Author teams up with Everton

Aug 5 2009 by Matt Hurst, Heswall News

WIRRAL author Peter Lupson, fresh from delivering a speech to MPs, is lined up to talk when the world-famous Everton Collection returns to Merseyside.

The head of English at Kingsmead School in Hoylake is still reaping the whirlwind generated by his books, Thanks God for Football! and his most recent tome, Across the Park.

So deep has been their impact that Peter was invited to Westminster to deliver a speech to theAll Party Parliamentary Football Group, and this has led to his appointment illustrating the Everton Collection with a series of seven talks.

Peter’s first book delves into the church roots of many of Britain’s top football teams, while his second examines the close relationship and subsequent split between Everton and Liverpool in their early days.

Peter said: “The people at the Everton Collection knew that I was speaking at Parliament and one of the MPs had also been present at the launch of my book, Across the Park.

“If you get invited to the House of Commons, it more or less gives you fairly solid credibility as a speaker, and therefore makes other people more willing to take a risk on you.”

The Everton Collection is considered “without doubt, the finest and most complete collection of its type relating to a single club in private hands” according to Christie’s auction house in London.

Valued at more than £1.2m, but worth considerably more if broken up, the collection is an immense treasure trove of artefacts, letters, medals, programmes and financial records related to Everton FC, dating right back to 1878. It was amassed by Liverpool-born David France, whose interest was generated when he began collecting programmes as a young man in 1953. He amassed programmes dating back to 1886, including those for every single game featuring Everton legend Dixie Dean.

Peter added: “I could never believe that those tentative steps I took 10 years ago, discovering little nuggets of information, would eventually cause so much excitement in the world of football. That it would inspire clubs to restore their founders’ graves, induct players into halls of fame, and in the case of one club, change their badge, and to then get so many top invitations to speak.”

The Everton Collection returns to Liverpool’s Picton Library on September 24.