She was born Florence Douglas in 1855 and her father was Archibald Douglas, the 8th Marquis of Queensberry. Her eldest brother, John, became the 9th Marquis and sponsored the Queensberry Rules of boxing – notably the wearing of gloves, rounds of three minutes in length and a knockout count of 10 seconds - which are observed to this day.

John was also a keen footballer and formed his own team – named Kinmount after the Queensberry family home in Dumfries and Galloway – and captained the side against local rivals Annan in games in 1868. Annan wore red caps and Kinmount wore blue. It seems likely that this was Florence’s first exposure to the sport she later championed for women players.

She had a sister, Lady Gertrude and two other older brothers, the Reverend Lord Archibald and Lord Francis. Florence also had a twin named James Edward Sholto Douglas, whom she idolised. As the boxing and football examples show, the Queensbury family had a keen interest in sport and physical accomplishments, with Florence – who was only five feet (1.5m) tall - dubbed a ‘tomboy’ for her enjoyment of swimming, riding and hunting and competing with her male siblings.

Tragedy, however, also played a powerful role in their story. In 1858, Archibald, the 8th Marquis, died in what was said to be a shooting accident, but it was widely believed that he had taken his own life. 

In 1865 Francis, aged 18, was part of a group of seven climbers who staged the first successful ascent of the Matterhorn. On the way back, however, four of the group who were linked by a rope, including Francis, plunged 4000 feet (1400m) to their deaths on the Matterhorn Glacier. Francis’s body was never found.

On the 40th anniversary of the accident, Florence wrote an open letter to the many Alpinists who visited the mountain, pleading with them to look out for Francis’s remains. By the 150th anniversary in 2015, over 500 climbers had been killed on the Matterhorn slopes – but Francis’s body has never been located.

Florence was to lose another brother, her adored twin, James, in equally grim circumstances. James began to suffer from intense depressions and on May 5, 1891, in the North Western Hotel at Euston Station, he killed himself by slashing his throat.

Then, in 1895, the family was involved in a notorious scandal when James, the footballing 9th Marquis, discovered that his son, Alfred, was having an affair with the Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde. James denounced Wilde publicly as a homosexual, a status which was illegal at that time. Wilde sued James for criminal libel but lost, leading to his own prosecution and a sentence of two years’ hard labour in Reading Jail.

The scandal still reverberated 80 years later, when the then Poet Laureate, John Betjeman, released an album of his verse, which he read to the music of Jim Parker. One of the tracks, well worth a listen, is ‘The Arrest Of Oscar Wilde At The Cadogan Hotel’.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyUkeiw8P50
 

This, then, was the melodramatic background from which Florence emerged, but she extended it at the age of 19 in 1875 by marriage to Sir Alexander Beaumont Churchill Dixie who, at 6ft 3ins (1.88m) towered over her, although she was said to rule him ‘with a rod of iron’.

He was known to friends as Lord ABCD or, more commonly, ‘Beau’ Dixie which, in a later era would have been a perfect name for a Country and Western singer, all the more so because unlike the subject of Kenny Rogers’ classic song, ‘The Gambler’, Florence’s husband didn’t ‘know when to hold ‘em or when to fold ‘em.’

As a consequence of Beau’s gambling addiction, he squandered his annual income of £10,000 – worth around £1.1 million at today’s values – and was forced to sell his ancestral home and estate at Bosworth in Leicestershire. The couple moved to Florence’s home turf of Kinmount in 1885.

By then, women’s football had become a public spectacle, although in somewhat chaotic fashion. The first women’s match on record was supposedly between Scotland and England at Edinburgh’s Easter Road on May 7, 1881. The Scots won 3-0 in front of around 1000 spectators. However, the numbers were apparently made up by actors who treated the occasion as something of a theatrical performance – unsurprisingly, because the game had been organised by the Edinburgh-born theatrical agent, Alec Gordon.

In that regard, the women’s game was only following in the footsteps of the men’s equivalent because in 1868, when the Football Association had staged two games in London which were billed as ‘England v Scotland’, the tartan ranks were made up wholly of players who lived in the capital and some whose names were described as ‘mostly’ sounding Scottish.

In fact, the connection between the thespian world and women’s football continued throughout the 1880s and 1890s with sides such as Madam Kenney’s Famous Edinburgh Team, the Grimsby Town Ladies, and Carl’s Original French Footballers playing matches to raise funds for associated theatres. Madam Kenney’s players beat the Grimsby Ladies 1-0 on St George’s Day, 1887 at the Thornes football field in Wakefield.

It should not be any surprise that women’s game took longer to coalesce than the male version, a situation which reflected the social mores of late Victorian Britain. Tennis, for example, lent itself to women’s participation as a non-contact sport widely played in the gardens of the middle and upper classes.

Even so, the All England Club initially refused to include a women’s singles event until 1884 and even then permitted it to be played only after the men’s competition had been concluded. Men’s football, meanwhile, was emerging from a background of school sport which was long-established and essentially only required to be codified, which occurred when the game divided into soccer and rugby versions.

Moreover, physical contact sports were regarded widely as ‘not lady-like’ and the participation of most married women of the time was subject to the veto or approval of their husbands or wider families. These constraints were never likely to have troubled Florence who, in 1878, when her youngest son was only two months old, left him behind and set off with her husband – and in a group in which she was the only female – to explore Patagonia.

She chose Patagonia because few Europeans had ever visited the country and she wrote a travel book about the expedition, in which she portrayed herself as the principal figure of the group. Florence also returned with a jaguar, which she named Affums and kept as a pet until it had to be confined in a zoo because of its habit of eating live deer.

Florence continued to produce travel writing throughout the 1880s and she was also the author of two children’s books with strong and adventurous girls as the protagonists. She wrote articles for Vanity Fair, in which she supported Home Rule for Scotland and Ireland and was a forceful proponent of women’s suffrage.

In 1895, the British Ladies’ Football Club was founded by Nettie Honeyball, an elusive figure whose real name may have been Mary Hutson. Either way, her aim was to establish the women’s game throughout the UK as an equivalent of the male version.

In February 1895 Honeyball told The Sketch: "There is nothing of the farcical nature about the British Ladies' Football Club. I founded the association late last year, with the fixed resolve of proving to the world that women are not the 'ornamental and useless' creatures men have pictured. 

“I must confess, my convictions on all matters, where the sexes are so widely divided, are all on the side of emancipation and I look forward to the time when ladies may sit in Parliament and have a voice in the direction of affairs, especially those which concern them most."