New book on juke box rock which shocked Lancashire's older generation

10:46am Thursday 28th May 2009

By Gill Johnson

WHEN the sound of rock’n’roll spread across the Atlantic in the 1950s, teenagers listened to the new sound on juke boxes made in Lancashire.

The new music was frowned on by the older generation, but it spawned a whole new culture across the county.

Just after the war there were fewer than 100 juke boxes in Britain – but more than 15,000 by 1958 – according to a new book “Juke Box Britain” by Dr Adrian Horn, of Lancaster University.

The first ones were made in Blackpool – by the Hawtin’s factory from 1945, and later by the Ditchburn Company, of Lytham St. Annes.

Dr Horn’s book is full of recollections from people in the North West who were teenagers at the time, and who remember there was strong resistance to juke boxes and Teddy Boys by the shocked older generation.

Laura Dowding, from Nelson, said her father checked what was suitable for her to listen to, while Valerie Tome remembered that her family shared one radio, but no-one was allowed to tune into Radio Luxembourg.

She said: “My father claimed that tuning it into Radio Luxembourg would seriously distort the mechanism and ruin the membranes and blow up the tubes.

“But my friend Rita, who had everything, was bought a portable radio, and I can remember us lying on the floor in her bedroom and screaming to Radio Luxembourg.

“I would scream when Frankie Vaughan came on, and Rita would scream when Dickie Valentine came on.”

The only places for young people to hear the new music then were coffee bars, amusement arcades, fairgrounds, and at seaside resorts such as Blackpool and Morecambe.

“Teenagers were earning more in real terms than ever before and spending it on commodities ‘of no lasting value’, like make-up, clothes, records and juke box music,” said Dr Horn.

“These new forms of youth culture were seen as American, gaudy, a waste of money, un-British and socially retrogressive by culturally entrenched ‘Establishment’ bodies like the BBC, police, magistrates and school authorities.

“The generational frictions were stretched further by the Teddy Boy subculture, which led to a moral panic and general social indignation.”

One chief constable warned in 1952 that: “It is our experience that far more immorality among young people comes from milk bars than from pubs.

“My officers know that dances and milk bars, where the girls and boys gather, are the place where they tend to go astray.”

And Police Superintendent N Brown said that the sound of the peculiar music thumped out on juke boxes might be a trial to elderly people living nearby.

“To be quite frank,” he retorted, “nice young people do not go to these places after 8pm!

"It is my experience that where these licences are granted, after that nothing but trouble can arise for the people who manage these places and for the police who try to maintain order.”

“Juke Box Britain: Americanisation and Youth Culture 1945-60” is published by Manchester University Press.