Music Maker Mark 1
It is a Jack Hylton Music Maker and to
date nobody has come up with another one, I would be most interested to
meet anyone who has one or knows more than I do about the development of
the model.
For those in the group who may be interested it is the first English
Jukebox to be mass produced in a proper factory system.
It was the brain child of the band leader Jack Hylton who's name it bears.
He brought the idea from his regular trips to the USA and a company in
Lancashire called Hawtins manufactured it. The jukeboxes were not sold
they were rented out with a share of the cash box takings as payment, if
the site was poor the juke was moved on and so on.
At some point a
Mark 2 version was designed and the mechanisms from the
MK1 was transferred into the new cabinets, the old original cases were
then burned. The Mark 2 model is what became known as The Ditchburn Music
Maker because at some point The Ditchburn organisation also in
Lancashire aquired the manufacturing rights etc. The saga goes on as
Dithcburn also preferred to rent the machines rather than sell them out
right, and in the fifties they also had a conversion programme known as
the Mark 2R this involved cutting the whole of the cabinet top off
and replacing it with a new glassfibre unit together with a mod to the
mechanism which made it play 30 45s. So every mark2 R resulted in the
total destruction of an original Mark 2. They are therefore quite rare and
of course the mk2 is very Art deco and very British.
Hawtins Factory Floor 1947
