I was born, and grew up, in Ormskirk but my father was Liverpool born and therefore Liverpool was his club. I tagged along as a child and it never occurred to me to support anyone else. My first football experience was being taken to Anfield to watch Liverpool take on Lech Poznan in the European Cup in 1984 and I have fond memories of visiting Anfield with my father on other occasions, standing on the Kop (well, sitting on the crush barriers so I could see!) to watch the great Liverpool sides of the late 80s.
My first Southport game was not until 1992 where for reasons completely unbeknown to me, I found myself at a game against Marine at Haig Avenue. That season Southport won the Northern Premier League, and I became a regular from 1993, Southport’s first season in the G.M. Vauxhall Conference.
As an enthusiastic student at Ormskirk Grammar School I created my first website. Short of a topic I chose Southport FC and included the post match analysis of a naïve teenager in written form. I wondered if the club would be interested so I wrote a letter to them. Charlie Clapham wrote a nice letter back thanking me for my support and suggested I spoke to programme editor Derek Hitchcock about how I could help volunteer at the club.
With the internet in its real infancy the club obviously wouldn’t have known the potential value in having an official website but I was given essentially an “ok” to run an unofficial site. After a few years running the website and with Southport having been the first Conference club to have a website at all, around the time of the Wembley visit I was asked if it could be made official – I was delighted to say yes.
In the early 2000s my father moved to Glasgow and began to work for The Celtic Football Club, a club steeped in history and tradition. Ever since I had first read the opening chapter of ‘the book’ (as the Complete League History of Southport FC by Geoff Wilde and Michael Braham is most often referred to) in the mid-90s I had been fascinated with the early history of Southport Football Club, and seeing the way that Celtic embraced and celebrated its history made me even more keen to see Southport celebrate its own.
In 2006 the club announced its move back into full-time football and as I hold a bachelors degree in Communication and Media, Haydn Preece asked me to take on the voluntary press officer role he was vacating to become CEO. I did the role for 3 years and enjoyed it very much.
It was around this time that I developed an interest not only in the history of the club but in record keeping and began to independently build a site which included all the historical results and player information. I wanted to be in a position where any supporter could easily look up a player or manager and see their records for us, or look up an opponent and see our record against them. I’m very fortunate that over the years, as my own interests grew, and I started to keep my own Southport FC records, Geoff and Michael continued to indulge by enthusiasm.
Away from football I have worked as a Business Analyst in the Financial Services industry since 2005. My analytical mindset lends itself to research work and in 2019 I started the Southport FC Former Players Association to help promote the history and heritage of the club, and to recognise the hundreds of players that have made their contributions, big or small, along the way. After four years running independently of the club, although with its blessing and support, the FPA became part of the club in 2023 and is overseen by Rob Urwin, the club Head of Media.
I’ve spent a number of years researching the very early years of Southport Football Club and have contributed a number of articles on the subject to the Club’s match day programme and Club website, but, encouraged by Michael Braham, decided that it was perhaps about time I wrote a book. That book, “The Town’s Game” was published in July 2022, and covers the period of 1872 to 1889 and the events that led up to the formation of the current club in 1888.
DJH
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