A History of the Club in Snatches (ooh er missus!)

Chapter One: Genesis. In the beginning was the bird...

Scene: A seedy bar full of deviants, lowlife and ball-room dancers sometime in the late Summer of 1995. Gladys Bigears is nursing a tepid beer and thinking of reasons to avoid being caught up in an impending Rumba. Enter Gladys Arthur Daley former bubble permed Sarfend fem and bus driver turned slack haired Tottenham spiv. [I don't make this up you know]

Gl.Arthur Daley: [sidling and looking shifty] "Alright Bigears babe how you doin'? I've got this brilliant idea; we start our own football team. It's small, it's really sound and it's open to women of all standards. They'll be the best looking chicks and hopefully have lots of connections to famous people. I could be Total Controller and Star and you could do all that organisation stuff and tell people when they're dropped. Anyway I've got a job lot of purple socks I need shifting and Hackney aren't interested...."

Chapter Two: We become Freedom Glads...

Scene: A seedy pub empty except for about 13 deviants, 16 cats, 2 dogs and a landlady with prominent teeth. The 13 footballers (for it is us) are nursing the last pint of cloudy Kronenburg and eking out the contents of that weeks packet of crisps. It is above freezing, an occurrence rarer than the pub having a choice of beer, which means that our heroines are located in the beer garden crammed between the dog turds and the oversized rats. It is a club meeting and Gladys Terminator is in the chair....

Gl. Terminator: [takes deep breath and prepares for truly unsubtle plot filling speech] "Well women as you all know after Gladys Arthur Daley and Gladys Bigears set up the club we were briefly known as Blah WFC before Gladys No-Stopping-Until-Victoria-Who-Passengers-On-The-38-Bus-Route-Will-Instantly-Recognise gave us the name Trash'n'Reddy Rangers which is allegedly Jamaican slang for being all dressed up and ready to go. After a year kicking around in Clissold Park we joined the Greater London Regional Womens League and have come bottom of division 7 for the last two seasons losing horribly in every game. We have decided to have this meeting because no-one apart from Gladys No-Stopping-etc, Gladys Arthur Daley, Gladys Anorak, Gladys Bigears, Gladys Lazarus and Gladys Pink ever really liked the name. Yes I know that's quite alot of us but Gladys Choc Full doesn't like it and she's our best player and she wont shut up about it.....

[six tortuous days later Freedom Glads is finally agreed on. The reasons for this are lost on most people but popular belief is that it is is a compromise between those wanting an overtly gay identity and a minority who want to be the Gladys Protheroe Allstars. No-one much likes 'Gladys' so we decide on 'Glads' leaving everyone the option to be either a Gladys, a Gladiator or a Gladiolus. Only later do we discover that other teams assume it stands for Gladiators which makes us sound like an evangelical roadshow featuring lots of men with over-developed pecs. Everyone votes except Gladys Bigears who has been taking the minutes and has passed out.]

Gl.Terminator [another deep breath, another whopping plot fill] Well, that's decided. Now we can go on to be part of Division Three East and spend two years being mown down by Coppermill, hacked down by Rickmansworth, whined at by Thurrock and spat at by Dagenham before gaining promotion to Division Two and playing such beautiful football that Gladys Lightbody actually transcends the physical plane and super-evolves into pure energy, omnipresent in all dimensions as a huge pulsating ball of light, with a big mouth. We do the double by winning the Russell cup and becoming Division Two champions thereby gaining promotion to Division One.....

Chapter Three: Exodus...

As they say 'when the going gets tough, the tough get going'. In this case they mostly got going to near neighbours Crapton Olient. The little slapstick music hall act that was the Glads had turned into a glamorous all singing all dancing West End production and some of the stars felt they were made for better things. Centre Circle star Gladys Toecutter had always considered her ball juggling act to be far classier than the simple clowning practised by the majority of the team and left for the big stage in the East with Gladys' Flasher clinging to her tattered socks. Gladys Fullshorts also eventually passed over to the Other Side - surprising, not least because any kind of passing by her was a rarity. Alas the fickle nature of show business! Toecutter was last heard of earning a meagre living in the sideshows of Crapton reserves...

Chapter Four: That bit where everyone gets struck down by something 'orrible...(yes I know biblically this is before the Exodus, this is called artistic licence or blasphemy, depending on your viewpoint)

Although depleted we looked forward to Division One and whatever it would throw at us. Quite frankly we felt able to deal with the odd plague of frogs and a few boils and Gladys Ricochet speaking in tongues was old hat by now. What we hadn't quite bargained for was the plague of kneeknack which claimed Gladys Manager (er, manager), Gladys Anorak and Gladys Big Bird, and the fact that Gladys Choc Full's ankles were no longer able to support her matronly form....

Chapter Five: Back to school...

Scene: a school playground in downtown Homerton covered in Kentucky Fried chicken bones, one traffic cone and jumpers for goal posts. The four or five mostly able bodied Gladys' left after the plague are puffing around sharing inhalers and fags. At the side of the pitch a strange assortment of yelping Mummies moving like wheelbarrows turns out to be Gladys Manager (er, manager) putting the remedial class through their paces. There is silence apart from the constant wailing of fire engines and police riot vehicles speeding to Even Further Downtown Homerton (there is no uptown Homerton) and the occasional 'ooh me knee's popped out' and 'ah me shoulder' from Gladys Scissorhands aka Dave Save.

Gladys Terminator is attempting to coach us into triangles with limited success apart from Gladys Pink whose triangles are eternal.

Gl. Terminator: "Look [pronounced 'luke'] you lot, this isn't working. Big Ears, Lightbody, Guff - what's the problem?"

Gl. Big Ears: "I had the ball and then this skinny little thing whipped it off me!"

Gl. Lightbody: "Something keeps snapping at my ankles and everything smells like soap!"

Gl. Guff: "Something came up behind me and sang 'Hit me baby, one more time'! So I whacked the ball and it hit something big that bellowed 'I WAS KNOWN FOR MY VOLLEYING WHEN I WAS TEN!' "

The Glads looked round bewildered in the gloom. As they looked closer they began to see that they had been joined by several kids, a tall person in a wig and a mysteriously silent entity. Gladys Terminator thought for a moment and then....

Gl. Terminator: "Hang on a minute, I've got an idea...you whippy, snappy, pappy, soapy, wigsy, mystery woman give us our ball back and come over here...I think we might have a team this season after all..."

The End For Now

For the likes of Arsenal it's a sumptious space in the Marble Halls of Highbury...for us each trophy has been lovingly placed on its own porcelain plinth in bogs all over Hackney...

Cups:

Lancashire Trophy 1996 (fairplay)

Lancashire Trophy 1997 (Brenda Eastwood Fair Play Trophy)

Gay Games Amsterdam 1998 (fairplay trophy - well big!)

GLWRL Second Division Champions 1999/2000

GLWRL Russell Cup Winners 1999/2000

Lancashire Trophy 2000 (fairplay)

Siemens 5-a-side trophy Winners (Mardi Gras 2002)

Precious Things:

stain-free pair of Gladys Terminator's shorts

fragment of conversation in which Gladys Whipper manages not to offend anyone

footage of Gladys Austin Powers passing the ball

a crisp offered round by Gladys Choc Full