How Three Sisters Revolutionized England’s Penny Arcades

[pennymachines]

How Three Sisters Revolutionized England’s Penny Arcades

The Dennison sisters amassed a small fortune with their morbid “working models.”

By Jenny Elliott, Atlas Obscura, July 23, 2024

[slotalot]

I am lucky to be able to say that I have have had the privilege of working on the "Dennison's Murder at the Museum" working model, though it was far from working at the time. I would like to share with you a view of the mechanism, minus the motor, which the museum had managed to remove and lose. Also a short video I took at the time as I moved the model through its movements by hand.

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[brigham]

I read once that original John Dennison working models are now rare, as a result of most having been mutilated by his daughters after his death.

[moonriver]

I read once that original John Dennison working models are now rare, as a result of most having been mutilated by his daughters after his death.

You're being a little dismissive there Colin. The Dennison models are rare as you say, they are all one off's, however the daughters are to be commended for being unique in their field as entrepreneurial women taking over the family business following their Father's death, and continuing in business on their own especially in that era, and then going on to design and build from scratch, making their own parts, painting and dressing their own models in their own unique style. Personally I like the daughter's work far more, as they have significantly more movements and elaborate mechanisms and humorous design. Build quality, especially when compared to later manufacturers such as Kraft was as like night and day.
At the end of each week it was money in the cash box that was paramount, and if there was an opportunity to enhance some of their Father's earlier models which often had more simplistic movements then they did so. We see evidence in their famous diary that they closely watched their individual model takings figures and looked at opportunities to tweak or add subtle differences to enhance customer play, such as their Eugene Aram model. It has a black raising curtain reveal that they wrote in the diary they added the word MURDER in red across the curtain, and also the addition of a skeleton outside of the curtain , the accumulative effect being that these simple alterations intrigued people enough to achieve more play.
John Dennison was not averse to buying in French automata and re-casing or altering them for his own use in some way, for example his French Guillotine, and Floating Lady, and through the decades many other operators including Brenner modified and re-cased working models into their own uniform yellow painted cases.
Finally, how many other working model manufacturers of the day kept a written log, accompanied with photographs of each model they made, with descriptive notes and site takings figures?
The Dennison daughter's did all of that and left us a truly amazing legacy.
Amazing.

[daleman]

Just to pick up on the article. Whilst Nic Costa wrote back in 1988 that Dennison was the first recorded person in the world to make a living from coin freed devices (as per the unaccredited quote in the article) further research has revealed this to be untrue. By the time Dennison was operating there were many others making a living from this genre.

The grand daddy of the coin machine industry was John Perry who made his first coin machine in the 1840's and who by the 1850's was running his own arcade of coin freed devices in south west England. His pioneering work was taken up by the irascible George Lee who eventually ended up in Blackpool (he has a hard job keeping his trousers on where ladies were concerned). Both their life stories are amazing. Dennison was an also ran in this respect.

Anybody who is interested can buy a copy of Nic's new book from Amazon. The cover has been redesigned. Note what Greg Mclemore of the International Arcade Museum has to say about the book on the back cover