Nettie Honeyball, Rosy Rapids and start of women's football

But 100 years ago, those women who wanted to play a game that was “quite unsuitable for females” were banned from playing on men’s grounds, were condemned as “unwomanly” and were widely ridiculed. They had gone backwards from the heady years of the First World War when they did men’s jobs in factories and in the North East played in front of large crowds for the Munitionettes Cup.

The very first mention of women playing football in The Northern Echo is in a column called “Ladies Gossip” on February 23, 1895.

“Lady Florence Dixie has accepted the presidency of the British Ladies Football Club,” said the Echo. “The members of the club do not play in fashion’s dress, but in knickers and blouses. They actually, says Lady Florence, allow the calves of their legs to be seen, and wear caps and football boots!”

Other items in the gossip column included the clothes that fashionable lady cyclists were wearing that spring – “knee breeches, silk stockings and pretty shoes, and a short skirt always kined with satin which doesn’t stick as the pedals are worked” – and tips on how to clean discoloured ivory handles on tableknives.

Lady Florence, 40, was a writer and feminist, and a month later, the British Ladies Football Club – formed by middle class women with suffragette sympathies – scandalised London by playing their first game on Tottenham Hotspur’s pitch at Crouch End before a crowd of 10,000. The BLFC was led by a charismatic, enigmatic lady called Nettie Honeyball (surely a made-up name), and immediately began touring the country.

Nettie Honeyball was the key figure in the early days of the British Ladies Football Club, but surely she had a made-up name?

On April 20, 1895, they played at St James’s Park in Newcastle – the first organised women’s match in the North East – in front of an 8,000 crowd. Most of the interest was in the women’s knickerbockers, and that the brunettes played in red strips and the blondes in blue.

“The girls did their best and seemed in earnest but their idea of play was most comical and their ignorance of the rules most amusing,” reported the Echo’s sister paper, the Durham Advertiser. “The goalkeeper on one side had, on one occasion, a goal kick to take and calmly kicked it through her own goal. Then she innocently asked Charles Squires, who acted as referee, whether it was a goal to her. 

“The lady players looked charming in their costumes, used a very small ball, did not unduly exert themselves, charge roughly or indulge in foul play but as an exhibition of football it was, of course, a farce…”

The smallest player on the pitch, Miss Nellie Gilbert, had the trickiest skills and the crowd shouted “Tommy” at her because they were convinced she was a boy.

When the BLFC played at Sunderland three weeks later, the local paper said that “‘Tommy’ opened the scoring with a shot that would have put any of the league champions to shame” – and the men’s league champions that season were Sunderland.

And Tommy well have been a he: it is suspected that he was the 13-year-old son of one of Mrs Richardson, a full back.

This money making tour took the train from Sunderland to Exeter for more matches and returned to Darlington on May 20, 1895, when the reds beat the blues 3-1 at Feethams.

But The Northern Echo’s only report said: “If it is desired to protect the corporation property on the Victoria Embankment, the civic authorities of Darlington should see to it that a policeman is within hailing distance of the place on the occasion of football matches and other events attractive to the public. 

“On these occasions the trees, which add so much beauty to this approach to the park, are turned into supports by impecunious individuals who balance themselves on the railings around the trees three and four at a time. They hang on by the branches and in descending from their perches generally bring the branches with them. 

“The presence of a man in blue might prevent such damage as was perpetrated last night on the occasion of the match between the lady footballers.”

This does at least suggest there was such interest in the match that people were climbing trees to get a look at it.

The BLFC toured for two years, bringing Stockton its first taste of women’s football on April 27, 1896, when they played at the Victoria Ground. The Echo noted that “there was only a moderate attendance”, and interest in this freak show was now waning, especially as there was a schism in the ranks, with Nettie Honeyball and Mrs Graham, a Glaswegian goalkeeper of some skill, having rival touring teams.

The club fizzled out, and just to make sure that women never kicked a ball again, in 1902, the Football Association banned men from playing any part in women’s games.

The Wheatley Hill Rosy Rapids of 1909: : Meggy Lowther, Lizzy Luke, ?, Meggy Farrow, Lizzy Champley, Meggy Philips, Bella Cowie (kneeling). Are you related to anyone? Picture courtesy of the Wheatley Hill History Club

Yet women did still play: in the archives of the Wheatley Hill Local History Club is a 1909 picture of the Rosy Rapids AFC. They only seem to have seven players and, as all women footballers did then, they all wore caps to keep their long hair out of their eyes. The picture has “engagements wanted” written on it, as the Rapids were looking for opponents – or they were looking for crowds, at fairs or shows, to entertain with their novelty act.

But for all the allure of the Rosy Rapids, women's football would really have to wait for the outbreak of the First World War before it really kicked on...

SEE TOMORROW'S POST: HOW THE MUNITIONETTES INTRODUCED MASS FOOTBALL TO THE NORTH EAST AND CREATED THE FIRST STARS OF WINNIE McKENNA AND BELLA REAY