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It's often said that women's football has come a long way in recent years. To appreciate just how far, you need to listen to Patricia Gregory, who remembers when the washing facilities for women's teams in London amounted to "maybe a bucket, or possibly a river".

Patricia's journey begins in the early 1960s, when the Double-winning stars of Bill Nicholson's Tottenham side had the world at their feet. Inequality quickly became apparent. "My father didn't want to take me to White Hart Lane because he didn't think it was a place for women," she recalls. "I quite understood when I went, because of the behaviour of some of the men."

Within a decade Patricia had played a key role in the formation of the Women's Football Association (WFA) and witnessed the end of the infamous half-century ban on women playing at FA-affiliated grounds. Without her can-do spirit and tenacity, the burgeoning professional sport we know today might easily have taken a lesser path.

 

Invisible

By 1967, when Spurs won the FA Cup for a third time that decade, watching the game was no longer enough for Patricia. "My father and I went down to Tottenham Town Hall to see them bring the cup back. I remember looking up at them on a balcony and thinking, 'why don't girls play football?'"

So in a search for potential teammates Patricia contacted her local paper, the Hornsea Journal. "They came and took my picture, and girls wrote to the paper wanting to join my invisible football team." Before too long a new club was being formed under the nose of Patricia's father, who "didn't want me or my sister to play football, but he didn't stop us from convening a meeting of these interested girls in his front room."

With Patricia as chair, White Ribbon FC set about trying to secure facilities and opponents. That 1921 FA ruling was a stumbling block, and contemporary women's teams such as Manchester Corinthians and Fodens Ladies were unknown to the new club. But the support of male allies proved valuable.

"Various men's and boys' teams got in touch and said, 'come along and play us'. So for the first few months of our existence, because we didn't know of any women's teams, we played men's and boys' teams." Mixed-gender football, says Patricia, "would have been absolutely illegal, but nobody did anything about it". Male referees, too, offered to oversee matches between women's teams, in defiance of the rules, potentially putting their careers at risk.

 

Multi-tasking

As well as her role with the new club, Patricia was an administrator of her local league and became Honorary Assistant Secretary of the Women's Football Association when it formed in 1969 (all roles were officially 'honorary' as the WFA received no funding and ran on a voluntary basis). She speaks with fondness of the first Honorary Secretary, Arthur Hobbs. "I could type and he couldn't – he was a carpenter and he used to write all of his letters longhand!"

Patricia joined the BBC in 1970 as a Secretary in the sports department, and then succeeded Arthur at the WFA. "I would go to work and come home – I was living with my parents – I would have my dinner and then I would go to my room to start on the paperwork for the club, the league, and the association. That's what all of us were doing."

By the mid-1970s the ban was history, the England women's team was established, and the FA had started to provide some administrative and coaching support for the WFA. Funding and equipment were hard to come by, though. "Mitre used to chuck in a few footballs," Patricia says.

Eventually England followed most of Europe in unifying the governance of women's and men's football under a single organisation – in 1993, when the WFA's financial struggles saw it subsumed into the FA. "It was clear to a lot of us that we could not sustain activities to the level that we needed to in order for the sport to progress", says Patricia. "I suppose that's been evidenced by the progress that's been made in the last few years, but not least because of the money they've poured into it."

 

Action

For Patricia, the work of establishing women's football in England was pragmatic rather than idealistic. She and her contemporaries weren't setting out to change the world: they just wanted to play the game they loved. "You could say that we were fighting, but we never felt like we were suffragettes. We didn't feel that we were on a mission. I honestly can't say that was the case. We just knew a course of action that we believed we needed to take.

"Anyway, we weren't just a bunch of women – we had as many men, because almost all the managers of clubs were men. They might have been fathers of daughters playing football, or they might not. I can't say we were political or evangelical. There was a problem and it needed to be solved, and so that's what we did. Which you tend to think women do anyway, don't they?"

That's what Patricia excelled at in her career, where her initial spell at the BBC was followed by 15 years with ITV and an even longer stint back at the Corporation. As a Production Manager she made sure 150 colleagues were accommodated in Japan and South Korea and all in the right place at the right time to broadcast the men's 2002 World Cup. "I was good at organising things. I did that in my day job, which kept me going, and also in my hobby, in the football. It was a seamless transition."

At one point the overlap of her professional and amateur roles bore particularly intriguing results. As the BBC prepared to screen highlights of the Women's FA Cup Final, Patricia found herself "in the very strange position of typing a contract to myself" – "I wasn't allowed to sign it," she adds.

When the demands of the day job became too great, Patricia stepped back into the role of honorary life vice-president with the WFA, but her commitment to the sport goes on as both a Women in Football member and a writer/researcher. Last year saw the publication of A History of the Women's FA Cup Final, co-authored by Patricia with her former BBC colleague Chris Slegg. She's now working on a history of the WFA.

 

A solid base

Even as she ensures that the past is commemorated, Patricia's gaze is focused on the present and the future. Her characteristic blend of optimism and realism inform a careful take on the Lionesses' prospects for 2022.

"I would hope that we've got a good chance in this summer's Euros," she says. "We won the Arnold Clark Cup but I don't think it gives us a green light to winning in the summer. Everybody talks about Spain – who knows, maybe? But never discount the Germanys of this world, or our friends from the Scandinavian countries, who have always done very well."

And what of the unprecedented funding now going into women's football domestically?

"I want the money to be filtering down, not just staying at the top. I do see that as a potential hindrance. We're the first country to have a professional league and I hope that keeps going. I just hope the people in charge don't lose sight of the lower echelons. And that means money as well as anything else. It's so important that everything stands on a solid base."

Whatever happens at the professional level of the game, the work done 50 years ago by Patricia and her teammates kick-started a process of change at the grassroots which has permanently transformed the landscape for girls.

"I've got younger relatives, great-nieces, and if they want to play football they can, which is so different from what we had," she concludes. "If we've done nothing else, we're not any longer in that world."

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