Lady Dynamos: the thread about Edinburgh’s trailblazing women’s football team denied a sporting chance by the authorities

In April 1948, when the Edinburgh Lady Dynamos football team requested permission to play a charitable football match against an English select side at the New Meadowbank sports ground, they were denied permission by the City Corporation’s “General Purposes Committee”. When they had been allowed to play there in 1946, 17,000 spectators had turned out to watch a 2-2 draw.

Councillor for Pilton, Magnus Williamson, gave a lukewarm approval “I am not an advocate of women’s football. I don’t like it, but women apparently want to play football and we have a responsibility to see women get a share of the available facilities“. He told the committee he had consulted a doctor on the matter to see “if football does women any harm.” He was “assured it does not, if indulged in moderately“. Councillor Bruce Turnbull, Morningside, simply dismissed the very idea of women playing football as “pure entertainment“; I mean imagine football being entertaining! In 1939, as chair of the Corporation’s Parks Sub-Committee, the same Councillor Turnbull moved approval of a motion to remove a subsidised rate for women to play tennis (a rate to encourage them into the game and that acknowledged their lesser financial position) saying they “required no encouragement at all” to play and were “rather proud of themselves” when they did. The only woman on the committee, Cllr. Mrs Ross, protested for the record that if “women have to pay the same as men, I would like to see them treated as equals” and excluded herself. The rest of the committee – the men – carried it 5-2, with only Labour Councillors Jack Kane and John Welch against.)

Back at the vote in 1948 Deputy Superintendent of Parks, Mr A. T. Harrison, explained that Mr George Graham, Scottish Football Association Secretary, had told them “all grounds that allowed women’s football would be banned” from hosting men’s football. The committee voted 8-4 against the Dynamos lest they lose the men’s game from Meadowbank – which Leith Athletic called home – and the income its lease brought in. Instead the women’s side were relegated to the decrepit Woods Park in Portobello, not a ground that could host the tends of thousands of fans they had proved capable of attracting. Esta Henry, the club president, addressed the crowd at Wood’s Park and alleged “there were no sportsmen in Edinburgh Town Council“, that “only three or four members of the Corporation knew anything about sport” and thought it was very unfair that women could not use a ground provided for by the ratepayers.

The Dynamos were formed in late 1945 by Mary Leslie and Lynda Clements of Leith, who decided to resuscitate a pre-war team, the Edinburgh City Girls, who had been runaway Scottish Champions (winning 19/21 games in 1937) and had toured England in the late 1930s. The City Girls had played to crowds of 30,000 and regularly thumped their opposition 7, 8 or 9 nil. Here they are, in hoops, mixed with their opposition Lothian Girls at Ettrick Park, Selkirk. Unfortunately the names are not recorded, but Leslie and Clements were in the squad.

On June 17th 1939, at St. Bernard’s Park in Edinburgh, the City Girls won 5-2 infront of a crowd of 10,000 in an “International” charity match against Preston Ladies; Linda Clements scored 2 goals that day. They lost a follow-up return leg 3-0, to tie the account. The following month, the City Girls briefly became “international champions” after a mini-tournament of the 8 other womens League teams in Britain, thrashing Glasgow Ladies 7-0 at Carmuirs in Falkirk on July 6th – Linda Clements scoring a hat trick.

Leslie and Clements had been inspired by the visit of Dynamo Moscow to the UK in late 1945, where the Russian team played Cardiff (thumping them 1-10), Chelsea (drew 3-3), Rangers (drew 2-2) and Arsenal (won 2-3) and took the name of the visiting side for their own. For their club president they attracted the formidable figure of Esta Henry, a well-known face in the Old Town, an eccentric and determined antiques dealer who had served as Parish and Town Councillor and had an insatiable appetite for getting involved in anything involving women, youth and organised events. Esta put her money where her mouth was too, she probably paid for the club kit and she provided the Esta Henry Trophy for the women’s competition. The Lady Dynamos had much success in the Scottish scene. When a national squad was put together for an international with England in 1948, they contributed 6 of the starting 11. That game, played at a rugby ground, was abandoned in a thunderstorm when Scotland were 5-0 down.

In 1946, the Dynamos played Bolton Ladies at New Meadowbank for the Esta Henry Trophy, slumping to a 6-2 defeat at “home”, although they were able to hold the opposition to a 2-2 draw on the return leg in July 1947 at Bromwich. It was the 1948 return by Bolton to Edinburgh that caused controversy when they hoped to play it again at New Meadowbank. Dynamos manager Peter Farrell told the Dalkeith Advertiser he was determined they would be a match for Bolton Ladies – the best side in England – and if the latter were Arsenal then they would be Rangers. In a warm-up for the banned game with Bolton, the Dynamos played Newtongrange Bluebell – a men’s junior side – in front of a crowd of 1,500 at Victoria Park in Nitten. The rain-soaked match ended 3-3 after goals by Mary Leslie, Eleanor Wilson and a late equalising penalty by Linda Clements. When Wilson was in a position to score, her team mate yelled “Right, Eleanor! In wi’ it, hen!“, which she obligingly did.

“Dynamo are hardy lasses and they love the game as much as most men” declared the Advertiser’s Albert McKay in a frequently patronising and sexist review of the match – which he opened with”for years I have waited to see a girl who could get her hair wet without complaint“. But McKay at least gives us some details of the squad. There was “no brighter star than centre forward Mary Leslie”. 13 year old schoolgirl Betty Davidson “a sturdy little girl with a shock of red hair” was compared with Scotland and Arsenal legend Alec James. Grace Livingston, 16, from Tranent was in goal for Dynamo. Other players included sheet metal workers Nan Wilson from Gorgie and Babs McWhinnie from Prestonpans; Kay Dunoon, a clerk from Granton; Typists Betty Rae and Effy Gray; Factory workers Linda Clements and Mary Leslie. The team was completed by schoolgirl Eleanor Wilson, 14, and Agnes Whitelaw from Dalkeith who worked for the Dobbies nursery. The side were coached by Etta Moffat and her brother Jock.

The banned match was eventually played in the run-down Woods Park outside Portobello, a game which Bolton won 2-1. The Dynamos played on into the early 1950s but couldn’t persist against the official refusal to recognise them (an official “ban” which lasted in Scotland until 1974), the dwindling lack of interest shown to them and their game, and the ability to access proper facilities, match officials etc.

The driving force behind and within the Dynamos was the pair of Mary Leslie and Linda Clements. Clements has been described as one half of “two of the best Scottish players of the inter-war period” (Nancy Thomson was the other). Before the Dynamos and WW2, she played alongside Leslie for Edinburgh City Girls. Lydia, as she was Christened, was born in Rutherglen in 1918 to a coal mining family. By age 12 she was playing with a girl’s team in her native Rutherglen (often against men’s teams). Aged just 19, she left behind her family, her boyfriend and job as a curtainmaker to play professionally for the Darlington Quaker Girls, the team of Lillie Galloway. As such she is unique to be the only Scottish women’s player to transfer to England (and back again) pre-war. Clements was in a Quaker Girls team that thumped Edinburgh City Girls before Clements joined the latter.

Her move was short-lived however as in April 1938 the Quaker Girls folded when too many of the team left to get married. Returning to Scotland and starting with the City Girls, Clements instantly improved that team’s fortunes. It was only after her spells with that team, the intervention of the War, and then the re-formed Lady Dynamos that Linda let marriage get in the way of football, marrying in 1968 aged 50. She passed away in Edinburgh in 1996, aged 78. Mary Leslie (neé Millan) was born in 1912 in North Leith, married in Leith in 1934 and passed away in Edinburgh in 1992 aged 80. If you know anything further about either woman, please do contact me.

The team name was revived in the late 1960s and they were a founder member of the Women’s SFA in 1970. They won the Scottish Women’s Cup in 1972 and again in ’74, ’75, ’78 and the League in ’77. In 1975 the Dynamos earned themselves a place in the Guinness Book of Records by notching up an incredible 42-0 victory of poor Lochend Thistle. This record has never been beaten in Scottish football (men’s or women’s) or in the non-junior English game. Dynamo‘s central defender, Sheila Begbie, would captain the Scottish Women’s national team in its first international against England. She earned 25 international caps, scored against Italy in the San Siro stadium and would spend 14 years with the SFA in management positions, becoming its head of women’s football, before making a switch to the oval ball and becoming head of SRU’s women’s rugby in 2014, later director of rugby development, before retiring in 2021.

Thank you to Stuart Gibbs for his assistance in correcting the caption on some of the photos and on identifying which game was played at which date, for which purposes!

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