The Beatles Played Here Plaque, Dingwall Town Hall

The Beatles Played Here plaque is on the front of Dingwall Town Hall, now Dingwall Museum, on the High Street in Dingwall, north-west of Inverness. It recalls the Beatles' concert there on 4 January 1963. Only 19 people are reported to have come, and the Dingwall Business Association later put up the plaque.

Nineteen people on a January night

The Beatles played Dingwall Town Hall on 4 January 1963, the second stop of a short winter run in the north of Scotland. The Ross-shire Journal advert listed the Drumbeats as support. The turnout has passed into local lore as the "Dingwall 19".

Most of the town went elsewhere that night. The Melotones, a local band, were playing the Pavilion at Strathpeffer a few miles away, and a press report of the time put that crowd at 1,200. One later account says the Chessmen topped that bill with the Melotones in support. Please Please Me came out about ten days after the Dingwall show.

A plaque and a reunion

The Dingwall Business Association fixed the plaque to the town hall wall and organised a Beatles night with the tribute band the Upbeat Beatles, hoping to bring back as many of the original 19 as it could trace. A local report of the concert said 15 of them were there. The unveiling has been reported as 8 April, but no report found gives the year. The plaque was in place by November 2014, when it was photographed for Geograph.

The building

The town hall began as a tolbooth completed in 1745 and was remodelled in 1905, when it gained its columned front portico. It is a Category B listed building and has housed Dingwall Museum since 1975.

In June 2023 a Primary 5 class from Dingwall Primary School staged a Beatles concert in the hall, with some songs translated into Gaelic, and sold it out. Their teacher said the aim was to fill the room 60 years after the band could not. For a Beatles-related memorial elsewhere in Scotland, see the Linda McCartney Memorial Garden in Campbeltown.