Soccer History | Ayresome Park — 22,000 for a Women's Cup Final in 1918

On 18 May 1918, 22,000 people came to Ayresome Park in Middlesbrough to watch two teams of munitions workers.

Blyth Spartans Ladies beat Bolckow, Vaughan & Co. 5-0 and won the Munitionettes' Cup.

Almost every retelling makes this one match. It was two.

The final had been played first at St James' Park in Newcastle on 30 March, in front of 15,000, and finished goalless. Bella Reay hit the bar for Blyth; Bolckow missed a penalty.

The clubs did not agree a replay venue until 14 May, and the replay went to Middlesbrough four days after that.

Blyth led 1-0 at half time through Jennie Morgan. Reay scored most of the rest — three goals in most accounts, four in one — and Mary Lyons finished it off.

Reay was eighteen, from Cowpen in Blyth, and had scored 133 goals in 30 matches that season. The team won 26 of those 30, drew four, and lost none.

The competition was a North East affair and lasted two seasons. In 1919 Palmers of Jarrow beat Christopher Brown's of Hartlepool 1-0, with Reay guesting and scoring the only goal. She and Mary Lyons are the only players who won it twice.

The published record on this match argues with itself more than most, so both versions are given here.

Blyth Spartans' own website dates the drawn game 30 March on one page and 28 April on another, and puts the replay crowd at 22,000 on one page and 8,000 on another. A newspaper account dates the draw 30 April. One source gives Reay 33 goals for the season rather than 133, which reads like a dropped digit. Mary Lyons is fourteen in one telling and sixteen in another.

The cup itself was handed over formally at the Theatre Royal in Blyth on 31 May, by Jonathan Ridley, President of the Northumberland Football Association.

Ayresome Park was demolished in 1997. A housing estate covers the site now, and Middlesbrough moved to the Riverside Stadium, where the old ground's gates were re-erected in 2005.

The three photographs are the ground in 1991, the houses that replaced it, and those gates in their new position about two and a half kilometres away.

Sources: Blyth Spartans AFC; worbella.co.uk; Shields Gazette; Northumberland Gazette; The Daisy Cutter; Wikipedia.

Cover photo: Steve Daniels, CC BY-SA 2.0. Estate: Stephen McCulloch, CC BY-SA 2.0. Gates: Reading Tom, CC BY 2.0. All via Wikimedia Commons.