Preston and women's football: Dick, Kerr Ladies and the ban

One factory team in Preston did more to establish women's football in Britain than any other, and one governing-body decision undid it for fifty years.

Preston's place in the history of women's football in Britain rests on a single club that began inside a factory, and on the decision that ended it. Both are worth stating plainly, because the second is usually left out of the story and it is the part that explains the fifty years of silence that followed.

The club was Dick, Kerr Ladies F.C., formed in 1917 among women working at the Dick, Kerr & Co works in Preston — a workforce that had grown from 1914 as the plant turned to munitions, which is the reason there were enough women on one site to field a team at all. Wartime factories organised sport on the reasoning that it kept a workforce healthy and cohesive, running in-house tournaments between departments, and a women's team that formed on that basis went on to become the best-known side in the country.

A works team that became a national side

The founding story is the one that survives because it is so unlikely: a group of women employed at the works beat the men's factory side in an informal game, and an office clerk named Alfred Frankland, who had watched it, took on the running of the team. What began as charity fixtures raising money during and after the First World War turned into something with a national following.

In 1920 the club played a French side in what is generally regarded as the first women's international football match. On Boxing Day of the same year it met St Helen's Ladies at Goodison Park in front of 53,000 people — the largest crowd recorded at a women's club match anywhere, and a figure that stood for 98 years. That was the peak, not the norm: across its run the club won 759 of its matches, drew 46 and lost 28, and in the years before the ban its games regularly drew crowds of up to 50,000. No domestic women's fixture in Britain came near it again for the better part of a century, which is the measure of how established the game had become before it was stopped.

The 1921 ban, and the fifty years after it

In 1921 the Football Association resolved that women's football should not be played on the grounds of its member clubs. The stated reasoning concerned suitability; the practical effect was to remove the game's venues, its gate income and its route to a wider audience in one decision. Teams that had been filling grounds were left playing on rugby pitches and public parks.

The ban was not lifted until 1971. Dick, Kerr Ladies had disbanded in 1965, six years short of it, and the half-century in between is why the modern game had to be built more or less from nothing. Preston's claim on this history is therefore double: it is where the strongest team of the first era came from, and where the cost of the ban is most clearly measurable.

What followed in Lancashire

The clubs that emerged after 1971 came up through leagues. The factory teams were long gone. Preston North End W.F.C. is the clearest line of descent: it later moved to Fylde and now plays as AFC Fylde Women, which is a common shape for clubs of that generation — several changes of name and base as the structure around them settled. A club's records follow the name it holds at the time, so a single history can sit under three of them. The lineage is traceable through its names: the club founded in 1971 was originally the Duke of York, a founding member of the North West Women's Football League; it became Preston Rangers W.F.C., then Preston North End Women, who were promoted into the FA Women's Premier League Northern Division for the 2005/06 season, and the side changed its affiliation from Preston North End to AFC Fylde from the start of 2019/20, since when it has played as AFC Fylde Women.

Lancashire now supports adult women's football at every level of the pyramid: more than 100 adult women's teams play across the county, from the Lancashire FA County Women's League and the North West Women's Regional Football League up through the FA Women's National League to the FA Women's Super League. The league programme is 11-a-side on Sunday afternoons, with a 9-a-side summer league alongside it for recreational players. The top of that pyramid sits elsewhere — the clubs that attract the best players are the funded Super League sides, none of them in Lancashire — which is why Preston's standing in this game is historical, not current, and why the record it holds is a crowd figure from 1920 as opposed to a trophy. For its population the county is unusually deep in that respect, and the reason is partly historical — the game never lost its footing here in the way it did elsewhere. The professional men's ground in the city, Deepdale, is one of the oldest continuously used football grounds anywhere, and the city's sporting geography is set out on the live and work sheet. The recreational end of that pyramid has its own history: a summer league for recreational players started in 2017, and in 2018 six of its fourteen teams moved up into the Lancashire FA Women's County League.

Why Arsenal appears on a Preston page

The modern club most often named alongside this history is Arsenal Women, and the reason is not geographical. It is the side against which the professional era is measured: multiple Women's Champions League and Community Shield honours, and in 2006/07 the first women's team to win a sextuple of competitions in a single season. Players move towards that kind of programme, which is exactly the pressure a county-league structure in Lancashire sits under.

Arsenal's own hall of fame is where the names sit: Rachel Yankey, Kelly Smith and Katie Chapman among them, and the England midfielder Fara Williams, the most-capped player in the history of the national side. All four came through the professional structure rather than the works-team one this page describes, which is the distance the sport has travelled in a century.

What it records is why Preston appears in this history at all, and the reader who wants the present-day league picture is better served by a source that maintains it.