France's love for his own 'Toffee World'

BLUES SUPERFAN HOPING NEW STADIUM CAN SEE CLUB EMBRACE INDEPENDENT INITIATIVES

- By CHRIS BEESLEY ECHO Reporter

As we approach the end of 2025, the year that Everton made their momentous move from Goodison Park to Hill Dickinson Stadium, Blues superfan Dr David France is hoping that the new era will see the club embracing independent initiatives like his own.

The Widnes-born former oil and gas executive has travelled over two million miles attending Everton matches having been based in North America for the past 48 years.

Christmas is a time for giving and the 77-year-old has done so much of that for the football club he loves over several decades, so to mark his achievements, the ECHO is producing a special in which he reflects upon his incredible initiatives.

Originally 'The David France Collection,' the Everton Collection is a vast compendium of football memorabilia, consisting of more than 10,000 items related to the birth and development of Everton Football Club. It took Dr France over 25 years to assemble it and despite receiving numerous offers from private investors, his dream was to make the collection available to what he called 'The Everton Family' and sought to transfer his world-class archives to an independent charitable trust, at a heavily discounted price.

In September 2007, the Everton Charitable Trust announced that it had secured a grant from the UK Heritage Lottery Fund to obtain the collection and it was transferred from Dr France to the Trust on December 31, 2007. This was the initiative for which Liverpool's Freedom of the City panel rewarded Dr France with the prestigious title of Citizen of Honour in 2011 as he became the first person to receive it for services to Merseyside football since Bill Shankly.

He said: "It's special. We contributed between 10,000 to 12,000 items and now there's about 17,000 items in the record office.