Kim Moore founded Newcastle Women's Football Club in 1989. A goalkeeper and auxiliary centre half, a back injury curtailed her playing career and led to her move into coaching. She was in charge of the team in 1996.
Helen Hunter, a lifelong Newcastle United fan, moved back to the North East from Norfolk at 18 to undertake a sports studies degree at Newcastle Polytechnic. The centre half captained the team at Wembley.
Shauny Doughty joined at the age of 11, and played on the wing for the first team at 13. She was in her mid-teens by the time of the game at Wembley, which came during the summer she left school, and she was in the starting line-up that day.
Lynn Simmonette (née Perkins) joined at the same time as Doughty and was one of the youngest members of the squad that faced the Red Devils, coming off the bench at the home of English football.
Lynsey Dixon (née McLean) also played in the match before leaving for a football scholarship in America. She later returned to the club and earned five caps for Scotland.
A student at Newcastle Polytechnic, Moore was given the chance to take a coaching badge by Stan Nixon, who worked at United's centre of excellence. She later coached Whitley Bay Ladies, where a dispute led to the division of the team and Moore's founding of the club which is now Newcastle United Women in 1989.
Helen Hunter: I started playing football for Newcastle Polytechnic, and then moved on swiftly to play for Whitley Bay Ladies. I played for a couple of seasons, from about 1986 to 1989, and then November 1989 was when Newcastle Women was formed. There were a lot of challenges to overcome in the early days.
Kim Moore: We raised enough money to buy strips, to get into the league the following season, and that was the birth of Newcastle Women.
Shauny Doughty: I was playing for the local team, Blaydon Youth Club, with my sister Michelle and Lynn Simmonette, who was Lynn Perkins back then. We had our own five-a-side team but they were reluctant to put us into this tournament which was sponsored by Barclays and Northumbria Police.
We went to Winlaton Community Centre, and they put us in it. There were over 57,000 teams - I'm getting emotional even thinking about it - and we got to the final after so many regional and national stages over the course of the year. Our little team that Blaydon wouldn't put in the tournament got to the final, where we played against Newcastle.
We were tiny - we were little, skinny. The lasses we were playing against for Newcastle were massive. They were like giants compared to us. You know when you get nerves? My stomach was churning, butterflies… but we beat them 3-0. They asked us to come and play football for them.
Lynn Simmonette: We went along to a training session and then signed up for them. I think I was only about 11. I started at left back or left wing, and by the end I think I'd played every position. I even went in goal, and I'm tiny. But I had a big gob, so I think it helped put other players off when I was in goal…
SD: We moved from playing five-a-side to 11-a-side. It was a big transition. But the lasses were great. It was like moving into a ready-made family.
LS: We used to play games on a Sunday in a Yorkshire and Humberside league, because that's where the teams were at the time. I'd get the bus into town myself and then meet everyone at Central Station. One of the players, Pauline Veitch, was a schoolteacher and she often used to get us the school minibus, or one of the parents used to drive a minibus if we hired one from somewhere else.
KM: We used to always have two players on the insurance to make sure that if anyone got injured, it wasn't the one driving the bus. Veitchy sometimes would get the school bus but mainly we'd hire a minibus. Some of them were better than others! It was just whatever we could afford.
Lynsey Dixon: We all used to pay our weekly subs and meet at an ungodly hour on a Sunday morning. I was 12 or 13 and it was a different world. I used to live in Whitley Bay. I'd walk to the Metro station, get the Metro to the city centre, get the minibus from Central Station, get back on the Metro and back home, or my dad would have to drop me off if we were meeting at 6.30am. It'd be two or three hours to wherever we were going. We'd get out, play a game and then were straight back up the motorway.
When we got into the later rounds of the FA Cup and for the Wembley game, we did bag-packing at Asda and things like that to raise funds for a bigger bus and a bus driver.
LS: Most of the women I played with were all in their 20s, working, with careers. I was still at school. We fundraised to go to a tournament in the Netherlands once - I had to get permission to get off school to play in that. We used to stop off for petrol, and because they were adults, they could afford meals, they would go in and buy breakfast or whatever. And there's me in the tuck shop, because I could only afford a packet of crisps and a Mars bar…
HH: All of us were working apart from the young ones, and you had to fit your football around your job. I remember those bag-packs at supermarkets to earn money for the club to keep us going.
SD: Back then, we had to fund everything ourselves. We had to pay for our own tops, shorts, socks. We had to pay for the referee's fees, training. We had to pay for everything.
LS: Using our own bucket and sponge was about as good as our first aid got. Eventually we ended up with a sub suit, because of the fundraising at supermarkets and parents chipping in, trying to get us sponsors. It was really hard.
KM: Callers-Pegasus sponsored us for a few years - one of their directors' daughter played for us and he wanted to support us, so we were very grateful to have that for three or four years. We used to tout around looking for cheap training facilities, as very rarely did we train in the same premises for more than two years.
Trying to find a ref and a pitch, even then, was difficult. One of the lasses at one time was a copper, and we managed to get the police pitches out at Ponteland for about two years, free of charge. That made a massive difference for us.
HH: It did develop a lot, and a lot of that is down to the likes of Kim. She was an FA coach, and her coaching was really good. There were a lot of people giving up their free time, and we wouldn't have survived without that. We were forever trying to find a pitch, a referee, a place to train. It wasn't great but conversely, it keeps you together.
In 1996, Kevin Keegan's Magpies - who had just finished second in the Premier League - were preparing to face double winners Manchester United in the Charity Shield at Wembley, with world-record signing Alan Shearer primed for his United debut. Moore had worked for the Football Association in the early 1990s - they had flown her out to watch England's World Cup semi-final against West Germany at Italia '90 - and had heard about their plan to stage the Littlewoods Charity Challenge women's match before the men's game.
KM: Newcastle United didn't have a women's team, so we were representing them. If you could put women’s football in front of however many fans that might have been in the stadium when we played, then it was worth doing. As we found out with the Women's Euros in 2022, visibility and success actually improves sports participation.
LS: We were at a training session, and I remember being told that we would be playing at Wembley but there wouldn't be many positions so not everybody would be chosen. I just thought, 'I want to play'. I just decided to do my best and worked my socks off to make sure I would get a place on the team.
LD: We had a big squad, an A and a B team. I always played on the A team but you still don't take anything for granted. You just thought, 'I need to get to Wembley - I need to get my head down and make sure I'm in the squad'.
SD: I've never trained so hard in my life to make it into the squad for Wembley. I still remember what I was wearing on that field in Jesmond - it was that maroon and blue top, Newcastle Brown Ale on it, with the grandad collar. There are pictures of me afterwards, sat on the grass holding my legs, thinking, 'I'm knackered'. I gave it 150 per cent. I can't even remember the moment I got told I'd made the squad - it was just a blur.
KM: You raise your game, don't you? (Laughs) You get excited about it! I'll be honest, I can't remember that. I've stood on that many training pitches over the years.
LD: It was just euphoria. Everyone just couldn't believe that we were getting this chance. I'm not a Newcastle fan, being Scottish - I did like them, because I lived nearby since I was nine, but I was a big Celtic fan, my dad's a Glaswegian. Most of the players were big Newcastle fans though and it was unbelievable to get the chance to play there and feel what it would be like to be a footballer for a day.
KM: The FA had stipulated that we had to play in Newcastle United colours. There is a bit of disagreement on this. My recollection is that we approached Newcastle. They really didn't want anything to do with it, so didn't really get involved... we had to go back to them and say we do play in black and white, but it's not a Newcastle strip, which the FA wanted us in. Initially, they were like, 'so?'
Eventually, because I think there were discussions somewhere, they offered us the under-21s or juniors' kit, and we picked it up on the Friday before travelling on the Saturday. We had to get it washed, laundered and delivered back to the club by the Tuesday.
LS: Apparently, we nearly ended up with a red and white strip, because Newcastle weren't going to give us one and I think Sunderland were… something went wrong somewhere, which I didn't realise at the time. They wanted the strips back once we'd worn them. We weren't allowed to keep them. They did give us jumpers. I remember having an adidas jumper, but I don’t know what happened to that, I think someone nicked it. But we had to give the tops back.
KM: Rob Atkin, who coached Newcastle Women further down the line, actually said he remembers a Sunderland fan offering to buy us a kit - but it had to be a Sunderland kit - to play in. It had to be red and white. He said that was one of the reasons Newcastle stepped in!
SD: I had the number 11, because I loved Tino Asprilla - that was his number.
KM: One or two players think Newcastle gave them their shirts, but I think that was a different occasion. I know we had to give them back on the Tuesday because it was always one of our rankles. We weren't given brand new shirts - we had to borrow second-hand strips off the club. And they were reluctant to lend us them. The amount of money the club had, they could have given us all a shirt as a memento.
The team travelled down the day before the match, in a bigger bus this time, and stayed overnight in a hotel.
LD: I actually didn't travel with the team - my dad drove me down and then I met up with the team. I'd just come back from a holiday, I'd been in America, and I'd only got back that morning.
HH: I actually travelled down on the morning of the match as well. I'd been in Norfolk on the Saturday because my sister had just had a baby and I was seeing my niece. Me and one of the other players, Sue O'Hara, drove down on the morning and met up with everyone where they'd stayed and got on the bus that took us to Wembley. That was quite amazing - I'd never been there before, and seeing all the fans… it felt like a really big occasion.
KM: On the bus, I remember all the singing at the back! At the time, I think it wasn't too long since the Whoopi Goldberg film, Sister Act, came out and they were putting the white seat covers on their heads, like a nun. They were all singing, all the youngsters, and they kept us all young. They were daft and up for a laugh.
LD: I remember meeting them somewhere outside the ground and all the crowds of people. It was just crazy. There were lots of Newcastle fans singing, Manchester United fans singing. It must have been close to the time they were getting led into the stadium. It was the nervousness of thinking, 'I'm going to be playing in front of these people, and they don't even know who I am'. It was so surreal.
LS: We'd got t-shirts made with Wembley on. We got a picture outside. I remember walking into the ground with my sunglasses on, talking to the players. Waiting in the tunnel to come out - that's the bit that I remember most, that was the moment for me: just thinking, 'I'm playing at Wembley'.
HH: Even in the programme, it was mentioned that our match was kicking off at 1.20pm, but that was it - no other mention of us, nothing about Manchester United's women’s team either. It just sort of reinforced how irrelevant we were to the the club at the time, sadly… they didn't want anything to do with us, they didn't want a women's football team and, for me, they were quite reluctant in helping us along that way on the actual day. It was a really great experience playing at Wembley, but it definitely wasn't a watershed moment in how we were treated by Newcastle United.
KM: We got there and Manchester United were fully kitted out. They trained at The Cliff, which is where their men's first team trained at the time. They had the full support of the club, who embraced the women's team. Their girls weren't pros, but they weren't scrimping and scraping to have a game of football.
HH: We weren't in the main changing rooms - we were put in the pop star changing rooms, as they were called. We were given these blue bands to wear so we had access to everywhere. We had to wear them while we were playing. If you look on some of the photos, you can see them quite clearly. You know when you go on holiday and if you're all inclusive, you had a band put on? It was like that.
The game itself was 30 minutes each way, with a crowd of 73,214 gradually filtering through the Wembley turnstiles.
LD: We didn't know what to expect from their team - we'd never played Manchester United before. I don't even think we were inside that long; it wasn't as if you go outside and had a nice warm-up, I think we literally had ten minutes, and then we played the game.
I remember being in the tunnel and my legs were like jelly. The pitch looked massive. We were used to playing on regular sized pitches, but Wembley's a big pitch. It was beautiful, a lot better than the condition of pitches we were used to playing on.
SD: There are pictures of us in the tunnel. The excitement of going out to play at Wembley was just overwhelming. I'm getting overwhelmed talking about it now. It brings tears to my eyes.
I remember going on the pitch and kissing the grass. The pitch was lush - the best grass you've ever played on in your life, so flat, and very wide, which is what I loved playing on the wing. There was hardly anyone at all in the stadium but at half time I looked around and it was filling up. It was just a 'wow' moment. Everything was.
LS: I was on the bench. I had an ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) injury, many moons ago. I went back to playing with no physio, nothing. I used to wear a knee brace - that was my comfort blanket. Now, both my ACLs have gone, my MCLs (medial collateral ligaments) have gone, I've got arthritis in my knees from playing football. I did my right knee first, then had to stop, then went back a few years later and did my other knee. When I did that one, they put me in plaster from top to toe for six weeks and said they'd send me for physio. I'm still waiting to this day! I play rugby now. I don't know how I'm doing that…
LD: We weren't that unevenly matched. I think they might have been a division higher than us… they were definitely a higher standard than us. But we certainly made it a good game. A lot of the time I was probably dreaming. I couldn't take in the fact that there were so many people there watching us on the pitch. It's really hard to concentrate on the match when everything is going on around you!
HH: I worked for Northumbria Police for 28 years before I retired and I remember going back to Whitley Bay nick, where I was based at the time, the following week. One of the traffic wardens came up to me and said, 'were you on the pitch at Wembley playing football?' Just astounded I’d been on the pitch. 'Yeah, actually, that was me!'
SD: It was a really good game. We were fairly evenly matched. Sometimes when you play against a team that isn't as good as yourselves, you can get brought down to their level and it can become a boring game. But this was a fantastic game, it was cracking. It was 0-0 at half time.
KM: My ethos was always inclusivity. We wanted to create the right atmosphere. I wanted to give as many people a game as I could. We played as many players as the organisers would allow us. But Manchester United went out to win it - that was the mentality of theirs as a competitive club with loads of support, and it was easier to do that.
You're a club where you're fighting to keep everything going - if you say you're only going to play 14 people, and the other eight or 12 people don't get a game, you might look at it and go, 'I'm not playing for the club'. There's always that risk. We didn't have that, because the lasses were great. But we played as many players as we could.
LS: It was the biggest game of our lives. It was surreal. You could see the stadium filling up. I just couldn't wait to get on the pitch. We didn't have many chances to score, but they weren't that much better that us, really, considering the league they were in - they were miles above us, and they were obviously fully formed as Manchester United. I came on, and I just remember one cross coming to me, outside the box. I went to volley it and it went over.
SD: The crowd didn't affect us at all when we were playing, because your mind's on the game. It wasn't until after. That was the biggest thing for me - looking around afterwards and thinking, 'wow, all these people have just watched our game'.
LD: I do remember the Newcastle fans giving us a cheer, really getting behind us.
LS: It was all quite quick afterwards. They did a presentation - 'here's your medal'. I thought it went by so quickly. I wanted it to never end.
LD: We were all exhausted! We were all red-faced, still in disbelief that we'd just played at Wembley, and so grateful for the opportunity.
LS: As I came off the pitch, I had grass on my boot, and thought, 'I'm going to keep that'. But obviously the grass died, so that didn't happen! I've still got my ticket, and my medal.
KM: We had to leave the stadium, get our tickets and then come back in to watch the men's match. What I remember is a fight between Man United and Newcastle fans at the top of Wembley Way. I was just walking between the twin towers at that point. The police horses were chasing us. I grabbed Lynsey and pulled her out of the way to stop her getting battered by these police horses! Lynsey was only a kid, she was only about 14 or 15 at the time, wandering around, enjoying the atmosphere. I literally had to grab her by the scruff of the next and pull her against the wall. The police horses just ran. They'd have just trampled her.
After the men's game, we got on the bus and sang all the way home. We didn't care we’d lost. We'd just had a bloody good day, and life was good.
Moore's side were beaten 2-0 in the end, with two second half strikes doing the damage. The Magpies' men also lost, as the Red Devils lifted the Charity Shield after netting four goals without reply.
It is impossible to estimate the exact attendance of the women's exhibition game alone - but at that point, no domestic women's club matches had ever been played in front of a crowd akin to the overall number inside Wembley that day.
Moore and her team laid the foundations for what was built over the next three decades. The team played under the Newcastle United Foundation umbrella from 2016, becoming Newcastle United Women the following year. Under club ownership since 2022, United are now in the second tier with designs on promotion to the Barclays Women's Super League.
KM: You go back and you look at the Dick, Kerr Ladies and what went on with them. In 1971, women were still banned from playing football on FA pitches with FA referees. It was literally outlawed by the FA. I never thought I would see professional football. I never thought I would see the mushrooming of the women's game, and the way it's gone, in my lifetime.
LD: I definitely would have loved the chance to play professionally, to be paid to keep fit and make a living out of it and do what you love, but I don't have any regrets. We paved the way, and we've got some many good memories from all those hardships that we had to go through - paying subs, getting changed on the minibus before games, ten-minute warm-ups when it was battering down with rain and you've got no shelter. All those things have made us who we are.
LS: I played football pretty much all my life. The women's game has erupted, and I just feel proud to have been where I was when I was. I wouldn't change any of it. I just wish we'd maybe got the chances you'd get now. But we were just too early.
SD: I've got mixed emotions on that. The history isn't there, and we need to be recognised. I'm proud that women's football has got to where it has. We got to the quarter-finals of the Women's FA Cup. Without the basis and foundation of what we had, women's football might not have come as far - and when I say 'we', I'm talking about every single woman footballer at that time in the country, not just at our club.
The flip side of that is that you're working in full-time jobs, but if we could be getting paid to play football, doing something that we loved, then we wouldn't have to be in those jobs. It's a bit sickening that we could have had a career out of it. But we didn't play for the money. We played for the love of the game, and it's cracking how far the lasses have come. I wish them all the luck in the future.
KM: They're very right. If they'd been born in a different era, they'd have had different opportunities. Me personally, I loved the era I was in. I've made lifelong friends, and I wouldn't change that. You can't regret what you couldn't have, because it didn't exist.
I stopped coaching in about 1998. My partner had a little boy and I wanted to give time to him. I didn't want to go to the national level where I'd be having to leave home on a Saturday afternoon to get to football on a Sunday and then get up at two o'clock in the morning to go to work on Monday. When it moved up to the next level, I opted out, because I'd had my time. I was in my early 30s, doing a master's degree, I had a family and something had to give. It was football.
HH: We went back to our day jobs on the Monday. I don't know if there was anything on the telly at the time, or the local news, but I suspect there probably wasn't. I think it was just forgotten about, really, which sounds quite sad.
I do feel quite proud that we actually did it. As far as I know, I'm still the only woman to captain a Newcastle team at Wembley, so I am proud of that.
A few years ago, when the women's team got to the Women's National League Cup final against Hashtag United, the semi-final had been at St. James' Park and a whole load of us were sat in a restaurant in town, Zaap, and (then-captain) Amber-Keegan Stobbs was there. I had my photo taken with her and my mother-in-law was saying, 'it's the current captain and the first captain!' I just thought, 'she's right, isn't she?' I'm quite proud of it all.
LD: I've been fortunate to have had lots of good opportunities - I went to America, and I played for Scotland - but that was still one of the best ones because it's the first big opportunity I had. There aren't many women who can say they played at the old Wembley. To be one of the first female players to play there is brilliant.
It feels like so long ago… some of the pictures are in black and white, which shows that! But it was the beginning, really, of the club. I still get a bit excited when I see the photos, just thinking about that chance that we had. It's just unbelievable to think what's happened over the last 30 years. That's a normal thing for some players now, whereas for us it was a massive opportunity we never thought anybody would get again.
SD: Just having the chance to be there… some of the greatest, most famous footballers have always wanted to play at Wembley and didn't get to. But I did. We did.
It's never been forgotten. It's the biggest achievement, probably, in my life, and every single one of us will never ever forget that. It's something to be so proud of.
LS: People will say, 'you played at Wembley?' 'Actually, I did - the old Wembley'. They're like, 'nah!' I'm like, 'I did. I really did!'
I still see some of the girls. We don't keep in contact all the time, but once we see each other it's like we've never been away. It's really nice. Everyone's got older and moved on, but if there is a time we can meet, we do.
KM: We had a really good bond and friendship. We've all still got friendships, 30 years on. I've known some of them for 40 years, since university. I was out Saturday night with a couple of the lasses. We all said that even though the professional era is now, we loved what we had. We had camaraderie. It was a real team spirit.
SD: Everybody just loved each other, we got on so well. That friendliness is so special because you achieve things together. You don't get that in any other friendship. That's stayed all these years. We still knock about together when it's someone’s birthday or wedding anniversary. We go camping together. After all these years, it shows how strong those foundations were.
KM: The fact that we had such a good time… I think that's the important thing. Because of what we did, we kept the sport alive in the North East for women and girls who wanted to play football.
We kept it alive. We gave them the possibility of playing when it was a difficult period in life. And because we kept it alive, that's what led to people now being able to do what they do.
