Lily Parr

Lily Parr (Lilian Parr, 26 April 1905 to 24 May 1978) was an English professional women's association football player who played as a winger. Born in Gerrard's Bridge, St. Helens, the fourth of seven children of a glass factory labourer, she played football and rugby with her brothers as a girl, turned out for St. Helens Ladies, and was then recruited at about the age of fourteen to Dick, Kerr's Ladies, the Preston munitions factory team founded in 1917. She scored a very large number of goals for the side, with the article giving figures of 986 or 967 across a career that ran from 1919 to 1951, and was noted for a powerful left-foot shot and a hard, aggressive style. The team drew crowds of more than 53,000 at Goodison Park in 1920, and toured North America in 1922 after the Football Association banned women from its member grounds in 1921. Parr trained as a nurse and worked at Whittingham hospital, and in 2002 she was the only woman among the inaugural inductees of the English Football Hall of Fame. A statue of her stands at the National Football Museum in Manchester.