Dan Dare, Red Rum, the Blitz and neolithic sands: The Atkinson opens new display in Southport

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

Record-breaking speedboat drivers and Hornby trains to star in new museum display

A sculptor who made Holyhead’s Millennium Statue of Christ and reincarnated the Beatles at their Story Exhibition in Liverpool has revealed his latest creation: a one-metre tall fibreglass version of Dan Dare's nemesis, The Mekon, described by curators as an “imposing” figurehead at a new permanent museum which is about to open at The Atkinson in Southport.

Kevin Harlow, whose commissioners have included the former Turner Prize nominee Yinka Shonibare, made the antiheroic work in honour of Dan Dare’s publishers, Eagle Comics, which began in Southport in 1950.

The sculpture will be part of a new display also featuring art deco architecture, wartime attacks on Merseyside’s docks and some of the Mesolithic families who foraged around the local coastline 6,000 years ago.

“It is an area of contrasts – working ports and dense urban areas rub shoulders with areas of outstanding natural beauty,” says Director Emma Anderson, discussing the variety of an exhibition containing oars and personal belongings from one of the worst lifeboat disasters in history, off the coast of Birkdale in 1886, and artefacts from the Bootle Blitz of 1941, which damaged or destroyed 90 percent of the town’s houses.

“The Atkinson’s new museum tells the stories of this extraordinary, changing and contested coastline.

“The displays reflect the histories of communities and individuals along Sefton’s coast and have a strong emphasis on the influence and experience of the coast – in terms of fishing and shipping industries, including lifeboats, wrecks and tragedies, as well as the development of leisure and tourism.
 
“Our project has strategic, regional significance because, over the last 10 years, regeneration projects up and down the coast have stressed the importance of creating and enhancing a sense of place – building up the uniqueness and integrity of places through culture and heritage.”

Bootle docks were a key target for Luftwaffe bombers during World War II.  A recently conserved map from a downed German plane clearly indicates the grain stores at Alexandra Dock as the focal point for the many air raids that devastated the surrounding area.

Around 4,000 people were killed in the Merseyside area during the Blitz – second only to London. Fragments of bombs, gas masks, wartime ration books, shrapnel, memoirs and photos recount the period locally.

• Between Land and Sea – 10,000 years of Sefton’s Coast opens at The Atkinson on Friday (February 13 2015).
  
  

Stories from Sefton

The daring female motor-racing pioneers dubbed ‘scorchers’, ‘motorinas’ and ‘motoristes’ who tore up Southport beach in the 1920s. One of their party, Dorothy Levitt, went on to break numerous records as a speedboat driver, racing driver and aviator and even taught Queen Alexandra and her three daughters to drive.

The cartoonist behind Dan Dare, Frank Hampson, was a pupil at King George V Grammar School (now King George V College) during the 1930s. His sci-fi hero appeared in the Eagle comic, which was first produced in 1950 in a studio called Old Bakehouse in Churchtown, Southport. The Eagle's founder, the Rev John Marcus Harston Morris, was vicar of the St James church in Birkdale at the time.

The formidable Mrs Mirabel Topham, the former Gaiety Girl, ran Aintree race course during the 1950s and 60s. One of the most famous horses to race at Aintree, Red Rum, was trained by Ginger McCain on Southport sands.

Frank Hornby, the inventor of Meccano, Dinky toys and Hornby model trains was a Maghull resident and a father of three with no formal engineering qualifications. He experimented with ideas in his home workshop. In 1901 it is said he borrowed £5 from his employer to patent the invention of Meccano. His boss quickly saw the merit in his idea and soon became his business partner.

19-year-old polar explorer and Southport resident FJ ‘Percy’ Hooper, one of the search party who discovered Captain Scott and his team’s bodies at the end of their ill-fated expedition to the South Pole, sacrificed his own skis to fashion a cross as a memorial.  A blue plaque was erected outside Southport Town Hall to commemorate Hooper in 2012.

A Neolithic or New Stone Age mother and child made their way across Formby sands to gather food, leaving their footprints as an echo from the region’s distant past.
 
On Dec 9 1886, the lifeboats Eliza Fernley of Southport and Laura Janet of St Anne’s put out in a storm to the rescue an iron ship, The Mexico of Hamburg. Neither boat reached the vessel, although the former approached so close that, according to the narrative of the two survivors, one of the lifeboat men was about to throw a line before the boat swung broadside on to the sea and a huge mountain of water lifted it up and turned it over, burying the majority of its crew beneath it.

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Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk//history-and-heritage/art517109