If you were interested in football but had little or no knowledge of the women’s game in the latter stages of the 1900’s, you would nevertheless most likely have heard of the Doncaster Belles.
They were serial Women’s FA Cup finalists; subject of both Pete Davies’ revelatory book ‘I lost my heart to the Belles’ and a controversial 1995 BBC TV documentary, ‘The Belles;’ and they were the inspiration for the TV drama ‘Playing the Field,’ which ran for five series from 1998. Well before the turn of the century then, Donny’s iconic status was well and truly established.
Ahead of the WFA National League’s inception in September 1991, they had contested eight of the previous nine seasons’ WFA Cup finals; and went on to make it 11 from 12 as they won not just the Cup but League and Cup doubles in 1991-92 and 1993-94.
Twenty-two years after the club’s formation when they stepped into the National League, the Belles were the golden girls of the women’s game and more than ready to step up from regional leagues to nationwide competition in 1991.
“A national league had to come for the good of the game,” says Sheila Edmunds (nee Stocks), a Donny legend as not only having been the club’s key founder member but also its long-time team captain and later on physiotherapist, kit person, welfare officer, general manager and president.
“Before the National League,” she adds, “we’d been for years playing two-tier football - in local leagues we were winning too easily, then when it came to FA Cup ties it took time to adjust to the better opposition; so you were thinking ‘we could do with better week-in, week-out opponents.’”
Better opponents the Belles certainly got but, despite that, in the first season they won the Premier Division with a 100 per cent record under the management of Brian Broadhurst, whose daughter Jo was a Donny star and one of nine England internationals in the starting line-up.
Broadhurst senior managed in only that one campaign, stepping in for Paul Edmunds while he was studying for an Open University degree. But the management switch worked seamlessly, says Edmunds’ wife Sheila - the pair had been wed in 1986.
“The fact that Brian was manager that season,” she says, “I didn’t really think about that. I just wanted to play, and it was the same for the rest of the players. Brian was knowledgeable, everybody took to him and it worked well.
“Some of the stuff we were doing with Brian was slightly different to what we’d been doing with Paul, but basically we were all singing off the same hymn sheet at the end of the day. And we wanted to win!” And win they did, all season long and with Paul Edmunds watching as a fan.
“It wouldn’t have been fair to Brian or anybody else if I’d been stood in the background,” he says. “I said I’d take a year out and that was that, I just used to go down and support the team.”
A former professional player with Leicester City and Bournemouth, Edmunds coached and then managed the Belles over a 10-year period up to the end of the 1994-95 campaign.
“That 93-94 season was very, very special,” he says. “It was special for many reasons, one of them because it was recorded by the BBC for a documentary - although the FA didn’t like it, they fined us for bringing the game into disrepute.
“On the pitch though, that season showed that with good team spirit and a certain culture about you - the togetherness we had throughout the whole club - you can achieve big things.”
Edmunds’ team had a bigger job to achieve the 93-94 double than two years previously. A 3-1 defeat at Arsenal on 22nd May left the Gunners, who that day completed their season’s fixtures, at the top of the table and eight points ahead of the Belles - but having played four games more.
Donny stepped up from the bitter disappointment of losing to their arch rivals by winning all four of their games in hand, clinching the title with a huge 7-0 victory over third in the table Knowsley United (later Liverpool).
“After that Arsenal match it was all silent in the changing room,” remembers the manager. “That was shown in the BBC documentary. But then we had a good run-in and we played really, really well in the Knowsley game.”
Fabled Donny striker Karen ‘Kaz’ Walker hit a hat-trick in the win against Knowsley, three of the 12 goals that she scored in those final four outings to take her season’s tally to 40 in the league and 54 in all competitions.
“I can’t remember most of the goals I scored,” she says when reminded of her goal haul in that campaign, “but 54? That’s crackers!
“Losing that Arsenal game was a massive low for us, but the lows always made the highs even better. And although the pressure was on us to chase them down, we revelled in pressure and we seemed to just rise to it.”
In what turned out to be Edmunds’ penultimate season in charge, leading his side to the double was his greatest achievement as Belles’ boss. And looking back, he admits: “To be honest, I wish I’d left at the end of that season, to finish on a high.
“I did say I’d finish at that point, but I was persuaded to stay on one more season as there were things happening in the background, like trying to produce junior teams, and the club didn’t want to have a change at the top.”
By this time the Arsenal juggernaut was beginning to roll and, with challenges from Croydon and Everton also on the horizon, the competition was beginning to close in on Donny.
“That was inevitable,” says Paul. “I could see Arsenal getting dominant because they could offer so much more (with their men’s club backing) than anybody else could.
“What we had going for us was the fact that we still had some very good players, and that in itself can attract other good players. But we were having to go further and further afield, getting people from Birmingham and Stoke for example.
“That brings its own problems - if you're having to travel that far (to Doncaster) it’s difficult to get to training after work on weekdays, so some of those players we only saw on match days.”
Recruiting players became less of a problem towards and around the turn of the century. Former Belles player Julie Chipchase had taken over as manager and Sheila says: “We still had the nucleus of a great team with international players - I think we had 10 or 11 in the squad at one time, and that in itself pulls you through.
“We had players like the Twinnies (Carly and Gemma Hunt) from London and suddenly we've got Becky Easton and a few others, like Karen Burke, and I’m thinking, ‘Wow, well done Chippy.’
“But then slowly we lost a few players, and then Chippy was approached by Leeds and she left us.
That wasn't the best of times, it sort of split the team a little bit. She took quite a few of our players, including Kaz Walker.
“Kaz did ring me to say, ‘look, this is probably going to be my last season. I'd like to try it and see what it's like.’ So she went with our blessing. But following on from that it was like a major change, we had a group of people who came on board to run the club but who in my opinion didn't run it particularly well.”
The pre-WSL nadir for the Belles was the 2004-05 season, in which they avoided relegation only with a 1-0 win against Birmingham City in their last match having taken just four points from their their preceding 11 fixtures.
Most of the big players had left the club by then, but England internationals Vicky Exley and Claire ‘Des’ Utley stayed put and it was Exley’s goal that won that safety-confirming final game.|
A Belle for 10 years at that stage, Exley stayed with the club until her 2012 retirement. She said in the aftermath of that 04/05 season: “I love the club and I couldn’t have left. It’s been a really hard season, but I never lost hope that we would stay up.”
Utley, who spent her whole career at Donny apart from one season with Leeds, stressed just how much it meant to her to have helped keep her beloved club in the top flight.
“It was just the best feeling ever,” she said. “I’ve never won a league, but I think if I had it wouldn’t have compared to staying up on the last day. It was the best. There’s five or six of us meet up every year and we talk about that game every time.”
The strong bond of former Donny players indicated by Utley is part of the club’s DNA, illustrated by scenes at 2024’s Julie Chipchase memorial day, three years after her death.
Sheila Edmunds says: “We had a photograph taken of 55-years’ worth of Belles who were in attendance that day. Suddenly one of us started singing, and we must have been there 10 or 15 minutes singing all our old Belles songs that we used to make up on those long journeys to away matches. It was was a fantastic reunion.”
Tales of derring-do were doubtless swapped on that occasion, no matter that after their 1993-94 League and FA Cup double the Belles never again won the National Division.
They also lost their 12th and last FA Cup final in 2000, and were beaten in all three of their League Cup finals: 4-0 to Arsenal in 1993-94, on penalties after drawing 2-2 with Wembley two years later, and 5-0 to Arsenal in 2008-09.
In 2011 under the management of former Doncaster Rovers player John Buckley, who had taken over from Chipchase in 2003, they became founder members of the FA Women’s Super League after two decades of competing for trophies, narrowly failing to capture further top flight titles.
In the League’s first 12 years they never finished below third in the table, frustratingly missing out on winning the National Division on goal difference in 1995/96 and by one point in 1999-2000 - both times to Croydon.
Win or lose though, the players involved in those days never forget their big FA Cup highlights and, up to 2011, their two decades of FA WPL competition in which they were not just a top team but a true football family.
“It was a massive adventure with Donny Belles,” says Walker, whose long-time colleague and captain Gill Coultard - the first woman to win 100 England caps and one of Donny’s most celebrated players, says: “The camaraderie at Belles was fantastic.
“We played as hard off the pitch as we did on it and had so many laughs over the years. And that camaraderie has stayed with us – whenever we meet up, years now after we’ve all finished playing, we have a great time. As we always used to sing together: ‘Once a Belle, always a Belle’.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Images from Sheila Edmunds, Julian Barker and Simon Mooney.
