British Ladies’ Football Club, 1895. Back row, 2nd left: Emma Clarke.

It may come as a relief to readers that my posts are currently coming rather less thick and fast than usual. I’m working away, and awaiting some more info—Honest Guv, it’s not entirely due to the stellar conjunction of the Women’s Football World Cup and the new series of Killing Eve.

After China’s defeat to Germany yesterday, we might recall that football seems to have been invented by the Chinese (“Typical!“), and female players were common there. Wiki lists sightings in 12th-century France and 1790s’ Scotland. The British Ladies’ Football Club was formed in 1894 (the illustration depicts their first match in 1895).

Amongst the players was the first black female footballer Emma Clarke (1876–c1905), whose story has recently been rediscovered. One of fourteen children from Bootle, of whom only four survived to adulthood, “the fleet-footed dark girl on the right wing” was also an occasional goalkeeper.

The popularity of women’s football in Britain increased during World War One, with munitions workers taking part keenly (cf. Morris dancing). A golden age occurred in the early 1920s, but it was banned from the grounds of the FA’s member clubs from 1921 to 1971 (no comment).

Patronising early reports (“Grotesque football at Alford”!) had a lasting legacy. The first Women’s World Cup was held in 1991—in China. How inspiring that women’s football is finally making a major impact on the media, all the more so with the 2022 Euros; doubtless among the most excited followers were the girls of a County Durham school, authors of wise and trenchant letters to the FA in 2017.

For more, see Suzanne Wrack, A woman’s game: the rise, fall, and rise again of women’s football (2022, reviewed here).

As to Killing Eve (“homoerotic candy”?), my query, based on Mark’s comment in Peep show, remains unanswered. The temptation to binge-watch (never available for Twin Peaks in the prehistoric 1990s) is tough to resist…