Put your penny in the slot

Those finger-trapping wartime vending machines must be the most uncollected collectable around, says John Windsor

Gaudy, cast-iron vending machines can be spotted in films showing troop trains arriving home for VE-Day, standing like sentinels at the back of the crowds. Rusty, empty and obsolete, many were left screwed to their pillars on railway platforms until well into the Fifties, hollow reminders of wartime rationing.

Almost all were then scrapped - relegating to nostalgia the sight of their decorative cast-iron scrolls, the sound of heavy, old-fashioned pennies rattling down the chute and the feel of that recalcitrant steel drawer that insisted on testing your grip before yielding its bar of chocolate.

They must be one of today's most uncollected collectables.To see a vintage vending machine - if that is how you choose to spend your time - you would have to make for a transport museum's coin-operated ticket machines. Few other old vending machines survive.

Possibly the only British private collection, of up to 100, is tucked away in a restored castle in Larbert, Sterlingshire, the cherished property of 79-year-old John Findlay-Russell, founder in 1935 of the Russell of Larbert vending machine company. He is the last British connoisseur of such automated marvels as pre-war coffee and tea machines, whose demonstration models he imported from America and preserves in working order.

Now that the first British collectors' guide to vending machines has been published, will a new breed of enthusiast beat a path to Mr Findlay- Russell's well-fortified door? Unlikely. Even the book's author, 60-year- old Colin Emmins, who had a career in the soft drinks industry before taking to writing, has never owned a vending machine. His immaculate house in a well-trimmed suburb of Ealing, west London, where he lives with his mother, does not seem to be the kind of home that would adopt one.

He is aware that vending machines are not every collector's cup of tea. It is not just their castle-sized bulk that deters. After all, gaming machines, their sassy cousins, are mostly just as large but fetch big money (the James Smith private collection of penny arcade machines totalled $3.3m, nearly double its $1.8m estimate, at Sotheby's New York sale in September).

Mr Emmins explains: "Whereas gaming machines are part of leisure activity, a fun thing, vending machines are utilitarian - even if they sell refreshments that are next door to fun."

Clearly, cherries and plums offering the thrill of a gamble are sexier than a bar of fruit and nut guaranteed by the Sale of Goods Act. But you have only to see a picture of a pre-war red Nestl 1d chocolate bar vending machine, or a railway platform ticket machine, a Post Office stamp machine with heavy tabbed metal flap that trapped your fingers, a pay telephone with huge, idiot-proof buttons A and B, or even a coin-operated weighing machine - remember them? - to feel just a twinge of nostalgia.

Mr Emmins says: "Vending machines become part of your life without your realising it. When you realise how much they have changed, it makes you nostalgic."

Example: those floor-standing London Underground ticket machines, shaped like scribes' desks with sloping illuminated tops, offering destinations in the new decimal currency: 5p or 15p. We forgot about them when they were scrapped for today's holes in the wall. If any have survived, they could raise a pang or two.

Mr Emmins's fondest memories are of the cast-iron 1d red Nestl chocolate bar machine: "When I was four years old, just before the war, I used to go by train to visit my grandmother in Hanwell. Part of the ritual was that I was given three pennies to spend in the Nestl chocolate machine on the station platform - one bar for me, one each for my two cousins who used to visit her the following day. Getting the chocolate out was as much fun as eating it.

"I remember when war broke out because a notice appeared on the machine that said something like, 'This machine is empty for the duration of the war'."

In the United States, the most decorative vending machines have begun to acquire value. The highest price at auction is $34,500, at the Smith sale, for a 1907 Coney Island "Blinky Eyes Jolly Fellow" match vendor. Similar models have changed hands privately for more.

The last time a cast-iron match vendor came up at a British auction - at Bonhams four years ago - it was vaguely catalogued (no date, for example), lotted together with a wooden specimen, and fetched a mere £83. Someone, somewhere, might have a bargain. American one-armed bandits used to make up to £600 at Bonhams until it lost its gaming licence two years ago.

Dealers also price vending machines lower than gaming machines. You need to pay up to £300 for a wall-mounted "all-win" gaming machine of 1910-30, American Jennings one-armed bandits are worth £600-£1,000, and run-of-the-mill British bandits £200-£300. By contrast, that ultra-nostalgic cast-iron pre-First World War Nestl chocolate machine (which would doubtless be known as the "penny red" if it were more avidly collected), is a comparatively modest £600.

That is, if you can find one. Britain's only full-time dealer in vintage vending machines, Dave McGladdery of Brighton, has not seen one for months. But he might be able to find you an inter-war aluminium version for £300 or so if you are patient.

He sells early Sixties KitKat vending machines for £40, Polo mint machines of the late Fifties and early Sixties for £60 and late Fifties Spangles machines, with their beautiful artwork, for £100. A late Fifties Irish O'Girl penny chewing-gum machine is £150. "There is no really interesting artwork after 1960," Mr McGladdery says.

His customers either screw the machines to the walls of their theme restaurants as curios, not minding whether they work or not, or take them home and get them working as conversation pieces, as do all-win enthusiasts. You can use today's tubes of Polo in old machines by shortening their length. But chocolate bars are problematic because their size varied with inflation.

If you do not simulate vintage chocolate bars of the right size and weight, you could end up with the problem that bedevilled the postcard machine invented by the grand old man of vending machines, Percival Everitt, in the 1880s, the decade when automatic vending proliferated. His pull-out slide that delivered postcards from the bottom of a pile (the original "column and drawer" principle) tended to scrunch them up. The Post Office granted his company a licence - the first of its kind - on condition that the machine carried a notice saying it had nothing to do with the Post Office.

Mr Emmins says of Everitt: "I have not been able to establish who patented column-and-drawer machines. It does not seem to have been Everitt. But it was he who approached the Salter company, which made spring balances, with the suggestion that they should make coin-operated weighing machines. He seems to have been the sort of inventor who had the rare knack of getting things off the drawing board and into production: both ingenious and practical. I'd like to know more about him."

Victorian inventors devoted a lot of ingenuity to devices that tried to outwit "slugs" - fake coins - by weighing them or gauging their velocity. It was 20th-century electronics that finally brought success - but the 20th century brought other hazards, such as rapid changes in coinage, the complexities of VAT, and late-night shopping.

One victim was the milk vending machine of the Sixties. Milk was always a bulky, relatively low-priced product and machines were expensive, so profit margins were precariously thin. Adaptation to coinage changes and VAT was near-impossible because the law forbids the sale of milk in other than multiples of a pint or half-pint. Then late-night convenience shopping made the machines obsolete. The specimen in the Findlay-Russell collection may not look like an icon of social change. But it is.

'Automatic Vending Machines' by Colin Emmins (Shire Album,£2.25). Dave McGladdery, viewing by appointment only (01273 736622).