Three and easy on ace’s debut
QUESTION Have any players scored a hat-trick on their debut for the Republic of Ireland soccer team?
ONLY one player has scored a hat-trick on their debut for the Republic – David Kelly, a striker who played for clubs including Wolverhampton Wanderers and Newcastle United. He achieved this treble in a friendly match against Israel at Lansdowne Road in November 1987 – with Ireland running out 5-0 winners.
However, while this was an impressive feat, the English-born Kelly, who qualified to play for the Boys In Green through his Dubliner father, is best known on these shores for a goal against the nation of his birth. In February 1995, Ireland took on England at Lansdowne Road – and Kelly slotted home to put the home side 1-0 up. However, the night soon turned sour, as the game was abandoned due to rioting from the visiting fans. It was an infamous evening in Irish soccer history – but Kelly’s goal at least gave us one moment worth remembering.
There was another debut hattrick hero for the Boys in Green – though this was for the Irish Free State team, not the Republic.
Ned Brooks – who played as centre-forward or inside-left for clubs including Bohemians and Stockport County – was the man who achieved this, in 1924. The Dubliner had played international football once before this – representing the all-island team selected by the Irish Football Association, back in 1920. That match did not go so well, as the Boys in Green lost 3-0 to Scotland at Celtic Park.
However, following partition, his debut for the Irish Free State team, in June 1924, went a lot better. He rattled in a hat-trick at Dublin’s Dalymount Park, as the visiting USA team were defeated 3-1 in a friendly match.
James Fitzpatrick, Co. Kildare.
QUESTION Was the 1958 vote rigged to select Margaret Thatcher as Conservative candidate for the Finchley constituency?
THIS is an extraordinary scoop in Charles Moore’s brilliant biography Margaret Thatcher: Not For Turning. In the final vote to select the Conservative parliamentary candidate for the Finchley seat in North London, history tells us that Thatcher narrowly won by 46 votes to 43. This resulted in the famous headline, ‘Tories Choose Beauty: The woman Tories reckon their most beautiful member has been chosen as candidate for Finchley.’
According to Jonathan Aitken, ‘a small but vocal group of association members relentlessly opposed the idea of a woman MP and tried to deny Margaret
Thatcher the nomination.’
It appears they might have won had chairman Cecil ‘Bertie’ Blatch not switched two votes to ensure her nomination, changing the course of history.
During the 2013 publicity tour for the biography, Moore revealed at Ludlow Assembly Rooms the goings-on behind the scenes when Mrs Thatcher put herself forward for selection. Her main rival was Thomas Langton, a holder of the Military Cross, who was described by an association member as a ‘one-legged brigadier’.
On the day after Thatcher died, Moore received an email from Haden Blatch, who said his father had told him: ‘She didn’t actually win. The man did, but I thought, “He’s got a silver spoon in his mouth. He’ll get another seat.” [He didn’t.] So I “lost” two of his votes and gave them to her.’
If this is true, Thatcher unknowingly started her political career by a fraud. Moore also revealed the decision by her old university, Oxford, not to award her an honorary degree had deeply upset her. This is why she gave her private papers to Cambridge, from where Moore obtained most of the material for his biography.
Jonathan Fitch, Clun, Shropshire.
QUESTION What is the origin of the office jargon ‘pushing the envelope’?
THIS has nothing to do with moving office stationery. The term derives from development engineering where theoretical limits of safety are derived by calculation. It is used widely in engineering, especially in the development of aircraft.
Engineers will calculate the theoretical combinations of operating parameters, such as the angle of wings to the airflow versus the speed of the aircraft.
They will derive a series of curves: at one end will be the curve describing the minimum safe conditions and at the other will be a curve showing the maximum safe conditions.
When both curves are shown on a graph, they will enclose an area called the envelope of safe operating conditions. Theoretically, operating the craft with any combination of parameters within the envelope should be safe.
Test pilots are said to push the envelope by finding how far beyond those theoretical limits they can fly the aircraft. The phrase has come to mean challenging existing assumptions.
It became widely used after it appeared in Tom Wolfe’s awardwinning 1979 non-fiction book The Right Stuff, about the Mercury Seven astronauts and test pilots of rocket-propelled aircraft, most notably Chuck Yeager.
‘Yeager had been the first rocket pilot to go through this particular hole in the supersonic envelope, and it was during the flight in the X-1A in which he set a speed record of Mach 2.42. One of the phrases that kept running through the conversation was pushing the outside of the envelope,’ wrote Wolfe.
In corporate jargon, this term suggests a performance that exceeds expectations, rather than staying within its limits.
Tony Cater, Grays, Essex.
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