The forgotten first Lionesses who won the hearts of Mexico
The women of England’s 1971 World Cup squad became overnight stars – then were banned on returning home, they tell Eleanor Steafel
Late one evening in the August of 1971, 14 girls wearing white crimplene skirts, white socks and tartan blazers stepped off one of the first ever Pan Am 747 flights on to the runway at Mexico City International Airport. They were met with a wall of cameras, the flashbulbs blinding them as they ambled sleepily off the plane. “We said, ‘There must be someone famous on the plane,’” Chris Lockwood recalls today. “Then we realised. They were there for us.”
The England Women’s World Cup football squad of 1971 were a ragtag bunch. When they arrived in Mexico City that summer, they might have resembled a gaggle of schoolgirls (indeed, one onlooker in the airport asked if they were a ladies’ choir), but for five weeks – and, it turned out, five weeks only – this group, hailing from Oxfordshire, Hampshire and Leicestershire, were celebrities.
They played in front of crowds 90,000-strong. Everywhere they went, they were mobbed by fans: their coach needed a police escort. Mexican boys sought them out with bunches of flowers and notes of adoration. Every television station wanted to interview them.
And their appearance in Mexico – all but forgotten until recently – paved the way for today’s Lionesses, who play their first fixture against Scotland tonight, as the 2019 Women’s World Cup gets under way to an altogether different level of global recognition.
In 1971, women’s football was emerging from a 50-year ban in Britain. During the First World War, women’s teams had partly filled the gap left by the men who had gone to fight. But when they returned, the FA declared football tball “quite unsuitable for females” and banned registered clubs from letting women play on their grounds or use registered referees. It wasn’t until the men’s 1966 World Cup win that a resurgence in the women’s game began to brew.
Lockwood, a left midfielder in the 1971 women’s team, recalls years at school watching from the sidelines while the boys played, itching to be allowed to join in. “In games lessons, I couldn’t help kick the ball sometimes. And then I’d get sent off and spend the rest of the lesson in the dressing room.
“After school I was straight up the sports ground playing football with the boys.”
Most of the girls, she recalls, had similar stories of years spent begging to play football at school.
Lockwood was just 14, playing for a tiny women’s team started by another girl at school, when a man called Harry Batt, who ran a small elite side called Chiltern Valley, asked her to join his team. “I was over the moon. We won loads of tournaments. The joy, when Sunday came. We had to raise money to hire a pitch in the park because women weren’t allowed to play on proper football grounds. But we just got on with it.”
Batt is, Lockwood tells me, the reason there was an England women’s side at all. A former bus driver, who had been shot and wounded during the Spanish Civil War and spoke five languages, he was a “maverick” with “a vision for women’s football”. Batt had set about finding players to form a team in Luton, but as he accrued some of the best talent in the region and made contacts in Europe, in 1970 he secured invites to take his team to the first unofficial women’s world cup in Italy.
Mexico followed in 1971 (though it wasn’t until 1991 that the first official, Fifa-sanctioned women’s tournament was held). Lockwood was 15 when they went, and to this day can’t believe her parents let her go. “I don’t know if they knew where Mexico was,” she says.
Batt’s team was billed as the England squad, which angered the fledgling Women’s Football Association, which was in the process of slowly putting together its own national side. But after the swinging Sixties, England was glamorous in the eyes of the Latin American public. The girls were nicknamed “las chicas de Carnaby Street” by one Mexican newspaper.
At just 13, Leah Caleb was the youngest member of the squad, her style already drawing comparisons with George Best. That first night g getting off the plane to a sea of photographers “set the scene”, she says. “The public just embraced us. We were always doing a autographs. It was surreal.”
It was only when the players got to the Azteca Stadium for their first match that the enormity of the tournament dawned on them. These were girls who were used to playing on park pitches with a dozen or so people watching. Walking up from the dressing room, hearing the crowd before you saw it, was, they say, unforgettable.
The girls lost their first game – a bloodbath against Argentina, ending
‘The public embraced us. We were always doing autographs. It was surreal’
4-1. Less than 24 hours later they were on again, up against the host nation. One broken leg, a broken foot and several bruises later, and their World Cup dreams were dashed once and for all. But, after the game, when they left the stadium, Mexican fans lined the route, passing gifts to the English team. The Mexican side threw a party in their honour and asked them to stay on in the city until the end of the tournament. They had lost two matches and would return battered and bruised, but they had won the hearts of the Mexican spectators.
“You’d think that from that moment on, women’s football would have taken off in England, but it didn’t,” says Lockwood. The girls had visions of a sea change, imagining thousands of little girls taking up the sport. But it wasn’t to be. Instead, Batt’s team returned to a three-month ban from playing for each of the players, and a lifetime ban for the coach himself.
“After all that, to come back and be shut down, that was the unfortunate part, for every woman footballer ever, really,” says Lockwood. “Some of the girls never played again.”
Even those who did continue playing never spoke of their Mexican summer. “At school, if someone went somewhere on safari or something they’d mention it in assembly, but they never mentioned Mexico.
“I think we grew up in an era when you didn’t show off. But we knew we’d done it, and our families were proud of us.”
Gill Sayell, a winger, who was just 14 in Mexico, has only recently told her 32-year-old daughter the full story of the time she represented England at the World Cup.
Lockwood, Caleb and Sayell have stayed in touch over the past 48 years, but it wasn’t until last year, when Caleb spotted an article about the Lost Lionesses of ’71, that they decided to hunt down their old team-mates. Since then, they have managed to find all but two of their World Cup squad, and have started to tell their tale in the hope that it will inspire the new generation of young women taking up the sport.
Nearly half a century after the ’71 team travelled to Mexico, women’s football in this country still doesn’t enjoy the funding and reach that the men’s game does. But when England’s Lionesses play against Scotland at the Stade de Nice today, they will have every bit of kit, sponsorship and medical support they need, as well as home fans in the audience and more watching on the BBC. In some small way, they owe all that to the 14 teenage girls who, years before them, clambered nervously on to lavatory seats in the Azteca Stadium’s dressing rooms to peek at the 90,000 boisterous fans waiting.
Lockwood, who displays absolutely no bitterness about her experience, is looking forward to cheering them on.
“We’ve got a terrific team, and I hope we win. I love to see young kids doing what they want to, without any inhibitions. If we were part of the beginning of that, then I’m proud – I just don’t know why it took so long.”