A trailblazer on the pitch
QUESTION
Did a Chinese footballer play for English club Stoke City in the Thirties?
FRANK Soo, born in Buxton on March 8, 1914, was a gifted professional footballer of mixed Chinese and English parentage.
The first player of Chinese origin to play in the English Football League, he has the distinction of being the first non-white player to represent England in unofficial international wartime matches.
Soo was quick, intelligent and regarded by many top players of the era as a great passer of the ball. He played in the old Cheshire League for Prescot Cables before being signed by Tom Mather, manager of Stoke City, for £400.
At Stoke, he wore the No 10 shirt (inside left) and later No 6 (left half back), making 185 First Division and FA Cup appearances between 1933 and 1939, and scoring ten goals.
His promising career was interrupted by service in the RAF during World War II, but he went on to play alongside centre forward Freddie Steele and Stanley Matthews. In 1945, he was signed again by Tom Mather, but this time for Leicester City, for a fee of £4,600, and was made captain.
As Leicester struggled, Soo was transferred to Luton Town in 1946 for a fee of £5,000. In 1948, he signed for Chelmsford City, helping them to finish second in the Southern League.
His life was marred by tragedy. In 1938, he married Beryl Freda Lunt, but the couple split in 1951 and she died of a barbiturate overdose a year later.
Soo was also a trailblazer in management, taking charge of teams in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Italy in a managerial career that lasted from 1949 to 1966. He died in Cheadle on January 25, 1991, aged 76.
A street built on the site of Stoke’s old Victoria Ground is named after him, a foundation was created in his honour in 2018, and an annual five-a-side charity tournament is held in the legendary player’s memory.
Geoff Pritchard, Crewe, Cheshire.
QUESTION
When was the word Holocaust first used?
BIBLICALLY, a holocaust was a sacrifice consumed by fire as opposed to a normal sacrifice, in which a small part was burned and the rest was eaten. The word comes from the Greek holos, meaning entire, and kaustos, meaning burnt.
The first known usage in English is from John Alcock’s 1496 work Mons Perfeccionis: Otherwyse In Englysshe, The Hyll Of Perfecc[i]on: ‘Very true obedyence is an holocauste of martyrdom made to Cryste.’ The word was used in the Tyndale Bible of 1526: ‘A greater thynge then all holocaustes and sacrifises.’
By the 19th century it was mostly used to refer to mass murder by fire, such as in L. Ritchie’s Wanderings
By Loire in 1833: ‘Louis VII...once made a holocaust of 1,300 persons in a church.’ It was used in the title of an 1844 dystopian short story, Earth’s Holocaust, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, in which all the world’s literature and artwork are burned.
The term became linked with the Nazis’ appalling genocide of the Jews in 1942. The News Chronicle of December 5, 1942, stated: ‘Holocaust . . . Nothing else in Hitler’s record is comparable to his treatment of the Jews . . . The word has gone forth that...the Jewish peoples are to be exterminated . . . The conscience of humanity stands aghast.’
For decades after the war, the genocide lacked a formal title in English except, perhaps, The Final
Solution, the term the Nazis used. In Hebrew, it became known as Shoah, which means the catastrophe. It wasn’t until the Sixties that writers began using the Holocaust as a proper noun. It took the 1978 TV film Holocaust, starring Meryl Streep, for the word’s use to become widespread.
R. E. Reid, Codsall, Staffs.
QUESTION
The Duke of Marlborough wrote daily letters to his wife from battlefields in the 17th century. How did they make their way to England?
FROM the earliest days of organised military expeditions, field commanders maintained contact with their monarchs and governments through the use of couriers. The word stems from the Latin
currere, meaning to run. The most famous courier was Pheidippides, who carried the news to the Spartans of the victory over the Persians at the battle of Marathon in 490 BC.
His achievement gave us the sporting event that bears the name of the battle.
Not only did couriers have to contend with the physical exertion, weather, thirst and hunger, but they might also be ambushed. For this reason, several couriers carrying the same message were dispatched by different routes.
From Roman times, couriers changed horses, ate and slept at staging posts. These were usually garrisons or fortresses, but were sometimes inns. This use of the word post gave rise to the term for the mail service.
By the 17th century, if dispatches had to cross the sea, they were taken to the nearest friendly port where packet ships – small, fast craft – would be waiting.
As well as dispatches, the networks would be used by senior officers for private correspondence. Letters were also sent post restant, which means they were collected from a staging post.
While John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, might write to his wife every day, it could take weeks or even months for the letters to be delivered. Couriers became known as dispatch riders, because they carried dispatches. They swapped horses for motorbikes from World War I.
Bob Dillon, Edinburgh.
QUESTION
How much of HMS Victory and Cutty Sark are original?
NELSON’S flagship HMS Victory was a 104-gun, first-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, and was launched in 1765. It was, most famously, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar in 1805.
The standing joke at Portsmouth dockyard is that Victory took six years to build and 240 years to restore. The ship suffered the ravages of warfare, neglect and the death watch beetle.
It has been estimated that just 17% of the original remains.
Cutty Sark was built on the River Leven, Dumbarton, in 1869. One of the last tea clippers, she appeared as sailing ships gave way to steam propulsion. .
Cutty Sark proved more durable than HMS Victory. Most of her masts were destroyed in 1916, but much of the original structure remained in place. She has undergone various restorations.
Disaster struck in 2007 when a fire ripped through the structure. Mercifully, much of the timbers, fixtures and fittings had been removed and taken to Chatham’s historic dockyard in Kent as part of the conservation project.
Ralph May, London E6.
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