WHEN WOMEN TOOK jobs in munitions factories while men were fighting the First World War, football teams sprang up from these female communities. The Dick, Kerr’s Ladies by Barbara Jacobs (Constable & Robinson, £8.99) tells the story of the most famous women’s club. The team, based in Preston, regularly played to huge audiences — in 1920 a capacity crowd of 52,000 flocked to Goodison Park to watch them play.
Jacobs calculates that between 1918 and 1921 women’s clubs raised the equivalent of £24 million for charity. Yet when men returned to work after the war, resentment at women’s empowerment grew. The women’s game was too successful for the FA’s liking and in 1921 it said that “the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged”. A doctor claimed that football was unhealthy for women. The directors of Newcastle United agreed. “The time has come when the novelty has worn off and the charitable motives are being lost sight of,” they claimed. The ad-hoc structure of the women’s game and its benevolent impulses were threats to the more hierarchical, profit-orientated nature of men’s football. The FA banned clubs from staging women’s fixtures, so Dick, Kerr’s organised a tour of the United States.
Despite the author’s zealous research, the book does not manage to get close enough to its chief protagonists. Still, Jacobs writes spiritedly and does a good job of papering over the biographical cracks. As a Lancastrian herself, she conveys a keen sense of Northern working-class life and a film version of this great tale will surely appear sooner or later.