Dick, Kerr Ladies Draw a Huge Crowd at Goodison Park

On Boxing Day in 1920, an estimated 53,000 spectators gathered at Goodison Park in Liverpool to watch a football match between Dick, Kerr Ladies and St Helens Ladies. Organised to raise funds for the Unemployed Ex-Servicemen's Distress Fund, the fixture set an enduring attendance record for women's club football that stood for over ninety-eight years. The match highlighted the rapid surge of popular interest in the women's game during and immediately after the First World War, with prominent players such as Lily Parr and Alice Woods regularly attracting substantial followings across British grounds.

The Dick, Kerr team had formed in Preston, Lancashire, during October 1917. Its members were factory employees who had entered the ammunition manufacturing plant of Dick, Kerr & Company in 1914 to support wartime production. Management had initially discouraged women from playing, but factory administrators soon concluded that organised sport improved worker morale and aided factory output. Following an informal break-time match in the yard where female workers defeated male apprentices, office worker Alfred Frankland organised the women into an official works team.