By Dr Alexander Jackson
On Wednesday 9 October, we were privileged to host a visit from the 1977 Women’s Football Association Cup winners, Queen’s Park Rangers Ladies. In a period dominated by Southampton Ladies, QPR Ladies were one of only two teams to beat Southampton in a final, winning 1-0 thanks to a Carrie Staley goal at Dulwich Hamlet FC’s ground at Champion Hill.
Thirteen players (and one husband) braved a typically rainy Manchester day to spend a wonderful day with us in which they made a generous donation of objects to the museum collections – and treated staff and visitors to a rendition of their club song!
It all started when Judy Orsmond contacted the museum for images to add to her recent book about the club. Although it folded in 1978, the players have remained close friends, organizing regular meetings. During the Covid lockdowns, Judy was persuaded by her teammates to write the club’s history.
We were delighted to accept copies for our library and our invitation to host them coincided with their plans to visit us. With Judy’s help, we arranged a small surprise with the team’s photo and name appearing on our Hall of Fame Screen in our Pitch Gallery. Judy has generously shared her account of how the team felt on seeing this:
Walking into the main area we witnessed our name in lights highlighting us as Women’s FA Cup winners in 1977. It was quite emotional and many of us were speechless and overwhelmed, to think they had done that for us. We felt that as a team they treated us like champions like no one had ever done for us before. We felt that we had finally been acknowledged for what we had achieved as a team.
The team enjoyed a tour of the museum and after lunch, spent the afternoon with the Wiebke Cullen, Marek Romaniszyn, and Alexander Jackson from the museum’s Collections team. After an introduction to the museum’s work on women’s football history, the Rangers players shared objects that they had been encouraged to bring if they wished to donate or loan.
This has resulted in an amazing offer of over 100 donated objects and 24 on loan for digitization. Amongst the donations are a very rare QPR shirt, trophies, scrapbooks, club songbooks, a rare poster advertising the 1977 WFA Cup final, and rare publicity packs provided by Pony (the tournament sponsors) to the media, and a letter from the WFA informing one of the players about their ban for participating in a tour to Thailand.
The loan items include rare colour photos of the team on one of their trips to tournaments in Majorca. Altogether, they amount to a major donation that documents both a very important team but also the wider picture of women’s football in the 1970s.
Because of the scale of the donation, it will take time to document the collection before any of it can be displayed or made available for researchers. Once this has been done, we hope to display put some key items on temporary display.
The Rangers visit ended with them singing their club song for the enjoyment of staff and visitors – a wonderful end to a very special day.
Such visits are always a team effort across the organisation, so it was very special to receive the following message from Judy after the visit:
We all felt very special and it was a day as a team that we will never forget, it was such a remarkable experience for us all to share together. Being together meant the world to us, and in addition we had the bonus of visiting the museum and being treated with so much respect.