VICTORIAN JUKE-BOX

New Zealand Listener, Volume 24, Issue 621, 25 May 1951, Page 20

VICTORIAN JUKE-BOX

by

L.

Cleveland

HE Polyphon leaned back forlornly into its dark corner on the New Brighton pier. Reverently we approached it and gazed into its mute face. We slipped our offering, a penny, into the slot in its massive oaken side. We waited. Seconds of suspense. A feeble creak, then the faint whirring of old, tired, trembling wheels. Time ticked back a cog. Back almost a whole century. Into our ‘Jaded city ears stole the quiet dignified tones of an old organ. Trams, wireless, milk shake machines, ice-cream-sucking children faded into background like a film sequence. The Polyphon played on. Generously it gave us @ little thing from The Geisha called "Star of My Soul," not once, but three times for the same penny. "He’s got a bit cranky these days," said the lady who worked the turnstile on to the pier. "Won’t stop when he’s started. They have to poke his insides." She had white hair, spectacles, a smile. Said the Polyphon had always been there. Once, right out in the sunlight in the passage-way where everyone passed. Now a little rustier, with

its great oak cabinet battered and unpolished, in a gloomy corner. We peeped through the glass face at the big clockwork motor. It pumped the air for the organ through a pin pattern of tiny slits on a revolving steel disc the size of a cartwheel. "Made in Leipzig, 1869," it said-with underneath (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) @ piece of Victorian vulgarity about somebody’s herbs and pickles. While we played with the idea that some German organ grinder had invented the juke-box and could only sell it in New Zealand, we learned that the Polyphon was not alone in Christchurch. Its companion was, indeed, installed in a more comfortable heme where it was regularly polished and admired. This turned out to be the bar of the Occidental Hotel. Cast iron lampposts with electric light bulbs where gas lamps used to flare, elaborate window etchings for no longer existent brands of liquor, imitation cast iron Versailles mirrors, horse hair sofas and rows of little empty glass barrels that once held fine brands of whisky and brandy. But city business men, drinking, cared more for race results than "The Blue Danube" on an old organ. It had not been wound up these ten years. So the New Brighton Polyphon, as we decided to call this piece of sociological research, was perhaps in better shape after all, still playing, and with the other machines. Among the other machines there was the "Great American Character Reader" from the Chicago exhibition of 1908 (your character and disposition correctly calculated by an eminent Mexican phrenologist); there was the "Automatic Astrologer," "Lovers’ Letters," the "Grip Tester" (with occupational ratings from the lusty wrenching of boilermakers and wagoners to the dainty squeeze of the typists); and a contrivance known as "a | medical battery." All rusty, but still doing business. OR twopence we clanked through the turnstile on to the pier-a shivery old pile of timber, with four. fishermen on a verandah-like extension that quivered each time the Pacific Ocean hit it; seagulls and the carvings and inscriptions of generations of lovers and small boys. Looking back along the old pier we could see something of the gap between the two centuries, There was no band playing Gilbert and Sullivan, only a wireless set rasping while four members of a religious society with a harmonium spoke about sin and cigarettes to two dogs and three old men sitting on a bench in the sun. And the Sunday afternoon crowd? Not promenading on the pier, listening to the Polyphon and having their fortunes told? We saw what had happened. Battalions of motor-cars lined along an empty section on the foreshore where once there used to be a merry-go-round and a miniature steam train. Inside these cars sat the same Sunday crowd now all split up into atoms, each one peering bleakly out on to an empty beach, not stirring; the cars like black beetles on a dead log, We came away a little disappointed. More than the crowds were lacking. What had happened to the Victorian setpiece of risqué entertainment? As children we remembered it. Now it was the thing we most wanted to enjoy. "What the Butler Saw." Why had it been removed? Was it too naughty, too daring, for the authorities of a post-war world to allow as popular amusement? Had it been de-registered, perhaps sent back to Wellington and censored? . Ah! Of course. That was it. There it would be now. In the film censor’s office. On a shelf, with a little black curtain over it. .