Football's Pioneers: Joan Whalley

For several seasons, Leicester City has worked with DeMontfort University’s International Centre for Sports History and Culture on various heritage projects. 

Joan Whalley was born in Preston on 18 December, 1921, a matter of weeks after the FA deemed football ‘quite unsuitable for females’ and banned its clubs from staging women’s football matches. The ban last until 1971 but it did not stop Whalley from enjoying a long and distinguished career, most of it with the famous Dick, Kerr Ladies team from her hometown.

Encouraged by her father, who got her a pair of football boots when she was just five, Whalley made her debut for Dick, Kerr (also known as Preston Ladies) in May 1937 at the age of 15. Playing its matches at rugby grounds and other venues, the team was by then nearly two decades old and Whalley had dreamed of playing for them.

Her first full season was a triumph. The team went unbeaten in 27 matches, including a 5-1 win over Edinburgh Ladies for the ‘Championship of Great Britain and the World’, a match Whalley could only play in by taking the day off school.   

A skilful player and a determined personality, Whalley was a pivotal part of the Dick, Kerr team for nearly 20 years. She had gone to the same school as Tom Finney and they became good friends. Like him, she was a right-winger, leading the national press to claim at one point that Preston had ‘the two greatest right wingers in the world’.

Women’s international fixtures were rare but Whalley was picked for an England XI match against Scotland in 1946. She also guested once for Wales against France. She scored a hat-trick but did not speak a word through the whole match in case her Lancashire accent gave her away.

Whalley lived for football. She played an average of 42 matches a year in her time with Dick, Kerr Ladies. This was as well as working full time, initially as a nurse at Whittingham Hospital alongside a number of her teammates and then as a bus conductor after the Second World War.

It was the demands of the latter post that led to her transfer from Dick, Kerr to Manchester Ladies in 1953. Working late shifts, Whalley overslept and was 20 minutes late for a bus to take Dick, Kerr on a two-week tour with a French team. Despite her team-mates’ protests, manager Alfred Frankland refused to wait and the bus left without her. Whalley was too upset to try to catch the team on route.

Instead, she cancelled her planned leave and returned to work. Frankland never gave Whalley the apology she felt was deserved and she left the Preston club, only returning in 1958 after the manager had died.  

Whalley retired a few years later. But she was reunited with her former team-mates as part of an international women’s tournament in 1992, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the foundation of Dick, Kerr Ladies.

Four years later she became the first female footballer to be featured by Nike in a national advertising campaign. She will be remembered as one of the pioneers of women’s football and one of its greatest ever players.