This summer, 24 national squads have gathered in France for the most eagerly anticipated Women’s World Cup finals ever. But – more than 100 years ago – it was a very different kind of global conflict that sowed the seeds for the first female superstar football team.
For years, it was one of football and feminism’s best kept secrets. An inspiring story of spirit over setbacks, and a testament to women refusing to be told they can’t do something.
The tale of this phenomenal team – the Dick, Kerr Ladies – begins against the backdrop of the first world war. It was a time of huge social change, as millions of young men signed up to serve their King.
The loss of manpower from Britain’s workforce left the country with a massive labour problem. Huge numbers of women volunteered to work in jobs they’d previously not been allowed to do. Initially there was some resentment that women were doing “men’s work”, but conscription, introduced in 1916, ended the objections. Subjected to relentless hard labour and often toxic conditions in the much-needed munitions factories, women began to enjoy informal kickabouts as relief from the plants.
Spotting an opportunity to boost productivity, bosses began encouraging football as a way of keeping the female workforce healthy and building morale.
On Christmas Day 1917, three years after the famous footballing truce on the western front, 22 fresh-faced young women took to the pitch at Deepdale, the ground of Preston North End football club, to raise much-needed funds for wounded soldiers at the local military hospital, Moor Park.
The two teams of Munitionettes – from Dick, Kerr Ladies FC and Coulthards Foundry – raised £600 (worth almost £50,000 today), as an amazing 10,000 people left the warmth of their firesides to watch the entertainment and support the war effort. Such was the demand to see the women, following that game, that Dick, Kerr Ladies began playing two charity games a week across the country – on top of 5am starts and 12-hour shifts.
Then the war ended; the men returned home, and women were expected to step back into the lives they led before.
Not so the Dick, Kerr Ladies. In 1920, they became the first British women’s club to take part in an overseas football tour of France – returning home unbeaten to cheering crowds lining the streets. They even approached the War Office for the loan of two anti-aircraft searchlights, so they could become the first women’s team to play an evening game. Permission was granted by Winston Churchill, no less.
As the favourites of Pathe News (the bulletins showed in cinemas before the main movie), their reputation kept on growing, as did their box office credentials. On Boxing Day 1920, they drew a record-breaking 53,000 crowd to Goodison Park, in Liverpool, with more than 10,000 fans unable to get in.
But the growing power and allure of women’s football didn’t go down so well with the FA – who feared it was affecting the gates at men’s matches. In 1921, a ban was brought in to stop women playing in any league grounds. This was the year Dick, Kerr Ladies FC had played 67 games, with centre forward Florrie Redford scoring a phenomenal 170 goals; they had been watched by nearly 900,000 fans.
Two reasons were given for the ban. First, there were complaints the sport was “quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged”, with some doctors agreeing it could be a serious physical risk; and second, some believed that not enough money had gone to charity as a result of their efforts.
Unlike many other women’s clubs, who found it hard to survive, Dick, Kerr Ladies simply found other places to play and train. The following year they travelled to Canada and the US for a tournament, only to find they had to play men’s teams; they won three, drew three and lost three.
Although the team featured many fantastic players through the years, the iconic Lily Parr stands out – not only because she played for the team for 30 years (from 1920-1951), but also for scoring in the region of 1,000 goals. Nearly six-feet tall, the voracious smoker of Woodbines was known for having such a ferocious shot that the laces of the ball could cut other players’ heads open. She was also the first woman to be inducted into the Football Museum Hall of Fame in 2002.
In 1965, Kath Latham, the first female manager of a women’s football team, took the tough decision to dissolve the team, due to the challenge of recruiting players. Six years later the ban on women’s football was lifted.
“For these women, playing football changed their lives – it gave them so many opportunities,” says historian Gail Newsham, who has spent the best part of 30 years researching In a League of Their Own!, a meticulous biography. “Some were told they couldn’t play by their parents, who even burnt their boots, so they would play under assumed names. I have had people say to me: ‘I am sure my auntie played for Dick, Kerr Ladies, but I don’t know what name she used, so we can’t look her up in the records.’”
In 2017, their centenary year, the first blue plaque for women’s football was fixed on the original Dick, Kerr factory wall, and a memorial was unveiled at their home ground of Deepdale.
Newsham is currently organising a centenary dinner to mark the record-breaking Boxing Day match of 1920. “Their greatest achievement is that they carried on,” she says. “I think they would be thrilled to see how far women’s football has come. They’d think it is exactly as it should be.”
The story of Dick, Kerr Ladies and women’s football after the ban shows just how important backing is to empowering and encouraging women in sport. In the modern world, this means commercial sponsorship, such as Visa’s partnership with the Women’s World Cup and UEFA giving a greater visibility and a wider audience to the game.
Visa is the Official Payment Services Partner of FIFA and sponsors the FIFA Women’s World Cup
