Villa’s home from home
QUESTION Where is the villa from which Aston Villa Football Club takes its name? ASTON Villa FC began life following a meeting between four members of Villa Cross Wesleyan Chapel cricket team in Heathfield Road, Handsworth, Birmingham, some time early in 1874.
The meeting was between Jack Hughes, Frederick Matthews, Walter Price and William Scattergood – all keen cricketers who wanted to keep their Villa Cross team together in the winter months.
Aston Villa’s first match was against the local Aston Brook St Mary’s rugby team. As a condition of the match, the Villa side had to agree to play the first half under rugby rules and the second half under football rules.
Aston Villa have played at Villa Park since 1897. They were one of the founder members of the Football League in 1888.
Villa Cross Wesleyan Chapel was established in 1865. It took its name from Villa Cross, the junction of Heathfield Road, Villa Road and Lozells Road, about 200 yards from the chapel.
The junction is marked on the Ordnance Survey map of 1834 as Aston Villa. Aston is an ancient name for the area mentioned in the Domesday Book as Estone, meaning the eastern farmstead or estate.
Maps show a building on this site which for many years from at least 1879 was the Villa Cross Tavern.
It was previously Aston Villa boarding school, which may have been the original villa-type house after which the club is named.
The Villa Cross pub was closed after the Handsworth riots of 1985 and became a community centre.
In 1962, the Villa Cross Wesleyan Chapel was bought by the New Testament Church of God. The building was demolished in 2007 to make way for a new church centre with community facilities.
James Charmian, Solihull, West Midlands. QUESTION Have any small nations contributed significantly to space exploration? MANY smaller nations in the EU are members of the European Space Agency, thus contributing to space exploration. Ireland joined the agency in 1975 and since then has been making an ever-increasing input into this area.
Ireland’s connection to the explosevelt ration of space goes back to the early 1840s, when the then Earl of Rosse built what was then the largest telescope in the world to explore the stars. The Leviathan telescope was completed in 1845 and for the following 75 years, it was the largest astronomical telescope in the world.
Now, not only has that telescope been thoroughly restored, but Birr Castle is also the location for a new low-frequency array radio telescope, built at a cost of €1.4million. It has meant a big leap forward for astrophysics in Ireland.
Through the European Space Agency, Ireland has contributed to various programmes for space exploration, such as the Huygens probe, which landed on Saturn in 2005. The European Space Agency was also the first to land a probe, the Philae probe, on a comet, in November 2014.
But despite all the Irish contributions to space exploration, we still haven’t sent an Irish person into orbit or even had a satellite of our own orbiting the Earth. That’s about to change, as preparations go ahead for Ireland’s first satellite – Educational Research Satellite-1, or EIRSAT-1 for short. A team made up of researchers from UCD and Queen’s University, Belfast, together with five space tech firms, are working on the project.
When it’s ready, the satellite will be launched from the International Space Station with the aim of providing training for graduate and undergraduate students in all aspects of satellite development.
It also looks as if we will have our first person in space before long. Our first astronaut is likely to be Dr Norah Patten, 34, from Ballina, Co. Mayo. She was one of 12 participants from around the world who took part in a recent US scientist/astronaut training programme in Florida. The aim of this programme is to train scientists with the skills needed for the next generation of space vehicles. B. Murphy, Cork city. QUESTION What was the source of the Kennedy family’s wealth? JOSEPH Patrick ‘Joe’ Kennedy Sr was born on September 6, 1888, the ambitious son of a prosperous Boston saloon keeper, Patrick Joseph ‘PJ’ Kennedy.
His was not the rags-to-riches tale some biographers would have you believe. Kennedy attended Harvard and, in October 1914, married Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald, daughter of Boston Mayor John F. ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzgerald.
Kennedy worked as an assistant bank examiner. He had a head for business and, after World War I, became a stockbroker. He made his first fortune through insider trading and stock manipulation, which was legal at the time.
He manipulated the stock pool, in which traders conspired to inflate a stock’s price, selling out just before the bubble burst. He pulled out of stocks early in 1929 and sold short following the Wall Street Crash, making money while his rivals lost everything.
It is ironic that Franklin D. Roo- later made Kennedy the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission with a specific mandate to end market manipulations and dissemination of false information about securities.
In the mid-Twenties, Kennedy became a movie mogul. He sold out just when the industry was consolidating, earning himself $5 million. He became even wealthier during World War II through property, and in 1957, Fortune declared Kennedy one of the richest men in America, with assets of $300million.
Joe Kennedy was what Americans call an operator – someone who sails close to the wind with their business dealings. The one time he may have crossed the line is during Prohibition, when some claim he was a bootlegger. In 1973, mob boss Frank Costello said he and Kennedy had been bootlegging partners.
By the time Joe Kennedy died on November 18, 1969, he had founded a political dynasty. Today, the Kennedy fortune is worth more than $1billion, wrapped up in trusts and tax havens.
IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Irish Daily Mail, Embassy House, Herbert Park Lane, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. You can also fax them to 0044 1952 510906 or you can email them to charles.legge@dailymail.ie. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.