For almost 40 years, football mascots have been Jan Hallam’s business, and her scrapbook is full of the clubs that came calling.

When the BBC met the 71-year-old in her living room, she was sitting on her red sofa looking through memories from a career making and designing mascots for clubs across the country.

Her work in football started in Coventry in 1987. Hallam, who had built a career designing fancy dress costumes for shops, was asked to make a mascot for Wolverhampton Wanderers FC.

“The next thing I knew I was doing the first Wolfie, then I did the first Leicester City, Derby County, Aston Villa, Coventry City, Birmingham City [and] West Brom [mascots],” she said. “I was there first.”

Hallam said clubs were trying to rebrand as family-friendly organisations in the late 1980s after years of hooliganism dominating the game. Part of that was bringing mascots to the UK in a bid to emulate American sports teams.

She said her mascot career took off almost overnight, with teams requesting designs a year in advance.

“I could phone a club and say, ‘do you want a mascot?’ So it was quite lucrative back then,” she said.

Over the years, Hallam has designed and fixed hundreds of mascots, including Lenny the Lion for Shrewsbury Town, Harry the Harrier for Kidderminster Harriers, Bobby the Buck for AFC Telford United and Swifty for Walsall FC.

She worked alone from her living and dining rooms while raising her two young children by herself.

But Hallam said the early boom did not last, as big companies in London moved into the market.

“The big companies got in on the act, and staff at the clubs changed, so I just had to try and keep up as much as I could,” she said.

She later became the “mascot doctor” when the annual Mascot Grand National started in 1999. For 11 years, dozens of mascots spent a day racing every September.

“I was learning about what makes a better costume at the same time because I was actually talking to the people who wear them, and I don’t think some of the bigger companies did that,” Hallam said. “That’s probably what’s kept me going and people coming back.”

Hallam, a lifelong artist, now lives with her husband of 20 years and two cats. She still designs mascots for numerous football clubs and brings them back into her home for cleaning and repairs.

“If they have got a solid inside then they will go in the bath, so you will very often see a head in the bath soaking,” she said.

She said handling heavy, thick costumes at home during summer heatwaves was “a lot”, but she still makes mascots and works on other craft projects including novelty cushions, knitted fairies and bags.

“I went to see my bank manager once, he was talking about retirement and so on,” said Hallam. “I remember saying to him, ‘Picasso did his best work in his 90s, artists don’t tend to retire, they just keep going’.”

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