A museum dedicated to British jukeboxes produced in Blackpool and Lytham St Annes opened exclusively as part of a series of events celebrating Fifties and Sixties culture.
The Ditchburn Jukebox Museum in St Annes opened for three days to welcome people involved with Jukebox:The Teenage Revolution project, supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, thanks to National Lottery players; the Granada Foundation and Garfield Weston Foundation.
The Museum features a selection of jukeboxes made by Ditchburn Equipment Ltd of Lytham St Annes, one of the UK’s first manufacturers of jukeboxes.
Visitors were treated to a talk by Museum founder and owner, Karl Dawson, who bought his first Ditchburn Music Maker jukebox in 2017 and who plans to open the Museum and coffee bar to the public next May.
Since setting up a Facebook page and website dedicated to Ditchburn’s, Karl has been inundated with information and photographs from people who worked at the factory or who have fond memories of playing jukeboxes during their teenage years in the Fifties and Sixties.
The first jukeboxes to be made in the area were produced at Hawtin’s Novelty Company in Blackpool in 1946. However, when Hawtin’s decided jukeboxes weren’t going to take off, they sold that side of their business to Geoffrey Norman Ditchburn who moved production to Lytham St Annes in 1952 and the rest, as they say, is history.
“Ditchburn’s put rock and roll on the UK map,” said Karl. “In its early days, the BBC wouldn’t play popular music so when teenagers wanted to listen to music, they always had to find a jukebox in a coffee bar somewhere.”
It was Ditchburn staff who selected the records for the jukeboxes which were from the American charts initially.
The history of jukebox production on the Lancashire coast and of teenage culture in the Fifties and Sixties is being celebrated by Jukebox: The Teenage Revolution, a project organised by Lancashire-based arts and heritage charity, Mirador and Lancaster University Library.
If you have memories of being a teenager in the Fifties and Sixties or photographs from that era, please Get In Touch.
About Lancaster University
Lancaster University is a collegiate university in the UK city of Lancaster and a member of the N8 Research Partnership: an association of the eight most research-intensive universities in the North of England.
Lancaster University is a highly ranked UK university with a global reputation for excellence in research and teaching. Lancaster is consistently ranked among the top 15 in all three major UK university league tables and continues to build a growing reputation both nationally and internationally.
About The National Lottery Heritage Fund
As the largest dedicated funder of the UK’s heritage, The National Lottery Heritage Fund’s vision is for heritage to be valued, cared for and sustained for everyone, now and in the future as set out in our strategic plan, Heritage 2033.
Over the next ten years, the Heritage Fund aims to invest £3.6billion raised for good causes by National Lottery players to bring about benefits for people, places and the natural environment.
The Heritage Fund helps protect, transform and share the things from the past that people care about, from popular museums and historic places, our natural environment and fragile species, to the languages and cultural traditions that celebrate who we are.
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About the Garfield Weston Foundation
Established in 1958, the Garfield Weston Foundation is a family-founded grant-maker that gives money to support a wide variety of charities across the UK. The Foundation’s funding comes from an endowment of shares in the Weston family business – a successful model that still exists today. The Weston family have a consistent aim. The more successful the family businesses, the more money the Foundation can donate.
Each year the Foundation gives away its income and donations have continued to grow. Since it was established it has donated over £1.5 billion, of which over half has been given away in the past ten years. In the most recent financial year the Foundation gave away over £100 million to nearly 1,800 charities across the UK.
