Day Preston's footballers set a world record

On Boxing Day 1920, history was made when Dick, Kerr Ladies and St Helen’s Ladies played against each other at Everton’s Goodison Park with a record- breaking crowd for a women’s football match turning up to watch.

This game was to raise money for the Ex-Servicemen’s Distress Fund in Liverpool but despite it having such historic significance there was little reported about the game itself by the press at the time.

Gail Newsham, author of In a League of Their Own: The Dick, Kerr Ladies 1917-1965, has made it her mission since 1992 when she organised a reunion of the Dick, Kerr Ladies team as part of the Preston Guild Celebrations, to research and inform people about the team and the individual players to keep their memory alive.

Referring to the 1920 Boxing Day match, Newsham said : “They must have been absolutely gobsmacked you know a full stadium like that. It must have been an amazing experience for them.

“The Dick, Kerr Ladies won four-nil and it was just a great day. There were 53,000 inside, between 10,000 and 14,000 unable to get in because the ground wasn’t big enough.”

The players had to be escorted to and from the changing rooms by police because the stadium was so crowded. Newsham said: “Florrie Redford one of the star centre forwards, she missed the train, so she was unavailable for selection, so they moved Jennie Harris up to centre forward. She was only 4ft 10in stall, but she was playing centre forward in this game, so Jennie scored the first goal and at half time they were leading one-nil.

“In the second half they had a bit of a reshuffle and Alice Kell was the team captain playing full back and they moved her up to centre forward and she scored a hat-trick in the second half and they won four- nil”

The kit worn by both teams wasn’t that different to that worn by male footballers but the women had to wear hats while playing.

Newsham said: “They had to wear the hats initially because everybody had long hair in those days and when they were playing they weren’t allowed to wear hair grips or anything, so they had to wear the hats to put their hair in. That’s the reason they wore them, once fashions changed and people were having their hair cut shorter they didn’t need to wear hats anymore then.”

After the victory at Goodison Park, the Lord Mayor of Liverpool presented the Dick, Kerr women’s team with a cup and each member of the team received a medal which was a gift from the Ex-Servicemen’s organisation which they were raising money for.

The game managed to generate £3,115 which if adjusted to today’s money would equal a sum of more than £147,000.

Their success in this game led the Dick, Kerr ladies to take part in international games travelling to the USA where they played against men’s teams for a total of nine games where they won three, drew three and lost three.

Two of the ladies who played for the Dick, Kerr team in that match were buried in the Lancashire area, Lily Parr and Jessie Walmsley. Newsham visits both their graves and is planning on visiting them again on the centenary of the Goodison Park match to place wreaths.

Newsham found Jessie Walmsley’s grave last Christmas Day and it had been badly neglected: “ I asked the vicar, can I get this grave put right?

“He said yes, they let me do it. It’s clean and on the bottom of it I asked them to put ‘Dick, Kerr Ladies Women’s Football Pioneer 1918-1922’.”

The record for the amount of fans attending a women’s football match was not bettered for nearly 100 years. It was only broken in 2019, when Barcelona beat Atletico Madrid at the Wanda Metropolitano stadium in Madrid when 60,739 fans showed up.

In England, this record was smashed later that same year when 77,768 fans filled Wembley for the Women’s FA Cup Final. The record went unbroken for so long as in December of 1921 women’s football matches were banned by the FA with them claiming: “The game of football is quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged.”

The ban lasted 50 years but since it was overturned in 1971, women’s football has gone from strength-to-strength and is getting close to the popularity of the years following the First World War.