Quite exciting for us to find that we had this footballing little old grandma
The main photograph is a picture of my grandma at the front of the football and the team and a crowd behind her. They all look very robust women with their jumpers and their ties round their necks but she’s quite a petite woman, they all had hats with tie rounds. My dad found the photograph, which was obviously for us quite exciting to find that we had this footballing little old grandma who was always a very petite lady, very quiet, very particular about how she did things and then to find out that she was this real rufty, tufty footballer, she must have only been about 15.
________Match programme cover________
We found a leaflet about a fete in Hexham where the teams from North Eastern Marine had played Wallsend Slipway football team and it sounds like they were munitions workers in the yard. They’d raised a lot of money for the war fund, I think they said on the leaflets it was about £1,500 which is a huge amount of money at the time. But it sounds like it would have been a great day out for them all to go off in a bus to Hexham and play against these teams. The leaflet describes how they were going to see if these women could really play football, which I think is quite funny considering how at the time they were obviously quite good at it.
Florence (possibly 1920s)
She died in 1985. She was a very petite lady, she loved her Yorkshire terriers, she loved horse racing with my grandad. They had a very particular passion about gardening and animals. They bred canaries, my grandad and her would take them to Yorkshire and show them and they won lots of prizes. Very northeast based, leek growing and showing and chrysanthemums and dahlias and he won lots of prizes and they were both very proud of that. It was their big day out. All the family had this shipyard link. My dad went on to work in the shipyards. My grandad worked there which is where she met my grandad and also my uncle worked in the shipyards so there’s a real history of it.
The photograph where they are all in a team, is 1916 and she married my grandad in 1925 and then went on rapidly to have her first daughter Joan and then my dad and then her third son Hugh. I think she became housewife, looking and caring for the children while my grandad continued to work at the shipyards, so a very traditional role.
I suppose she was probably only a young woman, so she may have done something else in the shipyard. She seems like that sort of person who would have been busy, she wouldn’t just be pottering around.
Florence (far left) at her son’s wedding
When I was a young girl, nobody played football, you know in the 80s and to find out that she played football was amazing and we were just like, “Wow!” And then you look at football today and you think, what have they missed, all those years where it was stopped completely but the fact that she’d done this. You look at the size of the football in the picture and obviously there’s this great big leather-caser and she’s just this petite lady. Everyone I know and sees the photo go, “Look at that, women’s football. Yeah!” On the leaflet about the holiday show, she’s down as a forward. So, Florence Wallace is a forward.
My grandad, from my understanding, was very much hands on welding and fixing and building the ships. My dad started off doing the same thing and then he went off to serve in the merchant navy and became a chief engineer, travelling the world on the ships. When the family arrived, he came back to work in the yards as an engineer in the repair side and he lived the rest of his life out in Wallsend, working in Wallsend at Swan Hunters.
Shirley was interviewed as part of the Women in Shipbuilding project.