Hi Everyone,
And welcome back. Before the commercial break, we heard about the sudden appearance of a video-arcade scene in the small Scottish town of Kilsyth in the early 1980s. While the story told was based on what I could remember, I had some help from the nation’s archive materials, and a friend. This is how it all went down…
The Archives
Kilsyth’s relationship with amusement machines didn’t begin in the early 1980s.
About 10 years ago, some video-game enthusiasts mustered the support of the now defunct Jammaplus community to stage a retro-gaming event over a winter weekend in the Coachman hotel. This was very handy for me, as I could stay with my parents for the duration. On discussing it with my dad, he mentioned an earlier hostelry on the same site, which had been popular in his youth – at some point in the late 50s or early 60s. This seems to have been a ‘milk bar’. Hard as it now seems to believe, there was still a locally enforced prohibition in the town in those days. But the main reason for the ‘bar’s’ popularity was that it had pinball machines – the only place, locally, where that kind of entertainment could be found.
By the time I started frequenting the local pubs, there had been no pin-tables for years. What they did all have, however, was at least one ‘fruit machine’, something that seems to have been common since at least the 1970s. Known officially as ‘amusements with prizes’ these kinds of machines were and still are heavily regulated. To be able to operate them legally, businesses needed a licence. The general conditions had been laid out by the Gaming Act 1968, and tightened up by the Lotteries and Amusements Act 1976. However, the District Councils kept an even tighter reign on developments, through the application of strict planning conditions on the kinds of activities which could be undertaken by traders on a given premesis. This might limit the type or number of machines that could be sited, the opening hours of the venue, the minimum age of the customers and more besides.
As far as I can work out, from at least 1982, any buinesses hoping to site multiple video arcade games also needed to apply for (and be granted!) a ‘Public Entertainment License’ under the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982. While all of this sounds like tedious legalese (which it is!), the prospect of licences and applications, means the prospect of a paper trail, and with it – potentially – more information to help fill the gaps in my crumbling memory. Encouraged by this realisation, I headed off to the National Library of Scotland on George IV Bridge in Edinburgh.
To simplify the process of trawling through the records, I thought I should probably start by nailing down the names and addresses of the arcades themselves, and if possible, their owners. My first instinct was to go through the old phone directories. These were easy enough to get hold of, and what a blast from the past that was – massive chunks of printed paper that were once so familiar, that could be found in every single house in the land, that were torn in half for sport by celebrity strongmen, but which I hadn’t seen for decades. I’d also forgotten about the flimsy paper and cheap ink they used that came off all over your hands. Ten minutes in the phone book, and anyone looking at your hands would mistake you for a chimney sweep!
The best possible outcome was that I’d look up ‘Amusement arcades’ in one of the phone books, and find a ready-made list of all the locations I was interested in. In reality, of course, I knew the information they contained was never going to be complete.
The Yellow Pages, for example, had a classifications index over 20-pages long, including the promising-looking ‘Amusement parks and arcades’, and ‘Leisure centres’. But that doesn’t mean that every location that we might consider an arcade would be listed there. For one thing, securing an entry in the Yellow Pages was a business proposition with an expense, which many smaller concerns and start-ups might not have wanted to incurr. I suspect there may have been more than a few businesses for whom video-games were a side-hustle, which they didn’t want to advertise any more conspicuoulsy than through word-of-mouth, lest they fall foul of the District Council, or the taxman. In even more cases, however, the ‘spacies’ will have been a temporary or experimental aside to an established line of business, and probably not worth the bother.
I quickly found the details of several of the arcades I used to frequent in Falkirk, Stirling and Glasgow – which I’ll explore in my next post. Frustratingly, this particular angle revealed precisely none of the venues where I invested / sacrificed so many 10 pees in Kilsyth. I couldn’t even find the names of all of the business.
Based on what I’ve written above, I was expecting to find at least four:
- Rennie’s the Bakers,
- Shannon’s the Newsagents,
- A proper, bona-fide arcade, with at least 10 video arcade games and a pool table, whose name and exact location I could not remember,
- The tiny grocers known locally as ‘The Wee Shop’, run by a businesman called Harry Wilson.
Of these four establishments, Rennie’s was there under ‘Bakers & Confectioners – Retail’. It’s still there now, at 22 Main Street.
I also expected to find Shannon’s and Harry Wilson’s under ‘Newsagents & News Vendors’, or ‘Grocers, Supermarkets & General Stores’, but nothing, nada… although not entirely zilch. Being able to remember roughly where those locations were, I checked for the addresses. For some reason, what was Shannon’s was still listed as ‘Matear’s’!!! Big up all the grannies out there! While I found another of Harry Wilson’s groceries, he doesn’t seem to have put his name to ‘The Wee Shop’, which was apparently officially-known as ‘Highland Park Stores’.
There was no information, however, about the other arcade.
A friend suggested I try to fill the gaps by looking through back-issues of the local newspaper, The Kilsyth Chronicle. Initially, I was reluctant to do so. The last time I’d done that kind of thing, which was – admittedly – decades ago, the materials came on microfiche or microfilm, which is an absolute chore to use, and difficult to photograph. But luck, it seems, was on my side. On going back to the Library to collect my order, it turned out that they only had physical copies of the paper in stock. Woot!
Looking back through those old papers brought back so many memories. The Chronicle was another one of those things that was always there in the past. Everyone who lived in the town read it, mainly because it chased down every local crime, scandal and happening to fill its column inches. It’s also where you could buy and sell your unwanted shizz for free through it’s ‘Fifteen Pound Flyer’ section. No Facebook Marketplace in them days. It was also amusing to rediscover the immediately transparent and dare-I-say unprofessional levels of bias in how some of the issues-of-the-day were reported. But that’s a tangent for another time.
Figuring that the new arcade opened in 1984, I started with the box of newspapers from that year. Disappointingly, there was a gap from the 19th of January to the 5th of April. Miraculously, however, the next available issue, for Thursday the 12th of April, had a massive clue on the front page!!!
The arcade had been at 46-48 Main Street, and the proprietor, a Mr Francis Harvey! As you can see, Frances had gone out of his way to make his planned business acceptable to the local Community Council (basically a residents’ associastion), as well as the District Council, which presided over licencing and planning decisions. To the detriment of his own business, he was going to stay closed during the lucrative lunchtime slot. And I’m wondering now, if that’s because the Rennie’s was already doing that? In any case, the Rennies weren’t overly pleased at the prospect of further competition, and had employed local lawyer and sharp-actor, Alastair Mathie, to raise objections on their behalf. What’s really interesting about all of this, are the comments offered by Mathie on their behalf. You’ll note that he plays the ‘social and moral danger’ card – which had been very prominent in the media back then. It is also very interesting how he suggests that ‘space invader machines […] could lead youngsters on to gaming machines which in turn could lead to an addiction to gambling’. Why is this interesting? Later that year another gaming-related application was considered by the council. It has been submitted by the Rennies.
You see, those sneaky bar-stools were already planning to refocus their own games room on just the kind of activity their lawyer had suggested was socially and morally dangerous. Even worse, on looking through the surviving records of Cumbernauld and Kilsyth District Council, I discovered that the Rennies had submitted their application before the meeting about Francis’ application had been held!
Someone who was justifiable irked by this was Mr Francis Harvey. While it’s not mentioned in the newspaper, the records of Cumbernauld and Kilsyth District Council show that he had submitted a formal letter of objection to the licensing committee, opposing the Rennie’s development. It seems that the Community Council had also been extremely concerned. In the end, however, the upstanding local businessman got his way! But this was to be a pyrrhic victory. By the looks of things, there weren’t enough hardcore gamblers in the town to feed his new morality vacuum. After a few months, it seems to have died a death, after which the building was sold, refurbished, and repurposed. That’ll teach him, eh?
I made several visits to the library, where I went through all the available copies of The Chronicle from 1982 to 1986. While this was tough going, it didn’t take quite as long as you might think. For a start, it was a weekly paper. There were also gaps in the collection. Significantly, however, there were rarely more than 10 or 12 pages of news in those things, only 4 or 5 of which were relevant to Kilsyth. The rest covered the outlying villages. While I didn’t find any substantive information on Kilsyth’s arcades, I was able to trace the beginning of the Rennies refurbishment of 22 Main Street to 1981 and the planning permission they were granted to undertake ‘erections, alterations and part-demolition’. What was even more interesting were the adverts.
In the world of ‘retro-gaming’, there is a persistant myth that the video-games industry, and with it the whole video-games phenomenon, suffered a devastating crash in 1983. If we focus on sales of massively expensive cartidge-based home-gaming systems – like the Atari VCS 2600 – or the high-volume sales of dedicated arcade cabinets – such as Pac Man – in the USA, that’s probably accurate. Here in the UK, however, this is precisley when gaming at home, and certainly in my local arcades really began to take off. Throughout 1983 and 1984, The Chronicle is full of stories on local computer initiatives, computer-themed events, and the sale of computer systems. These are also the only years where there is a wave of applications and approvals for the opening of new arcades.
Check out those prices! And check out these!
The next step in my investigation (!) was to have a look through the minutes of the Council’s Committee Meetings. While some of the bigger councils kept discrete sets of minutes for Planning, Licensing, and other committees, the surviving material from Cumbernauld and Kilsyth District Council was all lumped together in one bundle. I imagined this would have been stuffed into a single, large storage box. But the reality was rather more civillised. Nobly assisted by fellow arcadist, TartanGP, we set out on an expedition for the North Lanarkshire Heritage Archives in Motherwell.
After steeling our nerves at a nearby fastfood restaurant, we arrived to find the documents we’d requested neatly bound into a series of fetching hardback volumes. On leafing through them, however, it was clear that large swathes of information had been consigned to the dustbin of history. Not only were there major gaps in the records, but loads of examples of overlap and repetition, and no indexing to speak of. We did manage to find the minutes of the meetings that fed into The Chronicle’s reportage, but this was – surprisingly – revealled to be more or less verbatim. I suppose that simply copying down what was said in the Council Chambers was easier for the journos than creating any actual stories!
Sadly, I wasn’t able to confirm when Francis Harvey’s arcade came to an end, or to find the short newspaper articles that reported the troubles that forced it to close. What I was able to do was trace how my own local arcade ecosystem sprung into life, fourished, then fizzled out. Don’t worry, though, readers, ‘cos in the end, I wasn’t too sad. In fact, it may surprise you to learn that I wasn’t particularly bothered. That wasn’t because I’d gone off arcade machines. It was because suddenly, my horizons had been significantly widened.
Arcade Odysseus 