Margaret Brecknell – Author Of Celebrating Southport

Margaret Brecknell

– Author Of Celebrating Southport

Lancashire Magazine readers may have spotted my regular monthly features on people and places from the region’s past.

Iam incredibly fortunate to make my living these days as a freelance writer. Yet I didn’t find my dream job until I reached my fifties and even then it only happened because of an impulse decision to send an article about Samuel Johnson’s cat to a magazine.

From a very early age I showed a lot of enthusiasm for writing, possibly too much for my long-suffering family. I started out as a budding dramatist, who wrote and performed my own plays. One highlight each year was my Halloween “spectacular” which was usually performed in near darkness, apart from the occasion when I was so scared by my own words that I asked for the lights to be switched on.

Despite this promising start, any hopes of becoming the next Stephen King were soon dashed when I began to turn my attention to non-fiction. At the age of seven or eight, winter weekends and holidays were spent producing a series of illustrated

booklets on topics like British birds and bridges. I was clearly never afraid of a challenge as a writer in my early childhood, which is entirely the way it should be.

By my teenage years, writing for pleasure had become a thing of the past. During the “A” level and university degree years, I seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time writing essays on a range of not always fascinating topics. I studied Latin at the University of Manchester, which I loved, but some of the essay subjects were challenging. I recall being asked to write a 3000-word essay on whether the Roman poet, Horace, had taken part in a naval battle based on his use of the Latin word for seasickness. I became the queen of the wafflers, a terrible writing habit which I have had to work hard to eradicate ever since.

After university, I expected to become a journalist or librarian. Instead, to the surprise of many people, including myself, I applied successfully for a job as a PA to the head of a local stockbroking firm. I suspect that this was not because of my superb organisational skills, but rather that I was a huge cricket fan at the time, an enthusiasm which I shared with my new boss.

In time, I began to study for the industry’s professional exams, which resulted in more fascinating essay topics, such as the workings of the Monopolies & Mergers Commission. When I entered the profession as a fully qualified stockbroker, women were still very much in the minority. I was extremely fortunate to have supportive male and female colleagues who helped me tremendously in the early years. The job was entirely unpredictable and never boring, which suited me, but could be quite stressful. I had to learn quickly how to placate clients when things did not go entirely to plan and was not above resorting to my wellhoned talent for waffling.

By the spring of 2017, my days as a stockbroker were long behind me and I had not put pen to paper for many a year. Call it a mid-life crisis if you like, but I felt in need of a new challenge and hit upon the idea of attempting to have a piece of my writing published in a magazine. Now I was free again to write about subjects that interested me. As a devoted cat owner, it didn’t take me long to decide on the topic for that first feature. I chose to write about Hodge, the cat owned by Samuel Johnson of English dictionary fame in the early 18th century.

I didn’t really expect much of a response, but was delighted to receive a positive reaction from the magazine to which I sent it, and that spurred me on to send further features to a range of different publications. I was thrilled when my first feature on local history was published a couple of months later. These days I wouldn’t dream of writing a feature without pitching the idea to a magazine first, but, early on in my writing career, I often sent the completed piece to editors fearing that they would otherwise be deterred from commissioning the idea because of my lack of published work.

Gradually I began to assemble a portfolio of published articles, which has grown exponentially over the last five years. I’ve now contributed to over thirty different print and online publications, both here and overseas, on a wide range of different subjects. Possibly the strangest of them all was an article on films featuring men in kilts for a now sadly defunct US website.

Below: Carousel next to Southport’s Miniature Railway

The next few months are set to be an exciting time for me professionally, as my latest book, Celebrating Southport, will be published by Amberley Publishing on 15th November 2022. This is my second book for Amberley. The first, Secret Skipton, was published during the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020.

Illustrated throughout, I hope Celebrating Southport will appeal to residents, visitors and all those with links to the town. I aim to celebrate the famous seaside resort’s most significant landmarks, people and achievements. I set out to discover how an innkeeper from nearby Churchtown, named William Sutton, came to be credited as Southport’s “founder” and why this claim was later disputed. I learn the story behind the development of Southport’s famous tree-lined shopping boulevard, Lord Street, as well as the resort’s grand Victorian pier, the Marine Lake and the remarkable Monument to its World War I dead. Another of the resort’s once iconic landmarks, the Winter Gardens, was lost to posterity.

In researching this book, I discovered some fun facts relating to celebrity visits to the town. One early 19th-century tourist, the future French Emperor Napoleon III, is alleged to have been so impressed with the layout of Southport’s Lord Street that he later used it as a blueprint for the redevelopment of central Paris. Southport may not have featured in the 2017 Hollywood blockbuster musical, The Greatest Showman, which tells the story of 19th-century US entertainment mogul, PT Barnum, but it could well have done. Barnum visited a friend in the town on several occasions and became so friendly with the family that he ended up marrying his host’s daughter.

Investigation into Southport’s rich sporting heritage also uncovered some fascinating stories. Early motor racing and aviation pioneers were attracted to the resort because of the area’s vast expanse of golden sands. Later in the 20th century, Grand National legend, Red Rum, was trained on those same wide sandy beaches.

My personal connection to Southport goes back more years than I care to mention. I spent several years living in the resort as a child and have lovely memories of idyllic summers spent on Ainsdale Beach. I’m sure that it must have rained plenty of times, but conveniently have no memory of that. Presumably that is when I turned my attention to booklet production. I must confess that in those days I had very little interest in historic buildings, but Southport’s Pleasureland was a place of endless fascination to me. My favourite attraction, the Noah’s Ark, is sadly long gone, but merits a mention in the book anyway.

As regards future plans, I have already started writing a third book for Amberley on the Burnley and Pendle area which I hope to see published late next year. I shall continue to research fascinating new historical subjects on which to base features and look for new writing challenges.

Celebrating Southport by Margaret Brecknell is published by Amberley Publishing. Visit the Amberley Publishing website: www.amberleybooks.com

Email: sales@amberley-books.com Phone: 01453 847800

Margaret is attending a book signing at Broadhursts Book Shop, 5-7 Market Street, Southport PR8 1HD on Saturday, 26th November from 1.30pm to 3.00pm

She may be found on Twitter: @mabrecknell

Below: Southport’s Lord Street at night