Aroundtown MEETS
Margaret pictured with her latest book
Using her
words wisely
By Joanne Ainley
When Yorkshire-born Margaret Drinkall suggests that you stop thinking about something and get on and do it, you know she’s talking from first-hand experience and with a genuine passion to see others take the plunge and follow their dreams.
As the published author of 31 books - and counting - she certainly has the credentials to inspire anyone to seize the chance to change their lives for the better and that’s exactly what she wants to do. Born into a large family in the 1940s, Margaret left school at the age of 14 without a single qualification. Despite being the only girl in her class to pass the 11 plus exam, giving her entry into the local technical college, the feelgood moment on getting the news was sadly short-lived. Like many of her peers at the time, Margaret wasn’t allowed to stay on at school. Instead she found work and went on to start her own family, raising four sons and taking a series of low paid jobs along the way.
Counting factory worker, cleaner and lollipop lady among her varied roles, Margaret, now 72, can’t even contemplate that earning a living by writing about her twin passions of local history and true crime stories
chapter of local history, you get the impression that ‘working’ life is now a total joy. So too is living in her adopted home town of Rotherham, where Margaret arrived in 2001 from a small village near Scunthorpe to take on a job with the council. But she didn’t reach this happy state of affairs overnight which is partly why she’s so keen to encourage others to grasp the nettle and do something that really interests them, especially if life feels like it’s not going quite to plan. “No one else can do it for you so you just have to get on with it and have a go. I’d really love to be able to inspire other people because, honestly if I can do it, anyone can do it,” she explains.
The road from unqualified schoolgirl to fully fledged author was more of a marathon than a sprint and started around the age of 45 when Margaret studied a history degree at the University of Humberside. Describing university
‘‘No one else can do it for you so you just have to get on with it and have a go.’’
actually fits the description of work. “I’ve worked and I’ve worked hard but what I’m doing now isn’t work. I love it and can’t wait to get started each day,” she says. Given that she sometimes hops out of bed as early as 3 or 4am to do a spot of research because she’s so keen to find out what happens next in some long forgotten
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life as an ‘eye-opener’ Margaret’s love of history was given free rein to develop into something that would one day lead to a career that had once seemed impossible. “If someone had told me 25 years ago that I’d be doing this now I wouldn’t have believed them,” she says.
Aged 60, she went on to achieve Women munitions workers in wartime
a master’s degree in history through the Open University, an experience she enjoyed even more and would recommend to anyone with an interest in doing it.
Deciding that the next academic step of a PhD wasn’t for her, Margaret instead set her sights on a different goal. While walking along Rotherham’s Alma Road one day, she glimpsed what would have been the laundry walls of the old workhouse and resolved there and then that there was a story to be told and that was the book to do. Months of in-depth research followed along with the tentative first steps into the unfamiliar world of publishing until, about two years later in 2009, a 63-year-old Margaret found herself gazing at her very first book in print ‘Rotherham Workhouse,’ published by History Press. With the bit firmly between her teeth, more books followed and Margaret eventually found the confidence to retire from her 9 ‘til 5 job to take up writing full-time. In just nine years, she has written a total of 31 books: 15 about Rotherham covering crime or local history; six about Sheffield; and others about Barnsley, Leeds and Halifax, where
Margaret was born.
Margaret’s latest title: “Struggle and Suffrage in Sheffield” charts women’s lives and the fight for equality between 1850 and 1950. Published by Barnsley-based Pen and Sword, it begins with an astonishing story of a helpless wife being sold in Sheffield marketplace. It ends with the far more upbeat, if belated, official recognition of the city’s Women of Steel, who worked day and night in munitions factories during both world wars, often as bombs fell around them. The richly detailed chapters in between cover everything from women’s treatment in the justice system to family planning and motherhood and the long fight for women’s votes. Margaret’s fascination with the people involved at all points on the social scale shines through the pages and gives an incredible insight into their day-to-day lives. Who knew, for example, that women’s patrols – the forerunners to women police officers – were established during World War One to prevent young girls becoming ‘khaki crazy’ at the sight of men in uniforms?
Such gems are gleaned by
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