An interview with the writer             

What is The Allsorts FC series about?

 

The Allsorts FC stories are the extraordinary, individual tales of members of the Allsorts Football Team. As we learn in the first book, ‘The Viaduct Cup’, The Allsorts are brought together by Kit Bracken.

 

Kit is football mad, but she lives in at a time when girls weren’t allowed to play football... not properly. But the First World War changed all that. With the boys away fighting, many young women got together to form their own football teams.

 

The Allsorts FC Series is about the players in one of those teams. But more than anything the series is about friendship and teamwork, about the struggles and challenges faced by the girls as they navigate their lives during the war.

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Where did the idea for The Allsorts come from?

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I have always been a fan of women’s sport, especially football and cricket. It is only in the last few years that the games have been available to watch on tv and social media. But that doesn’t mean that women and girls weren’t playing sport.  It took bravery and spirit for girls to play sport in the early years of the twentieth century.

 

Many in society disapproved of girls in sports clothes, of playing in front of crowds. Some believed that physical activity was bad for girls. But that didn’t stop the determined. 

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The war changed the world for girls. Suddenly called upon to fill the jobs left behind by the boys who signed up for the war, they discovered a new found freedom. 

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You may have heard of some of the most famous football teams to emerge during the great war. The Dick, Kerr Ladies from a factory in Preston played to enormous crowds. The Blyth Spartans from the north east of England blazed a trail winning the Munitionettes Cup. Hundreds of teams from factories and mills, foundries and docks raised thousands for charity.

 

Are The Allorts a real team?

 

The Allsorts are a fictional team, living in a fictional town. But they are based on the real teams of the day. I decided to invent the Allsorts, because I wondered whether girls who did not work in the big factories would have liked to play football too.

 

I haven’t been able to find a record of a team of girls who did not all work for the same company, but imagine if there was? What if there was a team made up of shop girls, factory workers, telegram girls, maids and waitresses? With all their different skills imagine what kind of team they would have made? 

 

Why did you set the stories during the First World War?

 

History has always been a passion of mine, local and industrial history soon drew me to the First World War. We know a lot about what life was like for the boys who signed up and marched away to the trenches. But what was life like for those left behind? I always wondered what it would have been like to be an ordinary girl living during the war years. We know something about middle and upper class women who left behind diaries and records in the archives, but very little about ordinary girls working in the mills and factories, the shops and grand houses. 

 

In 1914 my great-grandmother Ethel was a 16 year old living in Salford, the daughter of a coal miner. I don’t know what Ethel did for a job, because there are no records, but if she followed her siblings, then she was probably a weaver in a cotton mill. 

 

In 1915, Ethel’s older brother Edwin joined the 19th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers also known as the 3rd Salford Pals. I know very little of his service, because again, as an ordinary soldier, there are few surviving records. 

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I cannot imagine how Ethel must have felt to watch her brother walk away to fight in a terrifying war, or the constant fear that she and all the people left behind must have felt in their stomachs as they waited for news. 

Edwin’s battalion fought in many battles, including the Somme in 1916. Sadly he was killed on the 25th of April 1918. We don’t have a photograph. His family didn’t have a grave. His name appears on the Tyne Cot memorial in Belgium, but it is highly unlikely that any of his family ever visited. 

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What’s next for The Allsorts?

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The Allsorts have lots of tales to tell. Sign up to our newsletter to be the first to hear when new stories are published. 

 

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