When women were banned from playing football on men's grounds

The resolution, passed on December 5, 1921, effectively banned women's football.

The FA's statement said that there was a "strong opinion that the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged".

The incredible story of the rise of women's football in the First World War, when teams were formed throughout the country as women went to work in factories, to the ban in 1921 is the emotive topic of a stage play which opens next spring by internationally produced playwright Ed Waugh. He uses the story of Bella Reay – the free-scoring centre forward of the unbeaten Blyth Spartans Munitions Ladies in Northumberland – to shed light on this scandalous decision.

Bella (above) was born in 1900. She bagged 133 goals in 30 matches for the Spartans and earned the affectionate Geordie title of "Wor" (meaning "Our") even before the great Newcastle centre forward "Wor" Jackie Milburn earned the much-loved moniker in the 1940s.

Without doubt, Wor Bella was the Alan Shearer of her day.

When male military conscription was introduced in 1916 after the bloody slaughter of Ypres and later Passchendaele, hundreds of thousands of women flooded into the munitions factories to save the war effort.

The "munitionettes" (a cohort of 800,000 by 1918) worked long, hard, dangerous and physical 60-hour weeks in shipyards, armaments factories, docks, rope mills, steel mills etc and yet still found the energy to play football to raise money for maimed and blinded soldiers, widows and orphans.

Fans paid six old pence entry and gates of thousands were registered. Matches were initially played on minor football grounds and miners' welfares but as women's football was taken more seriously, and became more popular, the teams graced professional stadia.

Men's football had been suspended in 1915 so 7,000 professional footballers were made unemployed. Some joined the armed forces while others entered the domestic workplace. Many of them helped train the women and organised the games as secretaries or match officials.

There were teams across the North-East, centred on factories and particularly on munitions works, where the women were called “munitionettes”.

Blyth Spartans in action during the First World War: their team was formed by girls who loaded munitions into ships in the docks of Blyth

In his book, The Munitionettes, Patrick Brennan records 268 women’s matches in the North East between December 1916 and May 1919, which shows how widespread the movement was. For instance, Trimdon Grange Munition Girls played at Wheatley Hill and on the Brewery Field in Spennymoor; they took on West Hartlepool Women at Durham University’s ground and Hartlepool United’s famous Victoria Ground.

Many matches raised money for charities – the Trimdon Girls’ game at the university raised £50 for the Durham Light Infantry Prisoner of War Fund – and not all were serious: Brown's Foundry Girls on Teesside in late 1917 took on men from the DLI who had their hands tied behind their backs.

However, Brown’s better girls were kept out of the charity kickabout because later that day that had a deadly serious match against Bolcklow Vaughan Girls.

There were no leagues, but the North East was unique in the country in having an organized competition for the women: the Alfred Wood Cup – a trophy donated by a Sunderland businessman.

Known as the Munitionettes Cup, this is the first female football tournament ever organised in Britain. There were 14 teams in the Tyneside section of the draw and the Teesside section included four from Middlesbrough, three from Darlington and two from Skinningrove, as well as the Trimdon Girls. Teams, though, were very fluid, and there were lots of drop-outs, name changes and nine-a-side matches. But of the Darlington teams, Rise Carr, led by the free-scoring Sarah Hooper whose brothers starred for the Quakers, reached the semi-final where they lost 1-0 to Bolckow, Vaughan, of Middlesbrough.

The Bolckow, Vaughan Ladies of 1918 which were the runners-up in the Munitionettes Cup. Back row: Emily Milner, Amelia Farrell, Greta Kirk, Violet Sharples. Front: Elizabeth Powell, Mary Mohan, Mercy Page, Winnie McKenna, Gladys Reece, Olive Percival, Anne Wharton

The final was held on March 30, 1918, with the ironmasters’ girls taking on Bella Reay’s Blyth Spartans Ladies – a team formed of girls who worked on the docks loading ships with munitions.

The match, played at St James's Park, the home of Newcastle United, attracted 18,000 people. It was a 0-0 draw.

The replay six weeks later was at Ayresome Park, the home of Middlesbrough FC, in front of a crowd of 22,000. Bolckow, Vaughan were captained by Winnie McKenna (below), a free-scoring Grangetown lass, who was one of the greats of the day.

But Spartans had Bella and a 15-year-old wonderkid, Mary Lyons, who they had poached from Palmers’ Munitions Girls of Jarrow for the match. Bella scored a hat-trick and Mary also found the back of the net as Blyth won the first cup 5-0.

The Blyth Spartans Munition Girls of 1918 with the Munitionettes Cup: Back row: Hannah Weir, Lizzie James, Nellie Fairless. Middle: Agnes Sample, Martha O'Brien, Bella Metcalfe. Front: Dollie Allan, Annie Allan, Bella Reay, Ada Reed, Jennie Morgan

A couple of months later, though, Bella, Mary and Winnie turned out for a North of England Women’s team that beat West of Scotland at St James’s Park (attendance: 20,000) 3-2.

Despite its growing popularity, women's football took a severe blow when the war ended in November 1918 and the war-time industries closed down, causing the munitionettes to be thrown out of work to accommodate returning war veterans.

A second Munitionettes Cup was contested in 1919. Young Mary Lyons led Palmers of Jarrow to victory in the final 1-0 over Brown’s Foundry Girls, from whom Winnie made a guest appearance.

And although the women’s game was scaled back, it remained popular: on Boxing Day 1920, Dick Kerr Ladies of Preston played St Helen's Ladies of Merseyside at Goodison Park (home of Everton FC), watched by more than 53,000 in the stadium and thousands more locked out – this was then a world record for a football attendance.

In 1921, politics began to mix with sport. After the war effort, the coal owners had taken back control of the mines from the government, and they demanded that the miners take a wage cut of up to 45 per cent to "restore profitability". It led to a lockout and terrible deprivation in the Durham coalfield where families were callously thrown out of company houses and faced harsh deprivation and even starvation.

Women’s football teams were again formed and finances were raised for the families of miners, so the women’s game gathered political overtones.

The Darlington Munitionettes who played in a charity match at Feethams on November 17, 1917, against West Hartlepool Expansionists. A crowd of many thousand saw Lady Raven, wife of the chief mechanical engineer of the North Eastern Railway, kick off the match. Despite the efforts of star local girl Sarah Hooper, the Expansionists won 2-0

It was these politics, and the thought of women once again drawing bigger crowds than the men, that led to the FA's ruling of December 5, 1921.

The women’s game had always been controversial in some quarters. For instance, a letter writer to the Echo’s sister paper, the Evening Despatch, signed himself “Father of Daughters, Darlington” as he wrote: “Is it not time a protest was made against this decadence of womanliness and burlesque of a national game?

“I am the first to admit that women have taken a noble part in the prosecution of the war . . . but it is a different thing when a girl consents to run about before a mixed crowd clad only in knickers and jersey, simply for what amusement she may get out of it. Such conduct is reprehensible. Little do the girls suspect the dangers to which they are exposing themselves, morally and socially.”

The FA wheeled out doctors who claimed that women's "weak" bodies were unable to withstand the physical rigors of football – this despite the fact that for the previous five years women had been successfully fulfilling the duties in heavy industry.

The ban wasn't revoked until 1971, 50 years later, and in 2008, the FA issued an apology. Next March and April, the Northumberland and Durham FAs will be enthusiastically supporting the play Wor Bella as it goes on tour.

Alex Scott: standing on the shoulders of Wor Bella

And today, women’s football is the fastest-growing sport in the world. Players like Sunderland’s Steph Houghton and the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing star Alex Scott stand on the shoulders of the First World War munitionettes who were banned by the FA 100 years ago.

L Wor Bella is staged at the Phoenix Theatre, Blyth, on March 25 and 26; Queen’s Hall, Hexham on March 28; Newcastle Theatre Royal Studio on March 29 and 30; Alnwick Playhouse on March 31; Whitley Bay Playhouse on April 1; and Westovian Theatre, South Shields on April 2. For more details on the play and Bella Reay go to worbella.co.uk

L Another great source of information is Patrick Brennan’s 2007 book, The Munitionettes. See his website, donmouth.co.uk. The book tells how on February 2, 1918, at Stockton’s Victoria Ground, a match between the women of Tyneside and a select XI from Teesside and Darlington ended 1-1. Apparently for the first time in the world, to help the spectators identify the players, the players wore numbers on the back of their shirts which corresponded to a list of their names printed in the match programme. Players' numbers were not used in the men’s Football League until 1928 and did not become mandatory until 1939.