reference to and inspired by the American film which was released that same year they built the machine.
When they first took over the business, the sisters' working models raked in annual earnings of £1,586 (around $83,500 today). A decade later, they were making £2,624 (about $170,500 today). And then, in the midst of WWII, with Blackpool's tourist base now including soldiers on leave, London civil servants, and evacuated women and children, their machines earned them £6,831 (approximately $311,500 today).
In 1944, right after the war, the sisters decided to sell off their entire collection and live the rest of their lives from the proceeds. The machines themselves continued in popularity for the next two decades, while the women behind them were mostly forgotten. It even came to a point when the Blackpool Tower Company posted a request on the Blackpool Gazette regarding the origins of the machines, to which the sisters themselves replied.
Many of the Dennison sisters' machines are quite rare collectibles, as many of them were handcrafted and uniquely designed, with a lot of them now considered as "lost". However, if any do resurface, they become embroiled in fierce bidding wars between collectors.
Some of the machines that survived now live in museums. Murder in the Museum, one of the sisters' most popular machines, is currently housed at the Abbey House Museum in Leeds, and still retains its charm for evoking wonder, amusement, and a childlike joy from anyone who gets to see it in action.
(Image credit: Jenny Elliot; Leeds Museums and Galleries)