“When the ladies’ game began to fade away in the early 1920s no one still involved with it could have imagined what kind of future, if any, the game would have. When the Women’s Football Association of England was formed in 1969 few, if any, involved knew of the early pioneering players. In 1922 the ladies were doing their best to secure a future for the game; the modern women’s game has grown large enough to deserve a history. Now the two have come together at last.”

This is how David J. Williamson concludes his seminal book, on women’s football, ‘Belles of the Ball’ written in 1991.

In our own small local way, we hope that we have picked up the gauntlet to fill in the gaps and to tell Plymouth’s story of the brief but glorious history of our city’s first women’s football team in 1921-22, all too soon suffocated by the F.A.’s ‘sex prejudice’ ban that declared football was ‘unsuitable for females’.

We were inspired to create this drama, not only by David J. Williamson’s book but by David Lyons, who suggested the project to us last summer, and the initial and ground-breaking research undertaken and freely given to us by local historian, Anne Corry.

We thank both of these people most sincerely for setting us on this fascinating path of research and discovery; at times it has overwhelmed and  frustrated us, partly because of the lack of knowledge and interest in this incredible piece of Plymouth’s history on the part of Plymouth Argyle Men, but to balance that we have benefitted from some incredible support and input from the following people:

Sylvia Brice, Megan & Helen Bishop, Tess Blight, Paul Gillard, Lily Felgate & Kate Lyon, Hayley Jones, Laura Joint, Katie Middleton, Giota Papaioannou, Victoria Pike, Jane Rance, Caroline Seddon, Tim Tate, Alex Jackson (National Football Museum) and Argyle Women.   

Thank you.

And much gratitude to David J. Williamson for the free use of the powerful images from his book and to Dave Thompson for creating the ‘comic book’ cover for our scripts.

The more we investigated the real lives of our characters, the more we came to realise their bravery, foresight, skill and tenacity. Sydney Boultwood was way ahead of his time in investing in the new-fangled moving picture industry and Jessie Boultwood, was a mere domestic servant from Pin Lane but a local champion long distance swimmer! Frank Zanazzi, the trainer had groundbreaking ideas about training, incorporating co-ordination and grace, not just kicking a ball into a goal! The players we selected to symbolise the ‘team’ were chosen because they represented the range of full-time jobs - a waitress, a school teacher and a tailoress - that these women were doing whilst also training and playing matches. Obviously, Plymouth was one of over 150 clubs in England at this time, attracting crowds of thousands to their matches and raising the modern equivalent of thousands of pounds for the unemployed, orphans, local hospitals, the disabled and the widowed….

That is until the ‘men in black’ in the Football Association on December 5^th, 1921, put a stop to it all! Some of the clubs struggled on but most were unable to continue through lack of grounds and opponents to play. However, women’s football kept surfacing during the subsequent decades until the lifting of the ban in 1970; for example, Manchester Corinthians, created in 1949 by Percy Ashley for his daughter, Doris, a talented footballer. They helped to showcase the injustice of the ban on female participation in the sport whilst touring the globe, playing to tens of thousands in many iconic stadiums and raising thousands of pounds for charitable causes across Manchester – all largely ignored by the media and unrecognised by the profession.