Daniel Hayes at Southport Central Southport Central (southportfootballclub.co.uk)

Q: What’s the formal status of your heritage group and which groups are involved?

A: I don’t know whether my situation is unusual or not, but there is no “group”. Southport Central is just me. What I’m able to achieve, and the timescales in which I can achieve it, is constrained by the fact that this entire project is being undertaken solo. There is no operating supporters’ trust or supporters’ group at the club, and no funding. Furthermore, the club itself has very little interest in what came before the current incumbents set foot in the building, so there’s been no offer of support whatsoever. Ironically, having researched the origins of the club and discovered the links with cricket and rugby, the rugby club have been really welcoming and keen for me to become involved with them. Thankfully, I have been supported in some of my recent activities by the Southport Townscape Heritage Project, and people who I met through Footycon, who have been a constant source of encouragement. Other local historians have also reached out to offer support even though their own focuses are not on sport.

Q: How did you get started?

A: I first got interested in the history of Southport FC in the mid-1990s when Geoff Wilde and Mike Braham published a book on the Football League history of the club. The club itself has a habit of only ever referring to events post-1978, the year they left the Football League, and there was no single source that covered the whole history. I wanted to know more about the period before the club entered the League in 1921 and over time that research snowballed into creating a website which, as it stands today, is undeniably the most complete record in existence of games played by the club, dating back to its birth, and even the amateur clubs that came before it.

Q: How much stuff have you got?

A: I have a pretty complete set of programmes dating back to around 1955, plus a large collection of newspaper reports, team sheets etc.

Q: How do you make it available for public view?

A: My primary aim was to make the information available, and I’m pleased to be able to say that the website has grown steadily over the past five years or so to the point where it is certainly the most complete documented set of records publicly available. My plan is to follow that up by including, for as many games as possible, newspaper reports and scanned programmes for each game. That however is very time-consuming and has been sidelined somewhat by continued research into some of the more “forgotten” periods of history for the football and rugby clubs.

Q: What’s the best / most unusual memorabilia find?

A: I have a medal from the 1886 Southport Charity Cup Final which was the last competitive game played by the original Southport Football Club, one of the ancestral amateur clubs – the first association club in the town.

Q: What piece of advice would you offer people trying to set up a group like yours?

A: Reach out to fellow club historians, or experts within their field. You’ll find 99% of them go out of their way to help.