DAY THE PRESS SAID BALLS TO WOMAN FOOTBALLERS
Lady star Nettie
NEVER MIND Goldenballs, Posh’s nickname for her multi-millionaire footballer husband David, spare a thought for Honeyball, the battered and booed woman soccer star Nettie of 1895.
It all kicked off when Nettie Honeyball (was that really her real name?) formed the first British Ladies Football Club in deeply chauvinistic Victorian Britain. Her photograph appeared in the Daily Sketch, on February 6, that year alongside an interview with the headline: ‘One of the world’s first feminine footballers’, and it sparked outrage.
Horror of horrors, a woman cross dressing as a man to play a man’s sport. Nettie was wearing a male football kit: a long-sleeved shirt, shorts, long socks, and shin guards. Nobody had seen anything like it before.
Women were expected to wear crinoline underskirts with steel hoops, cloth skirts that kept their legs covered down to the ankle, and corsets that squeezed their stomachs and chests.
Nettie told the paper: “I have founded my football association to prove to the world that women are not the ornamental and useless creatures men have pictured them as. I look forward to a time when ladies may sit in Parliament and have a voice in the direction of affairs, especially those which concern them.”
She was, of course, a suffragette.
The hostility of the crowd and the press coverage at her team’s first game proved her point that society still viewed women as ornamental and incapable of athletic prowess.
A Sketch reporter was sent to the match between North and South London at Crouch End football ground on Easter Monday afternoon. Tickets were sixpence and the enclosure and pavilion one shilling. Nettie was playing for the North in red and South was in blue.
The reporter wrote: “The first few minutes were sufficient to show that football by women is totally out of the question. A footballer requires speed, judgement, skill, and pluck. Not one of these four qualities was apparent on Saturday. For the most part, the ladies wandered aimlessly over the field at an ungraceful jogtrot."
Nettie’s North London side beat South London 7-1, which included three own goals. Nettie sadly didn’t net any goals.
The Sportsman newspaper was more supportive: A reporter wrote: “I don't think the lady footballer is to be snuffed out by a number of leading articles written by old men out of sympathy both with football as a game and the aspirations of the young new women.”
The match drew a crowd of over 10,000 men and women who squeezed through a single turnstile. They cheered and jeered the women players and when one of them played well, many shouted out that she was a man in disguise.
At this time men were seen as superior in every sense—intellectually, physically and emotionally. Women were confined to a domestic role and their skills were honed with a view to making them more marriageable. They were to learn nothing too intellectual, in case they intimidated a potential husband.
At the Crouch End game, there was a special guest, Lady Florence Dixie, a well-known newspaper columnist, women’s rights advocate, and member of the aristocracy. Her father, the Marquess of Queensberry, had accused Oscar Wilde of an illegal homosexual affair with his son and was fighting slander charges in court.
Dixie, like Nettie, was a suffragette and had already received a letter bomb in the post and was even attacked and stabbed by two men dressed as women while she was walking her dog.
She had been approached by Nettie to act as a spokesperson for the upcoming game that she hoped would be the first of many for her Honeyballers.
But worse was to come. With the club up and running, Nettie took her teams on a tour of England. They played at a range of playing fields and stadiums belonging to long-established men’s teams.
Public views were mixed and The Blackburn Times said: “Woman in her place is a charming creature but the idea of donning football shirts, knickers, and shin-guards, and trying to ape the man is disturbing to one’s peace of mind. Let them look at their hop-scotch and skipping-ropes, and leave cricket and football to the boys.”
By the end of the tour, crowds had petered out into the hundreds and Nettie’s hopes had faded. But goalkeeper Mrs. Graham, one of the club’s most talented players, refused to give in. She organised a tour of Scotland with the ladies to take on some of Scotland’s men’s teams. It was a bold and silly idea and ended carnage.
In one match male players smashed into one of the women, giving her a black eye, bruises and cracked ribs. Then the crowd invaded the field and surrounded the ladies’ team, forcing them to kick and push their way back to the clubhouse.
Nine days later, an angry mob attacked Mrs. Graham’s XI after a match in Glasgow. The women were being taken to their hotel in horse-drawn cabs when several thousand rioters descended on their convoy, smashing windows and attacking the drivers and players. Police were injured by flying glass and the government got involved.
It led to the English FA finally banning men’s teams from playing against women and women’s football floundered in the tides of time for nearly a century. As for Nettie, she became a mystery, and it was believed that was not her real name after all.
Over time there has been lots of speculation about who she was in newspaper articles and books. She disappeared and the most authentic account was that her real name was Mary Hutson, probably from a middle-class family in London’s Pimlico, another story claims she died in Leigh on Sea, Essex. No one really knows. Honeyball just went out of touch.
HOW FLEET STREET IGNORED
COOK’S CHERUBS OF TRAVEL
EVERY DAY for years so many of us Express hacks would walk past a series of priceless cherubs above us on the façade of Ludgate House at the foot of Fleet Street, and never give them a thought.
But these historic works of art (called putti) and the golden wings of four cherubs high on the roof were once the symbol of the world’s greatest travel agent, the Victorian Thomas Cook, used by holidaymakers and Express reporters alike to traverse the globe.
From the humble beginnings of a train journey to Loughborough his company grew into a billion-pound empire and turned into ashes in 2019, due to mis-management, old-fashion business practices and some say the sheer greed of directors and their staggering bonuses.
If we ever bothered to look properly, we would have seen that the moulds tell a story. The cherubs, designed in the early 1900s as Thomas extended his offices and shops along Fleet Street, are tiny travel agents planning a trip.
One set plots the itinerary using a compass; another set is consulting a map, and others include poses from classical mythology, such as Hermes, the patron God of travellers. Two of them have train wheels on and another a boat.
Four cherubs on the roof have golden wings and are bent over because they once carried a globe with a ship on top. Today, only the winged cherubs remain. The ship and globe mysteriously disappeared and got lost in the annals of history. But there is still a globe over the clock.
Thomas Cook was born on 22 November 1808, in the village of Melbourne, Derbyshire and in 1828, he became a Baptist missionary and toured as a village evangelist distributing religious pamphlets.
By the 1830s, he had joined the temperance movement, and his new life began with the opening of the extended Midland Counties Railway when he took a group of temperance campaigners from Leicester Station to a teetotal rally in Loughborough, eleven miles away.
His plans got bigger and in 1846, he took 350 people from Leicester on a tour of Scotland. By 1851 he had taken 150,000 people to the Great Exhibition in London and four years later came his first excursion abroad with a grand circular tour of Belgium, Germany and France. It didn’t take long before he offered wealthy Victorians their first world tour — a trip lasting 200 days and covering nearly 30,000 miles.
By now he needed a base in London and in 1865 bought a shop and offices in Ludgate House. The shop sold travel accessories like guidebooks, luggage, telescopes and footwear. In 1872 he formed a partnership with his son, John, and renamed his agency Thomas Cook & Son. His wife ran a small temperance hotel above their office.
Then came another money-spinning brainwave ... the hotel coupon, and in 1868 he produced detachable vouchers in a counterfoil book which were issued to the traveller. These were valid for either a restaurant meal or overnight hotel stays provided they were on Cook's list.
Thomas’s son, John Mason Cook took over the company in the 1870s, overseeing its continued expansion and in the early 1900s Arthur Pearson’s Daily Express did a deal with him to send reporters and explorers all over the world. Those were the days, eh? By the late 1920s, Cook’s had taken to the skies with its own fleet of planes, the rest is history.
The company changed hands several times during the 20th century, but managed to stay afloat despite various buyouts, economic crises and the rise of online travel agents.
Sadly in 2019, it was handed a bill of £200 million for loans by the Royal Bank of Scotland and other financial institutions. Unable to source the funds, the company declared bankruptcy and 150,000 holidaymakers were stranded, along with 21,000 staff.
The Civil Aviation Authority had to cope with the largest-ever peacetime repatriation in British history. But the mystery of what happened to the Ludgate dome ship and globe remains.
HALCYON DAYS WHEN
BLANKS WERE THE NORM
STORIES abound throughout Fleet Street of the Great Expenses Days in the Seventies and Eighties. And I note that former hack Maurice Chittenden devoted a special chapter to the halcyon days of the blank restaurant and taxi receipts in his book: “The Last Days of Fleet Street (My part in its downfall). Wonderful stuff. Here are a couple of historical anecdotes to give us a New Year smile.
*One evening, when dear old Derek Jameson, Northern Editor of the Daily Mirror was signing a reporter’s exes, he came across a lunch receipt missing the name of a restaurant at the top. Jameson peered closely at the bottom and made out the small print. It said: ‘These shoes cannot be exchanged.”
*A Daily Express reporter specialising in security stories and spies, regularly claimed for lunches with Colonel Popov from the Czech Embassy. After a few months a ‘jobsworth’ clerk from accounts decided to check and found there was no such person. He turned up in the newsroom and challenged the reporter. “Doesn’t exist, eh?” said the reporter. “Then I won’t trust anything else he tells me.” And just walked off.
*Former Sunday Express Chief Reporter Andrew Alderson reveals in the book that it was well known that Maurice had the biggest collection of blank restaurant receipts in Fleet Street, although I would dispute that, putting forward my old mate Norman Luck for the dubious honour.
*When assorted hacks were chasing a murder story in the Midlands, a girl reporter at the bar asked if anyone had a meal receipt for Birmingham. One by one she went around the throng and each hack shook their head. When she got to Maurice, he flicked open his briefcase, rummaged inside and said: “What do you want, Chinese, Italian or Indian?”
TERRY MANNERS
13 January 2024