Peter Simper 5p

22mm, brass

About this token:

• Mike writes: I worked for Peter Simper from 1968 to 1985. I designed many fruit machines between 1968 and 1975 including holding patents on two devices. I then managed the South of England operation from our offices in Bordon Hampshire until 1985. Peter Simper tokens were used in Awards With Prizes (AWP) fruit machines from the mid sixties when the UK government betting and gaming legislation licensed these AWP machines for use in trading establishments open to the general public such as public houses (pubs) hotels and cafes, etc,.
  
  Membership clubs, on the other hand, were licenced by the UK government to use gaming machines with much larger cash only payouts.
  
  Thoughout the nineteen seventies and into the eighties AWP machines had a mix of small cash payout and larger value token payout as the government allowed staged cost of living increases in cost of play and maximum value of single payout. In line with these increaes and over years Peter Simper and other manufacturer's tokens were valued from sixpence pre-decimal currency to 5p - 10p - 20p - 25p in decimal currency.
  
  Tokens were not allowed by law to be exchanged by the player for cash with the site owner but only exchanged for goods. In this way the UK government (who were receiving massive revenues in many direct and indirect forms of taxation associated with every coin placed in a machine) suggested hypocritically that by the use of tokens they were limiting gambling, whilst actually attempting to pacify the self righteous anti gambling lobby.
  
  In the UK fruit machine industry these tokens were handled much as a component part, for topping up machines so that the machine always held sufficient to make the payout, and not considered as cash. Therefore, even with the introduction of computer controlled security and accounting, massive corruption existed. A publican running his own business as a tenant of a brewery owned public house had by contract to share the nett fruit machine proceeds with his brewery landlord. But, since he was to be regularly reimbursed from the fruit machine takings in cash for the tokens he had redeemed for goods, it would be in his interest to get as many extra tokens as he could, and he would be only to happy to provide fruit machine sales staff, engineers and collectors with cigarettes and or other favours for adequate token supplies, even putting in spurious service calls just before a collection was due to get his extra token supplies in time.
  
  Eventually the UK licencing laws were put in a logical setting allowing for cash only machines and tokens subsequently dissappeared. Someone who worked in the fruit machine industry until a few years ago says that, from memory, the reqirement in law for AWP machines using token payouts stopped in the early nineteen nineties.
• Henke writes: Peter Simper (Bath UK) in R. Hayes (1986): British Machine Tokens: 303.2
• Found this on the web: Peter Simper was a private company which operated more than 5,000 pieces throughout the UK. They pioneered the computerization of gaming machine operation for two principal reasons - to provide an absolute security check on all transactions and to collect all performance data and provide management information site and model earnings analysis..... The growth in Playsafe coincided with the sale of the various Peter Simper machine operating businesses which was completed in 1991. Subsequently the Playsafe company was merged with its Peter Simper parent, which was founded in 1946, and the original company was renamed Playsafe Monitoring.

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