by While men’s soccer fans of a certain age and ilk sometimes struggle to understand that the sport existed before Italia 90, fans of the women’s game can be relatively blank about its pre-Canada 2015 history.
Even those who are aware that women’s football was banned by the English Football Association for 50 years until 1971, are often dismayed to learn that it succeeded during and immediately after the first world war. And they will certainly have their eyes open Wor Bellaa play which will be staged at The Bread & Roses Theater Clapham and Newcastle’s Theater Royal this month.
Ed Waugh’s play tells the story of a cohort of more than a million brave young women barely swept from history. The Munitionettes heroes of the first world war united the war effort by working in munitions factories and playing football for charity.
Anyone who believes that British women barely kicked a ball before England’s Jill Scott, Lucy Bronze, Steph Houghton and company crossed the Atlantic and collected a bronze medal at the 2015 World Cup, might well know he has established hundreds of Munitionette teams nationally, including dozens in the northeast.
As fans began to attend matches in their thousands, female football superstars were born, perhaps most notably Bella Reay of Blyth Spartans Ladies. Scoring 133 goals in 30 games – including a hat-trick in her side’s 1918 Munitionettes Cup final – the then 18-year-old “Wor Bella” had an enviable goal by Alan Shearer on it.
With matches at St James’s Park and Ayresome Park regularly attracting crowds of 18,000-25,000, Bella and co were part of a sporting boom that would now be forgotten for almost a century.
“Today’s Lionesses stand on the shoulders of those incredible women from 100 years ago,” says Waugh, who is from South Shields and has written a series of plays highlighting little-known working-class heroes from the north-east. “The Munitionettes and their achievements seem not to be taught in schools so we are trying to keep their memory alive.”
Shearer has a cameo part in Wor Bella, playing a Match of the Day pundit. “The story of the Munitionettes who worked 60 hours a week in dangerous and physically demanding conditions and still found time to play football for war charities is incredible and inspiring,” says the former Newcastle and England centre-back.
It’s a message endorsed by Dan Burn. The Newcastle-born and Blyth-bred defender has had more than 36,000 hits after promoting the Theater Royal production by urging Tynesiders to buy tickets via a short “Howay the Lasses” video launch.
Bella is played by actress Vera Catherine Dryden and she skilfully transports the audience back to 1916 when Blyth’s working-age male left the Northumberland town en masse to fight at the Battle of the Somme and Ypres.
As the Munitionettes worked as stevedores, loading munitions forward and unloading spent cartridges on and off ships moored at Blyth docks, they began receiving informal harborside coaching from visiting sailors. By 1917 Blyth Spartans Ladies were alive, kicking and getting more formidable.
Not that this isn’t just a drama for football fans. “Before the war about 50% of young, unmarried, working-class women in the north-east went into low-paid domestic service,” says Waugh. “But when they were drafted into the factories, suddenly they had money in their pockets. For the first time, young women entered bars unaccompanied and often drank them dry. There are stories of the men left arriving to find the booze gone.
“Wor Bella It was a time of revolutionary social change when a cohort of young working class women had money and freedom for the first time. They could afford to cut their hair fashionably and play a man’s game like never before.”
By 1921, the men had returned to factory work but the women’s teams continued to attract large crowds. A peak was reached in the north-west on Boxing Day 1920 when 53,000 fans – with a further 15,000 locked out – packed Goodison Park to watch the famous Dick, Kerr Ladies v St Helens match.
In December 1921 FA barwomen duly played on affiliated pitches on the purported “medical” grounds that the game was “unfit for women”. The ban not only forced women’s football underground for five decades but helped to re-impose socially conservative ideas about the place of women in wider society. “There are some very funny moments in Wor Bella but it’s not all laughs, it should make people angry too,” Waugh said. “True anger.”
Dryden describes the 1921 FA ban as “scandalous” and is delighted to bring Bella, who died of dementia in 1979, back to life. “The play is a tribute to the million plus women who went into extremely dangerous industrial work when men were detained in 1916,” she says. “Apart from the war effort, they raised money to support wounded soldiers, widows and orphans. They were selfless.”
Get in touch
If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email moving.goalposts@theguardian.com. And a reminder that Moving the Goal Kus is held twice a week, every Tuesday and Thursday.
