The Forgotten Women of Darts – Part Three: From Wartime Darts to the Forgotten Champions of the 1950s (1939–1959)
When I started researching the history of women's darts, I expected to find a few interesting stories from the 1930s before moving fairly quickly towards the better-known players of the 1970s.
Instead, the first two instalments uncovered quite a bit more than I anticipated.
We found Eileen Turnage, an 18-year-old from Essex who was beating men in the News of the World competition in 1936.
We discovered Mrs Morgan, who went even further and qualified for the News of the World Grand Finals in 1937.
And then came the remarkable story of a women's tournament attracting around 2,000 entrants in 1938, with its final broadcast by the BBC.
There was even the Queen having a throw at a dartboard, helping bring the game to a much wider female audience.
It seemed that women's darts was beginning to develop something of a following.
But then came September 1939.
Britain was at war.
And that got me wondering what happened to all those women who had been playing darts during the previous decade.
Did they carry on playing? Did the war bring everything to a halt? And when the competitions returned, were women still part of the game?
The answers take us through the 1940s and 1950s, and eventually to two women whose names deserve to be remembered.
When the biggest tournament stopped
By the outbreak of the Second World War, the News of the World Individual Darts Championship had become one of the biggest sporting competitions in Britain.
Hundreds of thousands of players were entering, with local pub winners progressing through area and divisional competitions in the hope of reaching the Grand Finals.
For a darts player at the time, it was about as big an achievement as you could hope for.
But the war brought the competition to a halt.
The News of the World Championship was suspended, and the major competitive structure that had developed during the 1930s was disrupted.
For the women who had been entering alongside the men, that meant losing one of the few established opportunities to compete on a major stage.
And unlike today, there wasn't a separate women's professional circuit or national championship structure waiting to replace it.
But darts itself certainly didn't disappear.
Darts goes to war
One thing that becomes apparent when looking at wartime darts is how widely the game continued to be played.
Servicemen played in army camps, aboard ships and even in prisoner-of-war camps.
Sometimes dartboards and equipment were provided through NAAFI recreational packs.
On other occasions, players made their own equipment.
And when you think about it, darts was almost ideally suited to wartime recreation.
You didn't need a large playing area, a team of eleven or expensive facilities.
Just a board, some darts and somewhere safe to play.
It provided entertainment, competition and probably a welcome distraction from everything else going on.
Darts also continued to feature in fundraising and charity events.
The News of the World even maintained a team of leading darts players who appeared at exhibitions during the war, helping raise money for good causes, including the Red Cross.
So although the major championships had stopped, people were still throwing darts.
But what about the women?
A different world for women
The war changed everyday life enormously.
Women who might previously have been expected to remain largely within traditional domestic roles were suddenly working in factories, transport, agriculture and numerous other occupations.
Many joined the auxiliary services.
Others took on responsibilities that had previously been regarded as men's work.
So it's interesting to consider whether those changes also affected women's opportunities to play darts.
After all, women were now spending time in workplaces and organisations where recreational activities could form part of everyday life.
And darts was already a popular game.
It seems quite possible that women continued playing in factories, clubs and other wartime settings.
But there's an important difference between something seeming likely and being able to prove it.
At present, I haven't found enough reliable records to establish how widespread organised women's darts was during the war.
We know darts continued.
We know women were becoming involved in different areas of working and social life.
But we can't automatically assume that women's competitive darts flourished as a result.
That is something I'd still like to investigate further.
A glimpse of darts in 1940
One small piece of contemporary evidence comes from Cheltenham.
In August 1940, the Cheltenham Chronicle and Gloucestershire Graphic reported on a sports and fun fair at the Ucal sports ground in Battledown.
The event raised money for the Cheltenham Sportsmen's Ambulance and the General Hospital.
Among the attractions was a darts competition.
Photographs from the event show people gathered around the darts activity, with women among those present.
Unfortunately, the surviving photographs don't establish whether those women actually competed.
So it would be wrong to claim this was a women's darts tournament.
But it does show that darts remained part of community and fundraising activities during the war.
And I suspect that much of the story of women's darts during this period lies in events just like these.
Not necessarily major championships.
Perhaps small competitions organised by factories, social clubs, pubs or local communities.
The sort of competitions that might have appeared in a local newspaper for one week and then been forgotten.
The women who disappeared from the records
Something else has been bothering me as I've worked through this period.
What happened to Miss Champion and Mrs Westlake?
They were the two finalists in that remarkable BBC-broadcast women's competition in 1938.
Approximately 2,000 women had entered, and these two had reached the final.
Miss Champion won.
Yet I haven't been able to establish what happened to either of them afterwards.
Did they continue playing through the war?
Were they still competing in the late 1940s?
Did either win further titles?
I don't know.
And that illustrates one of the difficulties with researching early women's sport.
Some women achieved enough to attract newspaper coverage, but there wasn't necessarily a lasting record of their careers.
Sometimes all we have is a surname and a town.
It makes you wonder how many talented players have simply disappeared from darts history.
Darts comes home
The war ended in 1945, and Britain began the long process of rebuilding.
Darts was part of that return to everyday life.
Leagues and competitions developed again, and the News of the World Championship returned in the 1947–48 season.
The reported number of entrants was extraordinary.
289,866 players.
After years without the competition, there was clearly still an enormous appetite for darts.
And the game was spreading beyond Britain.
Servicemen and women from overseas had encountered darts during the war, while people settling in other countries helped establish clubs and competitions.
The sport was becoming increasingly international.
But although organised darts was recovering, that didn't necessarily mean opportunities for women were improving at the same rate.
Still very much a man's game
One thing that becomes clear when looking at the post-war years is that darts remained overwhelmingly male-dominated.
Pubs were still central to the game, and many established leagues were organised primarily for men.
Women's teams certainly existed, and female interest in darts continued.
But there wasn't anything approaching the same national competitive structure available to women.
In fact, resistance to women joining established leagues would continue well beyond the 1950s.
Darts historian Dr Patrick Chaplin records an example from Lancaster in 1963, when a housewife applied to join a local league and was refused because it was restricted to men.
1963!
That was nearly a quarter of a century after the war had begun.
It demonstrates that the difficulties faced by women weren't simply a feature of the distant pre-war years.
Even as darts became more organised, some of the old attitudes remained.
But things were beginning to change.
A new organisation and new opportunities
In 1954, the National Darts Association of Great Britain was established.
The organisation helped develop competitive darts during a period that doesn't always receive much attention when the history of the sport is discussed.
The 1950s are often overshadowed by the growth of televised darts during the following decades.
But there were important developments taking place.
And in 1958 came a significant milestone for women's darts.
The National Darts Association of Great Britain introduced its first Women's Pairs Championship.
At last, we have another clearly documented national women's competition.
And, importantly, we have the names of the winners.
Joan Adams and Rose Branham — the forgotten champions of 1958
The inaugural Women's Pairs Championship was won by Joan Adams and Rose Branham.
They represented the Workers Club in King's Lynn, Norfolk.
Two women whose names will probably be unfamiliar to the vast majority of modern darts supporters.
They were the first winners of a women's pairs competition organised by one of the country's principal darts bodies.
That's a genuine piece of darts history.
I would love to tell you more about Joan and Rose.
How long had they been playing together?
Were they regular league players?
Had they been competing during the earlier part of the 1950s?
And how much attention did their victory receive locally?
Unfortunately, I haven't yet uncovered enough reliable information to answer those questions.
But perhaps that's the point.
We remember the great champions of the television era because their achievements were recorded, filmed and repeated.
Earlier generations didn't always have that advantage.
Joan Adams and Rose Branham deserve recognition for what they achieved in 1958, even if we currently know very little about their wider playing careers.
And I suspect there are other players from that period whose stories are waiting to be found.
A small step, but an important one
It would be easy to look at the introduction of a women's pairs championship and think it was a relatively minor development.
After all, it was just one competition.
But consider where we'd come from.
In the 1930s, women such as Eileen Turnage and Mrs Morgan were entering major competitions against men.
There had been women's events attracting large numbers of entries, but the opportunities were inconsistent.
Then came six years of war, followed by a period of rebuilding.
By 1958, one of the country's major darts organisations was running a dedicated women's championship.
It wasn't equality.
It wasn't a professional tour.
And it certainly didn't mean that female players suddenly enjoyed the same opportunities as men.
But it was another step towards a more organised women's game.
There was now a national title for women to compete for under an established darts organisation.
And that mattered.
The next generation was already playing
While Joan Adams and Rose Branham were winning their championship, another generation of female players was beginning to emerge.
One name we'll be returning to is Loveday King, from Cornwall.
Born in 1935, Loveday began playing darts in 1952, encouraged by her husband Tommy.
At that point, she was simply another woman enjoying the game.
But over the following decades she would become one of the leading female players in Britain, eventually appearing on television and winning a major title.
Her story is particularly interesting because it links the relatively poorly documented women's game of the 1950s with the growing opportunities of the 1960s and 1970s.
And she wasn't alone.
There were women playing good darts around the country, even if most of their names weren't yet appearing regularly in the national sporting press.
The challenge for this series is to find as many of them as possible.
Twenty years of change — but how much progress?
When we look back over the period from 1939 to 1959, it's tempting to describe it as twenty years of steady progress.
But I don't think the evidence really supports that.
The war disrupted the major competitions.
The post-war years saw darts recover and expand, but the game remained largely male-dominated.
Women continued playing, although many still faced restrictions and fewer opportunities than men.
Then, towards the end of the 1950s, we begin to see clearer signs of organised women's competition returning to the national picture.
The 1958 Women's Pairs Championship is an important example.
And perhaps the biggest lesson from these twenty years is that women's darts didn't simply disappear between the 1930s and the television era.
Women were still playing.
They were still competing.
And by the end of the 1950s, some were winning national titles.
We just haven't heard enough about them.
Where do we go next?
We've now travelled from the beginnings of organised darts in the 1920s through the Second World War and into the late 1950s.
And already we've uncovered names that deserve a place in the history of the sport.
Eileen Turnage.
Mrs Morgan.
Miss Champion and Mrs Westlake.
Joan Adams and Rose Branham.
And we've begun to encounter players such as Loveday King, whose careers would become much more prominent in the years ahead.
The next instalment will take us into the 1960s.
Women's darts was still facing obstacles, but opportunities were beginning to develop.
And we are getting closer to the generation that would help transform the women's game during the 1970s.
I'm particularly interested in discovering which women were dominating local leagues and tournaments during this period, long before television began making darts players household names.
Because somewhere between those local competitions and the arrival of the BDO lies another important part of the story.
And I suspect we'll find some more forgotten names along the way.
Can you help uncover the forgotten history?
I'm continuing to research the history of women's darts for Quest For Q School.
I'd particularly like to hear from anyone who has information about women's darts during the 1940s, 1950s or 1960s.
Perhaps your mother or grandmother played in a pub team.
Perhaps you have old newspaper cuttings, programmes, photographs or trophies.
Or perhaps you remember some of the women who were competing before the sport became widely televised.
I'd be especially interested in finding out more about Joan Adams and Rose Branham of King's Lynn, winners of the 1958 Women's Pairs Championship.
Even a small piece of information could help uncover another forgotten story.
Please get in touch through Q4QS or the Facebook group.
The Forgotten Women of Darts is an ongoing Q4QS historical series tracing women's involvement in competitive darts from its earliest organised years through to the modern professional game.
Sources and Further Reading
The following sources have been used to establish the historical background, tournament developments and individual achievements discussed in this article.
Dr Patrick Chaplin – A Brief History of Ladies Darts (1937–1997). Research covering women's participation, the post-war development of darts, the formation of the National Darts Association of Great Britain and the inaugural 1958 Women's Pairs Championship.
https://patrickchaplin.com/2019/05/22/a-brief-history-of-ladies-darts/Dr Patrick Chaplin – The News of the World Individual Darts Championship: A History. Background on the suspension of major darts competition during the war, wartime exhibitions, darts among servicemen and the return of the championship in 1947–48.
https://patrickchaplin.com/2019/05/22/the-news-of-the-world-individual-darts-championship/Dr Patrick Chaplin – Loveday King: The First Superstar of Ladies' Darts. Biographical research based on an interview with Loveday King, including her introduction to darts in 1952 and her subsequent competitive career.
https://patrickchaplin.com/2019/08/22/loveday-king-the-first-superstar-of-ladies-darts/Cheltenham Chronicle and Gloucestershire Graphic, August 1940. Contemporary photographic reporting of wartime community sporting activities, including darts.
https://cheltlocalhistory.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Graphic_1940_08_Aug.pdf
Research acknowledgement: Particular acknowledgement is given to darts historian Dr Patrick Chaplin, whose extensive work documenting the early history of darts provides important background for this series. The articles are independently written for Quest For Q School, and areas where the historical record remains incomplete are identified accordingly.
