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“When people hear about this everybody raises an eyebrow and says ‘Women played football back then?’” says Fran Porter.

Fran and her Coventry-based media company are reviving a golden era of women’s football, remembering the players from Coventry’s First World War munitions factories.

On Bank Holiday Monday scores of supporters will watch a unique replay of a 1917 match between two factory sides at the Butts Arena.

Coventry City Women’s Football Club will be dressing in period football kits, representing the teams of Rudge-Whitworth and Humber Ladies.

And the match will be filmed for a documentary telling the story of women’s football during the war.

The Heritage Lottery-funded project is being delivered by Coventry’s Eyefull Productions in association with Metal Dog Media, based in Far Gosford Street, and was inspired by an interview with TV presenter Claire Baldwin for a corporate video when Fran first heard mention of the First World War women’s teams.

She says: “We got wondering about that and thought it could be a great idea for a film, and being based in a big footballing city we wondered what was happening in Coventry back then.

“Because Coventry had so many munitions factories we thought there must have been teams here and, true enough, there were.”

The two teams being revived are from the Humber and Rudge-Whitworth factories (the latter stood on the site of the present day Skydome) and the match was the final of an eight-team tournament between Coventry’s munitions factory sides.

Before the start of the war, the role of Britain’s women was confined largely to the home. But as hundreds of thousands of men left for battle the women were left to take their places, filling roles in the civil service and transport, with more than 900,000 manning the munitions factories.

In Coventry’s factories women took on difficult and often dangerous work, toiling long hours to satisfy demand from the front line for a fraction of the wages paid to their male counterparts.

Outside work women also filled a gap left by men, taking to the football fields for some Saturday afternoon respite from the realities of war.

Tournaments were launched and the bigger teams would travel to other cities playing matches to large crowds.

“There was a lot of media coverage of ladies’ football during the war,” says Fran, “with some quite damning match reports about how these women were all ‘farcical’ and how they’d be better putting on their make up than playing this game.

“A lot of it was quite scathing.”

Metal Dog Media’s research is being used to make a documentary and a public exhibition.

It has unearthed details about how Coventry’s female factory workers were pushing to become unionised and how suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst visited the city twice on the back of ladies’ football matches.

Fran says: “We knew from the start that this was a project that needed to be embedded in the community and I’m astounded at the amount of support this project has, especially from the Sky Blues Trust.

“There’s a real dedication to telling this story. The momentum is just gathering and gathering.”

But the momentum of women’s football was brought to a stark halt after the war.

The most famous of the First World War women’s teams, Dick Kerr, from a Preston munitions factory, drew a record crowd of more than 50,000 to a Boxing Day match against St Helen’s in 1920.

The team’s star player, Lily Parr (who now has a place in the National Football Museum’s hall of fame) became the greatest goal scorer in English history – male or female – scoring more than a thousand goals during her 31-year stint with the club.

But after the Boxing Day match, when women’s football was at its peak, the FA pulled the plug, with what would be a 50-year ban on women using fields and stadiums of FA-affiliated clubs.

Fran says: “The women were raising enormous amounts of money with the matches for injured soldiers returning from the front line.

"But there were some very negative media reports suggesting the money was being misused. Nothing was ever proved but that coverage put a very negative slant on the game.”

She adds: “What’s there is the history as historians wrote it – and those historians were men.

"So we know the men came back and the women went back to the kitchens and it may be that they didn’t talk about this period much.

"I don’t know whether it became something that was disapproved of.

“But I think the FA definitely wanted to get rid of them. They were becoming so popular that they wanted to do international tours.

"We get the sense that at that point the FA said ‘No way’.

“What they were doing was unheard of and I think there was a fear about the numbers they were seeing on the gates.

"The FA was a very male institution at the time and they were nervous about what would happen next.”

The women’s game wasn’t revived until the 1960s, spurred by England’s 1966 World Cup win, followed in 1969 with the formation of the Women’s FA.

In 1971 the FA’s ban was finally overturned.

Now the women’s game is again one of the fastest growing sports in Britain.

Football has replaced netball as the most popular team sport played by women and women’s football is now the third largest participation team sport in England, after men’s football and men’s cricket.

Fran says: “It needs to be taken a lot more seriously.

“Coventry CIty WFC are incredibly committed, and doing incredibly well in their league.

“This is a team of women – with young girls joining at eight – who keep going despite the lack of money and investment.

“They have jobs and they’re playing on their weekends with absolute dedication.”

More details about the project, called No Game For Girls, can be found on Facebook and @eyefullcic on Twitter.