'Unsuitable for Females' E-Book

Carrie Dunn

• Herausgeber: Arena Sport
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 373

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Discover the origins of the Lionesses that brought football home.  Shortlisted for the Sports Book Awards for Best Football Writing of the Year England's Lionesses are on the front and back pages; their stars feature on prime-time television; they are named in the national honours lists for their contribution to their sport and to society. The names of Lucy Bronze, Steph Houghton and Ellen White are emblazoned across the backs of children's replica jerseys. These women are top athletes – and top celebrities. But in 1921, the Football Association introduced a ban on women's football, pronouncing the sport 'quite unsuitable for females'. That ban would last for half a century - but despite official prohibition the women's game went underground. From the Dick, Kerr Ladies touring the world to the Lost Lionesses who played at the unsanctioned Women's World Cup in Mexico in 1971, generations of women defied the restrictions and laid the foundations for today's Lionesses - so much so that in 2018 England's Women's Super League became the first fully professional league in Europe...when just a few decades previously women were forbidden to play the sport in England at all. This book tells the story of women's football in England since its 19th-century inception through pen portraits of its trailblazers. The game might have once been banned because of its popularity – find out about the subversive women who kept organising their teams and matches despite the prohibition, who broke barriers and set records – the legends of the game who built the foundations of the stage upon which today's stars flourish. 'At what feels like a pivotal moment, Carrie's forensic research and depth of knowledge make her the perfect person to guide us through the constantly changing landscape of women's football' - Kelly Cates, TV presenter

Leseprobe

UNSUITABLE FOR FEMALES

CARRIE DUNN IS A JOURNALIST and academic who has been combining research, teaching and professional practice since 2005. Her research interests include fandom, sport, feminism and the consumption of popular culture. She has covered the last three Women’s World Cups for The Times and Eurosport, and has worked in-house regularly for both – as well as the Guardian and other publishing houses.

She was UEFA’s London correspondent for the postponed 2020 European Championships, liaising with tournament organisers, ambassadors and syndication partners. Her most recent book is The Pride of the Lionesses (2019), which was long-listed for Football Book of the Year at the Telegraph Sports Book Awards in 2020, named one of FourFourTwo’s best books of the year, and the sequel to The Roar of the Lionesses: Women’s Football in England (2016), one of the Guardian’s best sport books of 2016.

PRAISE FOR CARRIE DUNN

‘No one is better placed to deliver an X on the state of women’s football in this country than Carrie Dunn’

FourFourTwo

‘Carrie Dunn is an exceptional journalist, perceptive and inquisitive’

Iain MacIntosh, Muddy Knees Media

‘Carrie Dunn’s razor-sharp way with words and clever analysis of women’s football history are worth paying attention to. Her personality shines through in the work she undertakes. You can’t keep her quiet . . . but then you’d never want her to stay silent for too long!’

Kait Borsay, Offside Rule podcast

‘Dunn’s meticulous research and careful choice of words leaves the reader entertained and informed in equal measure’

Matt Davies-Adams, commentator and broadcaster

‘Insightful, thoughtful, and fascinating’

Alex Stewart, Tifo Football, on Pride

‘Crisp and humane writing. I wish I had the psychic or persuasive powers to push The Roar of the Lionesses up on to the bestseller lists. A book that is rooted in the joy and pain of sport. Not only do “the girls” know how to play football as well or better than “the boys”; the best of ’em write about it just as well as the boys do too’

By The Book Reviews

‘Rivetingly insightful and beautifully researched’

Football writer Julie Welch on Roar

First published in 2022 by

ARENA SPORT

An imprint of Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.arenasportbooks.co.uk

Copyright © Carrie Dunn, 2022

ISBN 978 1 91375 905 6

eBook ISBN 9781788855044

The right of Carrie Dunn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Date

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

Designed and typeset by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed by MBM, East Kilbride

To Henry and Emilia

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: THE BEGINNING

ONE: THE RINGLEADER

TWO: THE MYSTERY

THREE: THE MYTH

FOUR: THE PHOTOGRAPH

FIVE: THE GOALSCORER

SIX:THE FORGOTTEN

SEVEN: THE ADVENTURER

EIGHT: THE ENIGMA

NINE: THE BELLES

TEN: THE CHAMPIONS

ELEVEN: THE LOST

TWELVE: THE FOUND

EPILOGUE: THE FUTURE

REFERENCES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INDEX

PROLOGUE

THE BEGINNING

THIS IS THE BOOK PEOPLE keep asking me to write.

After covering the Women’s World Cup in 2015, I wrote The Roar of the Lionesses, following a season in the life of women’s football in England. Four years later, I wrote the sequel, The Pride of the Lionesses, exploring what – if anything – had changed.

With both books, I stressed that I wanted to give a snapshot of life at all levels of the game. I wasn’t going to just focus on the England team or the superstars of the Women’s Super League. I wanted to tell the stories of the women all the way down the pyramid: their daily routines, their sacrifices, their love of football.

I tried to give a sense of the vast history of women’s football as well. The late Sylvia Gore, ambassador for Manchester City, spoke to me for Roar; Gillian Coultard, long-time England captain, wrote the foreword. Two legendary goalkeepers played a big part in Pride, with Rachel Brown-Finnis writing the foreword and her predecessor between the England sticks, Pauline Cope, sharing her memories of her playing and coaching career.

But there are so many more stories to be told, reaching back over more than a century. Decades of football history have been obscured by record-keeping so limited or non-existent that great footballing careers have simply disappeared from view. Understandably, governing bodies and players prefer to focus on the here and now, pointing to current achievements rather than looking back at the challenges that were faced by previous generations.

I argue that it is crucial to know and understand the past. It’s a truism that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. However, it is also true that to remember the women footballers who blazed their own trails in their own ways is to shine a different light on today’s game; it shows how complex and storied women’s football is – and always has been. Scratch the surface, and uncover a fascinating tangle of lives.

ONE

THE RINGLEADER

IT’S A GLORIOUS NAME – NETTIE Honeyball.

She is the woman who led the British Ladies in their famous fixtures at the end of the 19th century.

There is just one problem, though. Nettie Honeyball never existed – no matter what variant spelling you try, there are no records of such a person.

The 19th century was a time of social change, particularly when it came to sport. But it was a very male, macho sporting sphere, and there was an idea that physical strength, religious conviction and one’s ability to take on power and be a successful, strong leader were all interlinked. It all stemmed from the public school system – where boys were encouraged to take up a sport to make them stronger and more manly, suitably equipped to take up a role in governing the expanding British Empire.

Organised football – in a format a modern-day spectator would recognise – stems back to 1863, when the Football Association was formed. The founder of Barnes FC, Ebenezer Morley, had suggested to the press that there should be a way to establish the rules for football, just as the Marylebone Cricket Club (better known as the MCC) had done for cricket. In a meeting at the Freemasons’ Tavern in Great Queen Street, captains, secretaries and creators of football clubs in the London and South East area formed their association with the intent to regulate the game – rather than playing matches by their own rules, which might vary by region or by school background, as had happened previously.

Sheffield FC has a claim to creating the first-ever set of rules for football, with founders Nathaniel Creswick and William Prest drawing up their own code – known as the Sheffield Rules – in October 1858, publishing them the following year. Even though rules were available, that did not mean every club adopted them. Sheffield FC became members of the Football Association in 1863, but still used their own rules – and occasionally the quirky rules of opponents, with their first fixture outside Sheffield coming in 1865 against Nottingham. It was not an 11-a-side encounter, though, as might have been expected; rather, there were 18 players on each side.

What was needed was more consistency, and a countrywide approach for competition. To that end, the FA Cup – or the Football Association Challenge Cup – was created in 1871, with all the member clubs invited to compete in a national knock-out tournament. Then the Football League was founded in 1888 when Aston Villa’s William McGregor came up with the idea of regular fixtures for clubs, rather than one-off matches or challenges. The FA was still in charge, but the League operated within it. Though there continued to be disagreements about whether football should be an amateur sport or a professional one, a supposed ‘gentlemen’s game’ or one that paid men for their hard labour on the pitch – a schism that split largely along the north–south divide – the structure of football by the turn of the century would be easily identifiable to today’s fan.

Women’s roles in the leisure sphere generally and football particularly were not part of any public discussion, and nor were they broadly encouraged to take up sport. But they were certainly both playing and watching it. Reporter Charles Edwardes noted in 1892 that it was not just working-class men who had ‘football fever’ and were attending matches, but many women as well, and he expressed surprise that ‘the fair sex’ were prepared to stand on the terraces. Before the Football League began in 1888, Preston North End were forced to withdraw their offer of free entry to ladies when 2,000 women turned up at the ground.

Middle-class girls were starting to play competitive team sports at school and at university – when they were allowed to attend, of course. Most often they were playing hockey, cricket or croquet, and sometimes they got to play individual sports (in 1884, the ladies’ singles competition at Wimbledon began). But these were all somewhat in accordance with the stereotypical ideas of what kind of pastimes ladies ought to engage in. These were sports with no contact, and which allowed the participants to play wearing appropriate clothing – that is, long skirts. Football, however, was not judged to be appropriate. Although football for men was established, it was riven with those class divisions that were dogging the new Football Association and then the Football League, who suffered the same problems as cricket had, with working-class men earning money from their skills and the amateur ‘gentlemen’ tending to look down on them.

Nonetheless, some women broke free from expectations. It is thought that at least 150 ‘ladies’ teams’ were playing regularly in the first two decades of the 20th century, following in the footsteps of the Victorian women and girls who were enjoying less structured competition. In 1888, there was a match in Inverness between a team of married women and a team of single women, long believed to be the first match outside an educational setting, but historians now believe that the first home international took place seven years prior, on 9 May 1881, when teams playing under the names of ‘England’ and ‘Scotland’ faced off at Easter Road, Edinburgh, resulting in a 3–0 triumph for the Scots.

In 1894, the British Ladies’ Football Club was established, with Honeyball listed as its secretary. Clearly a woman of drive and spirit, Honeyball placed advertisements in periodicals for other women interested in football, and created her club comprising players, administrators and supporters. They trained in Nightingale Lane, in North London, and according to the generally accepted histories even managed to secure coaching from a leading male player of the time: John William (Bill) Julian, the Tottenham Hotspur centre-half. Honeyball organised the now-famous match between the North and the South at Crouch End the year after, which attracted more than 10,000 fans. It also attracted plenty of media coverage, with the Manchester Guardian’s report sidetracked by the kits worn by the players: the North team wore ‘red blouses with white yokes, and full black knickerbockers fastened below the knee, black stockings, red berretta caps, brown leather boots and leg pads’ while the South wore ‘blouses of light and dark blue in large squares, and blue caps’. The report added that some players also donned ‘a short skirt above the knickerbockers, but this rather distracted from the good appearances of the dress, as the skirts flapped about in the wind and rendered movement less graceful.’

The Guardian surmised that the crowds had been drawn by the novelty factor, but reassured any women reading that they should not be put off by the inevitable lack of public interest in their sporting exploits and that they should continue to play for their own health and recreation. Despite that rather downbeat conclusion, the success of that North v. South match led to a UK tour sponsored by the British Ladies’ club president Lady Florence Dixie.

The British Ladies’ subsequent fixtures were relatively limited yet dramatic, with men drafted in on at least one occasion after players failed to show up for a fixture. There was also a messy misunderstanding in April 1895, when the British Ladies were supposed to be playing at the Royal Ordnance FC, in Maze Hill, South East London, but a telegram sent in the name of Nettie Honeyball cancelled the exhibition shortly after the scheduled kick-off time. With the FA Council starting to notice that the women’s matches were attracting interest, they began informing clubs that ‘lady footballers’ should not be playing on their grounds. The Maze Hill fiasco also seemed to have triggered a schism in the club. Two separate teams were in operation from 1895 onwards, both calling themselves the ‘Original Lady Footballers’, and Honeyball disappeared from the teamsheets. It is possible that she might have taken on the name ‘Nellie Hudson’ instead, which appears frequently in the line-ups for one of the teams, but this is mere conjecture.

One of the biggest problems with tracing women’s football history is the lack of records – and the earliest footballers added a twist to that issue by adopting pseudonyms for their sporting careers. Perhaps because football was still thought to be unbecoming for women to play (particularly bearing in mind they were out in public in relatively few clothes – a full-skirted dress, the usual attire for a woman, was certainly not conducive to playing football, and thus Honeyball and Dixie had encouraged their original crop of players to wear kit similar to those worn by male players of the time), perhaps because their families did not want their names attached to such controversy, or perhaps just for fun, the earliest female footballers were happy to take on stage names for their performances on the pitch.

So who was Nettie Honeyball, and did any of the British Ladies play under their own names?

There is a photo of a woman purported to be ‘Honeyball’ in the Sketch magazine from February 1895. She appears to be aged between 25 and 30, she is moderately tall and of sturdy build – indeed, she told the newspapers that she weighed over 11 stone. There is no other indication in the photograph as to who she might be, but in the article accompanying that photograph, the reader is given a strong sense of her personality. Honeyball is quoted as saying: ‘There is nothing of the farcical nature about the British Ladies’ Football Club. I founded the association late last year, with the fixed resolve of proving to the world that women are not the “ornamental and useless” creatures men have pictured. I must confess, my convictions on all matters, where the sexes are so widely divided, are all on the side of emancipation and I look forward to the time when ladies may sit in Parliament and have a voice in the direction of affairs, especially those which concern them most.’

Even the contemporary reports of the time could not agree on what they knew about her, but they tended to call her either ‘Nettie Honeyball’ or ‘Nettie J. Honeyball’. One historian, James Lee, suggested that Nettie Honeyball could actually have been ‘Nellie’, born on 28 August 1873 in Pimlico, London; some of the press reports gave the variant first name, which could be accurate or of course a typographical error.

Some stories stated that she had a brother who travelled with the team and carried out some managerial duties; the Sporting Man newspaper interviewed this man in 1895 as part of their coverage of an exhibition match at St James’ Park, Newcastleupon-Tyne. Assuming that ‘Honeyball’ was a pseudonym and Lee was mistaken, the one piece of information that may give a clue as to who she might have been is her address, with some newspapers saying that she hailed from 27 Weston Park, in Crouch End, North London. That address was the home of Arthur Tilbury Smith and his family – including his son, Alfred Hewitt Smith, who was said by the Kentish Gazette to be the British Ladies’ manager. In 1895, Miss Jessie Allen wrote to the Manchester Courier on the subject of women’s football, describing herself as the secretary of the British Ladies, and giving her address as Weston Park, Crouch End. ‘Miss Allen’ was the maiden name of Mrs Jessie Mary Ann Smith. She was married to Frederick, the eldest son of Arthur Tilbury Smith and Mary Watford, and thus she was sister-in-law to Alfred Hewitt Smith. The jigsaw pieces do indicate that she may well have been the original player to adopt the name ‘Nettie Honeyball’. If Jessie Smith née Allen was indeed Nettie Honeyball, her use of the name was relatively short-lived. She stopped using the pseudonym by the end of 1895, and began playing and serving as secretary under her maiden name. The amateur historian Patrick Brennan points to census records that suggest that Jessie and Frederick Smith were living in West Ham at the time of the 1901 census, but by 1911 she had been widowed and, childless, was living back with her father in Stoke Newington, North East London. Brennan’s analysis of the registry records shows that Jessie later moved to Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, and died at University College Hospital in the centre of London on 3 October 1922, aged 52.

Honeyball presented herself as a respectable upper-middleclass woman, indicating that the rest of her players came from similar backgrounds. She was quoted as telling the Maidenhead Advertiser at the time: ‘If I accepted all the girls from the masses that made application to join us, why, our list would have been filled long ago.’ Of course, the choice of the word ‘Ladies’ in the team name was also deliberate in its similar connotations – suggesting that these players were not ruffians or ragamuffins, but refined, elegant women.

This was, however, surely a ruse. The fact that the British Ladies were attracting public attention, putting on a spectacle, and keen to bring a paying crowd through the turnstiles aligned them more with the scorned male professionals rather than their gentlemanly amateur peers who would not have dreamt of taking any money for their sporting prowess.

TWO

THE MYSTERY

IN 2018, THERE WAS A major event. Anna Kessel, the chair of campaigning and networking group Women in Football, had been leading a campaign to recognise women’s achievements with blue plaques – traditionally given out to mark places of significant historical interest. She spearheaded an event at the Royal Society as part of Black History Month, entitled ‘Celebrating Emma Clarke, Black Female Football Pioneer’.

And in 2019, there was a blue plaque unveiled at Campsbourne School, in Nightingale Lane, Hornsey, North London, to honour the pioneering British Ladies team, who toured the country and played on the site, the former ground of Crouch End FC. Once again, it singled out Emma Clarke on what would have been her 148th birthday, declaring her to be the first black woman to play football in Britain. Keen student of sporting history Stuart Gibbs had made the declaration after carrying out some research, suggesting that she was the ‘coloured lady of Dutch build’ referred to in a match report in the Stirling Sentinel chronicling the exploits of the team known as ‘Mrs Graham’s XI’, one of the two offshoots of the original British Ladies side. The phrase ‘Dutch build’ meant ‘hefty’ or ‘bulky’ at the time, and was not just used to apply to people, but to anything of size. As for the ‘coloured lady’, identifying her was tricky. Initially she was thought to be the goalkeeper listed on the teamsheet as Carrie Boustead. Unsurprisingly, however, there turned out to be no such person in the records as Carrie Boustead, or Caroline Boustead, or any other variant of the spellings.

Mrs Graham, however, is now generally believed to be Helen Graham Matthews, a Scottish prototype feminist and suffrage campaigner who, like her counterparts around the UK, took plenty of liberties with the truth when speaking to the press. Formerly one of the British Ladies goalkeepers, Mrs Graham said that all her players were from the Lancashire area, which led Gibbs to track down an Emma Clarke of about the right age in Bootle, near Liverpool. That was the birthplace given for her at the Royal Society’s event.

Then Gibbs uncovered a newspaper report in Belfast that listed more detail about each player, which indicated that Clarke was in fact from Plumstead, South London. Perhaps Mrs Graham had been liberal with the truth in order to appeal to a particular local audience, or perhaps she was deliberately obfuscating in order to hide her players’ identities. Whatever the reasoning, the confusion between the two women identified as ‘Emma Clarke’ has meant that her actual story has become muddled, with many different versions being told – and more than one of them made into theatre productions portraying different narratives.

The Emma Clarke of Plumstead had direct descendants, who have not yet gone on record to talk about their ancestor, but her sister Florence’s family have been happy to talk. The story that was passed down to them indicates that there may have been some kind of scandal in the sisters’ past; another researcher, Andy Mitchell, drew up a family tree tracking the sisters’ heritage.

Mitchell says that their grandfather, a Royal Artillery corporal called Edmund Bogg, spent four years serving at the British fort in Galle, on the south coast of Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka. He and his wife Ann had a daughter Caroline there in December 1841, and at the age of 22, Caroline married John Clarke – the son of another Royal Artillery man – in Woolwich. Emma was born in 1871, and Florence in 1877.

Mitchell had initially wondered whether Caroline Bogg was the product of an extra-marital affair, and thus of mixed race, but the birth records give her parents as Edmund and Ann. As he points out, that does not necessarily prove anything; she could have been adopted by them, or passed off as a child of the married couple to avoid any further questions.

‘I was able to put together the story of the real Emma Clarke born in Plumstead, and that in itself was kind of straightforward,’ he said, admitting that the Emma Clarke from Bootle disappears from history after 1903. ‘But then the big question, was she actually black? And that’s where of course it gets quite interesting because there is a family myth, and this was totally unprompted by media stuff because the family had no idea that she was a famous footballer; nobody had ever raised it with them. It was one of the other descendants of Florence who said, “Yeah, my granny always said there was some sort of family secret about the Indian Raj.” Well, that’s interesting, but pinning it down is another matter entirely.

‘So it remains a mystery as to whether she was actually black or . . . if there was some other family secret, or whether or not the whole thing is just a big misunderstanding.’

Mitchell stepped away from the entire story, explaining: ‘The whole thing is incredibly difficult. Having dipped my toe in the arguments of Emma Clarke, I’ve taken a back seat. I thought I’m not going to get anywhere here; there’s plenty of other people who are far more interested.’

Gibbs, however, has continued to work in an effort to uncover more of Clarke’s story. He was the leading researcher supporting the campaign for the plaque to honour her, which was eventually put in place by community group Nubian Jak, and sponsored by Black History Walks.

However, not everyone is convinced that Clarke should have been recognised in that way – or indeed that much of her story is confirmed at all. Mitchell is one of those with significant doubts.

‘There was this thing about having a plaque,’ said Mitchell, ‘and I said, “Well, you’re really having a stab in the dark here, saying this is correct,” but they were determined to go ahead, so I said, “Fine, I’m not going to endorse it and say this is wonderful.”’

Professor Jean Williams, an expert in women’s football history, also had major misgivings at the time, and said she felt there is currently a lack of evidence pointing to Clarke’s black heritage; she felt uneasy about relying on conclusions drawn solely from a handful of black-and-white photographs from the end of the 19th century. When the Royal Society hosted the event celebrating the Emma Clarke from Bootle, Williams felt that the evidence was shaky.

When the Royal Society hosted the event celebrating the Emma Clarke from Bootle, Williams tried to convince those involved that the evidence was shaky. Apart from anything else, she pointed out that Emma Clarke who played for the British Ladies could not have been from Bootle, because all Nettie Honeyball’s press interviews indicated that the matches were between North London and South London – not North of England and South of England, and not a national match. This is borne out by the initial teamsheets; if one accepts that Jessie Allen of Crouch End was using the name Nettie Honeyball, she is in the first-ever British Ladies line-up, representing the ‘North’; Clarke, of Plumstead, is on the opposite side, the ‘South’.

Williams also argued that Caroline Clarke, née Bogg, being born in Ceylon was no proof either way of any black or Asian heritage that would have been passed down to her daughter.

‘Given the size of the British army and the British Empire at that time, lots of white British kids are going to be born in Ceylon, so that’s not that remarkable,’ she said. ‘If there was a family scandal [around the birth of Caroline] the parents certainly went on to have more children together so it didn’t break the family up.

‘As a historian, I think we’re on very thin ground. [The campaigners] got family historians involved and they said, “Well, families all have secrets.” Yeah, they do. But as far as we go, the genealogical evidence – because again both parents sign both sets of their [registry] certificates that I’ve seen – there is no evidence for any split or anything in the family. If you follow the paper trail there is no evidence.’

As for the newspaper reports, Williams suspected that the references to Emma Clarke’s ‘darkness’ were descriptions of hair colour. ‘I accept that she is described as a dark girl, and her sister is described as a fair girl – but my interpretation of that is to be their hair colour. Again, [that is] not that unusual because the women tend to be distinguished by their hair. The other thing is this “woman of Dutch build”. Now, if you read any Charles Dickens or anything, somebody of Dutch build is substantially built, it is a kind of euphemism for generously proportioned – so you can have a Dutch sideboard! It doesn’t mean that she’s even foreign. We know Nettie Honeyball was about ten and a half stone, which would have been relatively robust for a Victorian woman of the time. So I just take it that it is the journalist’s sexist way of saying women who want to play football have to be pretty robust of build.’

Despite the doubts raised by some historians, the FA hail Clarke as ‘Britain’s first female BAME footballer’, and in the media her name has been mentioned as one of the ‘black pioneers of the women’s game’ – possibly even ‘the first black female professional footballer’, assuming she and her teammates did indeed get a small remittance for their efforts on behalf of the British Ladies. Her place in women’s football history has been assured even without the conclusive photographic evidence or genetic proof that some historians are still searching for, and which would dismiss any doubts once and for all. Nettie Honeyball may have been a pseudonym and Emma Clarke a real person, but both have become significant parts of women’s football tradition despite so little information about either of them. Of course, women’s history in general has been neglected, not chronicled in the same way that men’s stories might have been, and often tough to trace in public records because of the custom of women changing their surnames upon marriage. The struggles to track down women from the past are not unique to football historians. With a relative dearth of knowledge about the women whose football careers developed in parallel with the men’s competitions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fables and legends have been created around mysterious, elusive figures.

THREE

THE MYTH

LILY PARR IS PERHAPS THE first genuine, established superstar of women’s football. There is no question about her existence or her footballing career, which extended into the second half of the 20th century and as such was slightly better reported than her earlier years.

Her basic autobiographical facts are indisputable. She was born on 26 April 1905, to parents George and Sarah – their fourth child of seven. She grew up in St Helens, and the family were certainly short of money. She moved to Preston to look for work, and ended up with a job at the Dick, Kerr factory, which produced ammunition for the forces during the First World War.

Parr became part of their famous football team – the Dick, Kerr Ladies. The team had initially been set up after some of the factory girls joined in with the lads to have a kickabout during their breaks. After the men’s recreational team had a poor run of results, the girls were teasing their colleagues, and it ended up with the boys throwing down a challenge to them, which was quickly accepted, and the two sides faced off in October 1917. The factory girls kept on with their newly formed team, and were soon approached by a local hospital who wanted them to help with fundraising efforts for wounded soldiers. Rather than staging a concert, the girls opted to put on a football match, and asked the neighbouring Arundel Coulthard Foundry to form the opposition. The Dick, Kerr squad was selected after trials of the factory’s ladies’ sports club, which had 200 members, and one of the company’s draughtsmen Alfred Frankland took on the role of manager.

Wartime gave women a bit of leeway when it came to occupations and pastimes that had previously been the sole domain of men. Women were needed to do the jobs vacated by men who had joined the armed forces, and it seems to have been tacitly accepted that women were also going to do other typically ‘male’ things – like playing football. The authorities only permitted this during the war, though. The ban on women’s football in England was notoriously rubber-stamped in 1921, but there had been plenty of indications that it was imminent in the decades before that. The FA Council had warned their clubs that they should not be allowing the ladies’ teams to use their grounds as far back as the 1890s; and in 1902 they passed a motion forbidding all affiliated associations to give permission for their players to participate in matches against women. That was despite the huge amounts of money that women’s football matches were raising for good causes – not just those involving Dick, Kerr Ladies. The years immediately after the First World War were ones of immense poverty around the country, including in its major cities; financial assistance from charitable organisations in lieu of the formalised social security safety nets was essential, and women’s football was a massive part of that. A charity would ask two teams to play a fundraising match, the FA would be asked for permission to use a particular ground, and the club would work with the visiting ladies’ teams to promote and put on the event. It was a system that seemed to work very well. The 1920 Boxing Day match between Dick, Kerr and St Helens is famous for its venue, Everton’s Goodison Park, and its huge attendance of 53,000, with thousands turned away due to the stands already being at capacity, but it was also notable for the money made through gate receipts – over £3,000. Large amounts of money coming into the coffers was of interest to the FA, whose decision to ban women’s football was thought to have been partly influenced by the suspicion that not all the cash raised reached the charities for which they were intended – and that some of the female players may have been paid to appear in matches.

Dick, Kerr’s general manager Frankland tried to dismiss all these rumours, writing in the journal Sports Pictures: ‘Those responsible for the charity must make all the arrangements themselves and accept all responsibility for payments made in connection with the match. All we have received wherever we played has been just our expenses, and [these] in no way include any pecuniary recompense for playing . . . Our sole ambition has been to help as much as we possibly could the numerous charities on whose behalf we have been asked to play. We have all given our services gladly and the girls have revelled in the football.’

Women’s football was becoming hugely popular, evidently profitable and, ultimately, uncontrollable. In the summer of 1921, the FA gave permission for Dick, Kerr Ladies to play a South of England team on the home ground of Bristol City on the proviso that a full statement of accounts was shown to them immediately afterwards. A few months later, men’s league clubs were instructed to seek permission from the FA before allowing women to play on the pitches, no matter what charity would benefit from a match being held, and that if permission were granted, the club itself had to take responsibility for the accounts. Clubs were punished if they did not obey this new rule, and it became obvious that there were some dissenters within the FA’s membership – clubs, players and managers who were willing to continue to support women’s football.

The FA cracked down hard. In December 1921, it issued its famous declaration:

Complaints having been made as to football being played by women, Council feel impelled to express their strong opinion that the game is quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged.

Complaints have also been made as to the conditions under which some of the matches have been arranged and played, and the appropriation of receipts to other than charitable objects. The Council are further of the opinion that an excessive proportion of the receipts are absorbed in expenses and an inadequate percentage devoted to charitable objects.

For these reasons the Council requests the Clubs belonging to the Association refuse the use of their grounds for such matches.

The careful use of the passive voice and the shocking allegations of financial impropriety go some way to obscuring the emphasis of the first sentence – the idea that football was unsuitable for women, full stop, harking back to those concerns over unladylike sporting activities more than three decades earlier. There was also an implication – indeed, an argument that was made explicit by some commentators – that it was unsuitable for women’s bodies. For some critics, women footballers were not only risking injury during a match, they were risking long-term damage – possibly ruining their fertility and their chances of having a family later in life.

Such a proclamation could not wipe out women’s football entirely. At that time, there were approximately 150 women’s clubs in England, and they pulled together quickly to set up the English Ladies’ Football Association. They brought in some governing principles as swiftly as possible – one of the most notable being that no woman could play for a team more than 20 miles from her home, meaning that the close-knit local ties of teams and communities were preserved and encouraged.

Some of the better-established teams had access to their own pitches and did not need to rely on the generosity and cooperation of men’s clubs. Dick, Kerr Ladies, for example, had their own facilities at Ashton Park, but they were supported by the factory and company whose name they bore. Nor did the Dick, Kerr Ladies particularly see a need to be involved in a domestic league competition; their fame had spread abroad and they were invited to tour Europe, Canada and the United States. In 1926, the Dick, Kerr factory cut ties with its famous football team, which took on the name Preston Ladies instead, but to all intents and purposes it was the same side.

All in all, it was amazing that Lily Parr had such footballing longevity. Stunningly tall, and blessed with a magnificent head of jet-black hair, Lily Parr was an imposing figure to look at, and as a footballer she was a fearsome prospect too. She joined the Dick, Kerr side at the age of 14, in early 1920, having already spent time playing for St Helens, where she scored 43 goals in her first season. Even after the team were told to stop using the factory’s name and called themselves Preston Ladies instead, Parr continued as a mainstay of the side, terrorising defences, marauding down the left wing. She played her last match in July 1951, gracing the pitch at Windsor Park in Belfast, as Preston and a representative French side toured the British Isles. By that time, Parr had moved into defence as a full-back, where she may well have played at the start of her career if some early reports with their graphics of tactical formations are to be trusted. There she impressed with her vision and calm control, and as a veteran and club loyalist she was even prepared to go in goal if required. Although no detailed records were kept, it is likely that she notched over 1,000 goals during her three-decade-long career with the club.

Like many of the other players, after she left her job at the Dick, Kerr factory, she became a nurse at the Whittington Hospital, a large psychiatric institution near Preston, and worked there until her retirement in the 1960s. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in her sixties, and underwent a double mastectomy, which prolonged her life by ten years. She died at home in Goosnargh on 24 May 1978, and her memorial can be found in her native St Helens.

So much is known about Parr primarily due to the work of Gail Newsham, a footballer herself in the 1970s, who took on the role of historian for Dick, Kerr Ladies, recording as best she could their half-century of almost secret, and almost entirely ignored, football matches. As a Preston girl herself, she had heard the oral tradition of the famous women’s team, and in 1992 a local festival gave her the chance to bring former players together. She advertised in the local press, and began to talk to the women who had once worn Dick, Kerr’s colours, quickly realising that if this part of history was not to be lost entirely, she would need to get everything recorded. She first published her book In a League of Their Own! in 1994 and updated it in several subsequent editions as she continued to uncover information, locating plenty of newspaper coverage of the team right up into the 1960s.

‘It’s not just a bunch of women having a kickabout for charity, it’s something bigger than that, so I just thought to myself, somebody’s got to do something before it’s too late,’ explained Newsham. ‘I honestly believe if I hadn’t done it then, we’d have lost such a lot. That was it for me. The more I found out, the more I wanted to know. I just couldn’t believe the success and the size of the story and everything. It’s taken over my life, not just in researching.

‘To me, I still think of them as the young lasses that they were – I feel like we’re mates. I know you might think I’m loopy, but I don’t care – I honestly believe that they chose me to tell this story, because I always felt somebody were guiding me. I’d had no experience. I left school at 15, because you did in those days, you didn’t go to university or owt, so I haven’t got any qualifications to speak of. It just all fell together, and that’s how it is all the time with this story.’

She is also probably the foremost authority on Parr, having spoken to so many of her team-mates.

Parr’s early life is well chronicled by Newsham, who interviewed Alice Norris – also a Dick, Kerr player and worker, and with whose family Parr lodged. Norris described Parr as a loner, and could not recall her ever talking about her family. But she – as well as other players – also described a woman with a magnificently droll sense of humour, with Joan Whalley saying, ‘You would have died laughing at her.’ Whalley also told Newsham about Parr’s light-fingered habits, taking souvenirs from some of their games, most usually an autographed match ball, particularly if it bore the signature of a local celebrity who had been the day’s special guest.

Newsham writes of an incident where Parr was challenged before a match at Chorley in Lancashire by a professional male goalkeeper, who told her, ‘You might look good kicking in against other women, but you’d never score a goal against me.’ The tale goes that Parr proceeded to hammer home a shot that he attempted to stop, but the sheer power of it broke his arm, much to her amusement and satisfaction.

Such is the power of Parr’s story – the working-class girl with a magical gift for football – there has been plenty of interest in her in more recent years. And this boom has also led to problems. Some of the little fables that are told about Parr are perhaps exaggerations, and Newsham was aware of that.

‘She’s just been made into something that never existed,’ she said. ‘She was just an ordinary lass, a good player with a powerful shot in a very good team, and there were better players than her; it’s just that she played longer than anybody else.’

‘It’s like most great footballers,’ said Jean Williams. ‘People will claim to have had a drink with George Best. You’ve even got Norman Mailer in The Fight, writing about going for a morning jog with Muhammad Ali, after pulling an all-nighter and he is in as good a shape as Ali. Our heroes, we like to invest in them, we like to magnify.’

However, some of the other stories have more than a grain of truth. ‘There is lots of evidence that she was really quite naughty!’ laughed Williams. ‘I did interview some of the players. They did enjoy themselves and they had a lovely time.’

But the caricature of the chain-smoking, coarse, rude, wild girl is, according to Williams, unfair. ‘When I’ve seen Lily Parr [in photographs] at the various events she’s in a posh frock. She looks as good in a posh frock and a little cloche hat as she leaves for France as anybody else. I think that coarseness may have been overplayed. And, of course, people are complicated so maybe she did like a fag but was it 40 a day? I’ve never seen any evidence of that.’

More significantly, Parr’s name has been attached to initiatives for lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people, a move that shocked her family, who maintain that she would not have described herself in any of those terms. Well-intentioned people saw the story of a great footballer, of immense physical stature, unmarried, with close female friends and no known male partner, and adopted her as a trailblazer for their own causes – but Parr’s life and home set-up were far from unusual at the time. Assuming her sexuality simply from her marital status would be an error.

‘That is a backward reading of the situation,’ said Williams. ‘The situation was a million young men, mostly between the ages of 18 and 21, were killed in the Great War [between 1914 and 1918]. So, as a social historian, there were a lot of single women [of the same generation in the years afterwards].