The "Ladies'" Game
Women's football, it is suggested, officially began in 1881 and in Scotland. On 7th May that year a match took place in Edinburgh. Said to have been between Scotland and England and just short of a decade after the first men's international it was in reality a fraud. The teams were at best only partially drawn from the two countries and the girls involved were literally playing, in both senses, a part. Reports indicated little skill at the game and, despite a series of seven matches, in Glasgow and in England, they appear to have been far more show-business than genuine sport. But nevertheless it was a start, probably a World beginning, of a sort.
In fact, for a genuine commencement there would be a wait of the best part of decade and a half with the focus now moving, at least in location, to London. 1895 would see the formation of the British Ladies Football Club (BLFC), note British not English, with as a founder, team captain and its Honorary Secretary the somewhat elusive "Miss Nettie (or Nellie) J. Honeyball". Indeed the team itself would become known as The Honeyballers, the subject of the 2015, BBC Alba documentary of the same name with an excellent contribution from the Scottish Football Museum's Richard McBrearty.
But Nettie Honeyball's involvement did not last long; perhaps effectively fewer than three months and seemingly less than a year with events, her part in them and her origins best examined by the inestimable Andy Mitchell in his Scottish Sport History blog. But the gist seems to have been that by the following year, so 1896, she had returned from living in Crouch End in North London, the home of the club, to Pimlico in Central London, where probably she had been born and grown up, and in the process dropped out of the game completely. The team's first match had been in March 1895, by May there were internal disagreements, by the autumn she was no longer Secretary and by the end of the season the following year was reported as "no longer connected...in any way", although the activities of the club and its spin-off would continue for another decade.
The person, who made that report, was another of the club members, originally the team goalkeeper and sometime captain, Helen Matthew. And, whilst taking, if not the club then the idea on and until 1897 touring the country is said to have claimed birth in Montrose and called herself Scottish and with her sister, Florence, publishing as The Lothian Lasses. In fact she was again born in London, in Mile End but be largely brought up on Merseyside, a fan of Preston North End and particularly Nick, the elder of the two Ross brothers. Both would play at Deepdale. Both were Edinburgh-born.
But, if she was not Scottish by birth or up-bringing, then she was Scots by background; a Diasporan. Her father was a seaman, who became a ships-captain and sailed mainly from Liverpool. And it was he, who had been born in Montrose of Angus folk, moved to Devon, there marrying before taking his family north to where the work was. In fact Helen was to grow up within half-a-mile of Goodison Park, where Nick Ross would also for a season be Everton's best-paid player.
Moreover, there were to be two more "Scots" that were to be closely associated with the British Ladies Football Club from its inception, one Scottish-born, the other not and with the slenderest of connections. The latter was Hannah Oliphant, the girl, who might even have displaced Nettie/Nellie Honeyball in the affections of the team "manager" perhaps founder, Alfred Hewitt Smith. Perhaps even a reason for her sudden departure. In 1895 he was twenty-two, twenty-three when he married Hannah the following year. She was just seventeen and pregnant. The couple were wed no earlier than October. The first of their two sons was born in March, she returning for the birth to her family's home in Newcastle. In fact, it seems she had been born in Washington, Tyne and Wear, her father a Boiler-Maker from Cleator in Cumbria, her mother from Berwick-on-Tweed, so on the border, whether Scottish or English is not clear. And it would be Hannah, who on returning to London became for the next decade until final dissolution of the BLFC first a player and then the administrator.
Meanwhile, through the first two years of the club's existence the patron and first President had been Florence Dixie, in fact the aristocratic Lady Florence Dixie. She had been born Florence Douglas in 1855 at Kinmount in Dumfries-shire, the then property of her father, the eighth Marquis of Queensberry. After marriage at twenty and two sons she became a traveller, noted writer, war-correspondent and campaigner for women's health and rights with, whilst never a player, football seen as a vehicle. At the time of her appointment she said:
"If the British (Note again British, not English) public will only give encouragement to the idea, which is now being put into practice, of football for women it would soon take a firm hold and become a an approved custom.
Let women, therefore, go in for this most excellent game and earn for themselves that improved physique will not only improve their appearance but their health as well."
Few would ague with the sentiment although fulfilment, especially in Scotland, might just have been a tad quicker, if the men in suits had too believed and would do so now. A plaque has been placed at her Dixie family home in Leicestershire, now an hotel. She and the Douglas's Kinmount, now similar, might be worthy of one too.
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