On a bright Saturday in Barrow-in-Furness, a parade rolled past the shop fronts of a town more often defined by what it builds in steel than what it remembers about its own people. At the front walked the Mayor of Barrow, a woman. Behind her came Boomdang, a female-led drumming band; a women’s wellness choir; the Women’s Institute; the Soroptimists; Women’s Community Matters; park runners; lifeboat volunteers; schoolchildren; and a line of hand-painted banners carrying the faces of women who built this town but rarely got a sentence in its history books.
The artist behind it all is Sarah Hardacre, a collage artist and cultural producer who fell in love with Barrow during a year-long residency funded through Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places programme. “I really took Barrow to my heart,” she says.
“At the start of any of my research, I always hit the archives,” she says. What she found was Dorothée Pullinger, an engineer who arrived at the Vickers shipyard in her early twenties during the WWI and was given charge of roughly 7,000 women making munitions. Pullinger, the daughter of Thomas Pullinger of the Arrol-Johnston motorworks in Paisley, did something else almost nobody in Barrow now seems to remember. She set up a football team.
“The men come home from war and… thank you very much, dear, you get back to the kitchen now”
— Sarah Hardacre
“She was made the first female superintendent in the shipyard ever,” Hardacre says. “Single working-class girls were flooding into Barrow from all over the country chasing the work, helping the war effort. Sport became an answer to that. Dorothy set up the Barrow Munitions Girls football team.”
In March 1917 the team travelled to Celtic Park and beat a Beardmore’s side from Glasgow 4-0 in front of fifteen thousand people. On 27 December 1920, the Dick, Kerr Ladies of Preston pulled fifty-three thousand to Goodison Park. The Football Association responded in 1921 by banning women from its grounds. The ban stood until 1970. Of course that didn’t stop women playing football, they simply went underground. Today’s Lionesses can trace their recent incredible successes back to these women.
“The men come home from war and it’s like, right, ok, thank you very much, dear, you get back to the kitchen now, we’ll take over from here,” Hardacre says. “This thing women have had for centuries, where it’s like, hang on, I’ve just been getting into my groove. I’ve been going out working, I’m with all these other women. This is something we’re doing together, and then it gets the stop put to it.”
“Celebrate your mum, celebrate your sisters, celebrate the women in your lives”
— Sarah Hardacre
The parade was Hardacre’s answer. The banners, made with the late Charlie Barlow’s Barmy Flags in Greenfield, carried the names of Gillian Thompson, the nuclear physicist who worked on the radiation shielding of every submarine to leave Barrow between 1960 and 2000, and who left a quarter of a million pounds in her will to the local athletics club; Peggy Braithwaite, Britain’s first female Principal Lighthouse Keeper, at Walney Island; Nella Last, the Mass Observation diarist later played by Victoria Wood in Housewife, 49; and Dame Stella Rimington, who lived in Barrow as a child and went on to become the first female Director General of MI5. They carried the name of Nan Tait, the Labour politician whose name lives on in the Nan Tait Centre but who survives in the record, Hardacre says, as “one pamphlet, one pamphlet in the local archives. Nothing online. Nothing.”
The schoolchildren among the marchers were descendants of Edith Ward, a Barrow campaigner for women’s and children’s rights. “I tracked down her family,” Hardacre says. “Her great-great-great-great-grandkids carried a banner in her memory.”
For Hardacre, putting the work in the street was the whole point. “The parade happened in the street, and that to me is where the people are. That’s where culture is. It makes it free. There’s no politicised space. There’s no walking over a threshold into a space you don’t feel like you belong.”
The piece Hardacre featured in this magazine pulls it all into a new series of collages: Georgia Stanway, the Bayern Munich and England midfielder from Barrow, set against archival images of the munitions team, the shipyard at the end of a terraced street, and the women who took to the pitch again after 1970.
The most rewarding outcome, she says, has been watching the research travel beyond her. Steve, of the Barrow Bluebirds Trust, has put the story on his primary school curriculum and helped launch a tournament for 240 young girls, endorsed by Stanway. Aimee Everett, the Crystal Palace Women’s captain and another Barrovian, sits on the same horizon. “Football is open,” Hardacre says. “Yes, you’re a girl. Go and kick it like a girl, and have it. It’s possible to make it.”
“There are statues to men all over the place. The women did just as much”
— Sarah Hardacre
What she wants anyone who happened on the parade to take away is simple. “Just a feeling of joy. A feeling of solidarity, of sisterhood, of bringing it back. Celebrate your mum, celebrate your sisters, celebrate the women in your lives.”
Women, she points out, are proud and do not shout their accomplishments. “There are statues to men all over the place. Histories of men all over the place,” she says. “The women did just as much for that town… and for all our towns.”
