It’s with an incredibly heavy heart that we announce that Margaret Miles-Bramwell, our beloved founder, passed away on Sunday 2nd February, surrounded by her family.
A daughter, a mother, a lover, a wife; an entrepreneur, a colleague, a friend and a fighter – Margaret Miles-Bramwell will be remembered as a pioneer in the world of weight management. A woman who put people before profit, common sense before rules – and love before all else.
Born in April 1948 and adopted soon after by Emma-Selina and Samuel Birch, Margaret grew up in the humble surroundings of South Normanton – a small mining village in Derbyshire. In 1963, aged 15, Margaret fell pregnant with daughter, Claire. Thrown out by her parents, she was forced to leave school and abandon her dreams of university. She made a home with Claire’s father, Roy, and found work to provide for her baby.
It was a seismic sequence of events that ultimately shaped the woman Margaret became: someone with a profound understanding of and compassion for the emotional needs of others; with strong beliefs and a sense of what’s right (and what isn’t); and with grit and determination to live and work by those beliefs – no matter what. These powerful personal qualities went on to shape the small business Margaret started in an Alfreton church hall 55 years ago – a slimming group with a revolutionary eating plan and a support system designed to put an end to the shame, guilt, judgement and humiliation faced by those struggling with their weight in 1960s England.
Although Margaret never felt comfortable referring to herself as a ‘businesswoman’, it was a term she grew to accept, as she resiliently and tirelessly worked to grow the UK and Republic of Ireland’s most loved and trusted weight loss organisation – Slimming World.
“I never saw myself as neither a businesswoman nor an entrepreneur”, she wrote in her 2019 autobiography, Wild Women Do (and they don’t regret it!). “I suppose it was because I was never focused on the business per se. My focus was much more on what the business was trying to achieve. I wanted to help people – people like me – to shed the misery and the burden of excess weight, without having to suffer unnecessarily in the process.”
Margaret spent the majority of her 20s and 30s single-handedly juggling the challenges of being a young mum with her ever-growing business. When Claire was 13, Margaret and Roy welcomed their first son, Dominic, followed by Ben in 1980. Danny, Dominic’s close friend, became part of the family in the early 1990s. Margaret’s love for and dedication to her children was deep and enduring, and our immediate thoughts are with them and their families.
Over the course of her early career, Margaret navigated her way through numerous professional and personal challenges: separation and re-marriage, the devastating financial repercussions of the three-day week, miners’ strikes and recession, the deterioration and death of her father from motor neurone disease in 1986, caring for her mother during her decline from Alzheimer’s disease, together with a fractious business partnership and the near-bankruptcy of Slimming World in 1986. She also co-managed several other businesses alongside Slimming World – including a kitchen design studio and, later, a hair and beauty salon, where Margaret kept up her immaculate sense of style.
With the 1990s came a new chapter for Margaret – one that brought everlasting love with her late husband, Tony Whittaker; a passion for sailing; the birth of the number one selling title, Slimming World Magazine, and a whole new era of growth for Slimming World. Her intensive study of behavioural psychology – together with her deeply personal understanding of the mental and emotional challenges faced by people who struggle with their weight – enabled Margaret to further develop her powerful group support model, IMAGE Therapy, which she’d pioneered nearly two decades before. In 1996, Margaret funded ground-breaking research on macronutrients in relation to weight management and their energy density and satiety to further strengthen Slimming World’s Food Optimising eating plan. Supported by a growing team of loyal and dedicated staff, the company was able to open new groups at a steady rate and move to a purpose-built Head Office and Consultant training facility in Somercotes, Derbyshire, where it remains today.
In 1997, shortly after a frightening health scare and major surgery, Margaret founded the charity SMILES – Slimmers Making It A Little Easier For Someone – which has, to date, raised more than £25m for charities including the NSPCC, Barnardo’s, Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, Cancer Research UK, Alzheimer’s UK and the Irish Cancer Society. She became a patron of the NSPCC in 2000. Throughout the late 90s and 2000s, Margaret split her time between her cottage in Mansfield Woodhouse and a second home in Mallorca, where she and Tony ran further successful businesses including the spectacular dinner show, Son Amar, Mallorca Sea School and Charters, and boutique yacht builder, Pearl Yachts.
One of the most special moments in Margaret’s life happened in 2009, when she received an OBE for services to the health of the nation and to charity – a defining moment in her career and in the history of Slimming World.
In 2010, Margaret was awarded an honorary Masters degree from the University of Derby, which led to the creation of the ‘Miles-Bramwell Chair in Behaviour Change and Weight Management’ – giving Slimming World’s research specialists further opportunities to study the scientific complexities of obesity and lifelong weight loss.
In 2020, when the global pandemic forced our countries into lockdown, Margaret unflinchingly released emergency financial reserves to Slimming World and its Consultant franchisees – supporting and ultimately saving the company from the biggest-ever threat to its existence. So strong was her determination to continue Slimming World’s work helping members find health and happiness – as well as to protect and nurture the careers she’d helped create in her teams of field managers and Head Office employees.
Margaret’s husband, Tony, died in 2021, following a heroic fight with cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. In spite of the intense grief that followed, Margaret, true to form, refused to give up on life – and in the years that followed, she funded and passionately supported groundbreaking immunotherapy research in collaboration with Tony’s specialist, Professor Christian Ottensmeier.
Margaret concluded her autobiography with these words – words which will forever ring true, and fondly remind us of the person she was:
“Building a healthier future is paramount if our children, and theirs, are to survive. I therefore hope and pray that in future, as now, our profits will be used to promote caring for those in need, and to support all organisations that fight the evils of the world long after I’ve left it.
So my wish for my own family, as well as my other Slimming World family and for all my friends, is to continue to work with true kindness and compassion in the way you do, and to continue to see and follow the right path. I know it’s not easy. Sometimes it’s incredibly difficult. Be very proud of yourselves for your achievements and know just how proud of you I am and how much I love you.
Yours, always and forever,
