The Saturday briefing
Is there anything you’re yearning to know? Send your questions, on any subject, to the contacts given below, and we will do our best to answer them...
QI was watching a West Bromwich Albion football match and noticed on the empty seats they have “The Lord is my Shepherd” imprinted. Are they a particularly religious club?
Jeff Clifton, Fauldhouse,West Lothian (A Leeds United fan)
ALiverpool fans have You’ll Never Walk Alone, while Stoke supporters sing Tom Jones’s Delilah from the terraces, but West Brom’s surprising anthem comes courtesy of Psalm 23, and it’s heard after every goal.
The earliest recording of The Lord Is My Shepherd rising out of The Hawthorns is from October 31, 1976, when Albion were playing West Ham United. But it is thought to have been claimed by fans before then, and there are a few origin stories kicking about.
A convincing one comes from the blackout winter of 19731974, when miners were striking and the use of electricity for floodlighting and the heating of shops, offices and restaurants was banned. So midweek evening sporting fixtures were switched to get around the ban – in fact the first ever Sunday FA Cup games were played on January 6, 1974.
When Albion played their first Sunday game later that month against Everton, it is thought the hymn was sung, tongue in cheek, and it has stuck.
Season ticket holder Keith White also claims he started the tradition in the 1970s, but sang “Giles is my shepherd” in a pub, praising player-manager
Johnny Giles, who had miraculously turned the dying club around. And another story claims a group of fans found a hymn book on the bus on the way to a match and later started singing the hymn.
QWould it be possible to artificially make a new planet from the asteroid belt?
AScientists believe planets form as gas and dust swirls around a star, growing in size as they attract more matter, which collides and clumps together. As well as planets, there are millions of asteroids orbiting our sun – leftover rocky objects from the dawn of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. Most of these are found between Mars and Jupiter, in the main asteroid belt. They vary in size, from small boulders to the largest known one,Vesta, which is around 330 miles in diameter and can sometimes be seen with the naked eye. Sci-fi films featuring spaceship slalom chases between rubble might have you believe otherwise, but the distance between asteroids is around 600,000 miles. So to grow a new planet, you would have to divert their paths so they would collide – but not too violently or they would break apart, instead of forming a new body.
The heat from the formation would take millennia to cool.And whether the finished product would be able to support a species is a different matter entirely.
Even if we did have the tech to bring these asteroids together to make a new planet, there wouldn’t be enough of it.The combined mass of all these bits of ancient space rubble in the main asteroid belt adds up to only 4 per cent of the Moon.
Q“Gave up the ghost” is something my parents used to say a long time ago, though you don’t hear it much now. Can you please explain its origin?
AThis has been around since the 14th century, although it was popularised by the King James version of the Bible – seen as the first “people’s Bible”, published in 1611.
It’s now come to mean an inanimate object broken beyond repair, as in your television gave up the ghost.
But in the Bible it describes the death of Jesus, giving up his spirit, in Luke 23:46 and John 19:30: “And Jesus cried with a loud
CALL TO PSALMS: West Brom fans sing The Lord Is My Shepherd as their goal-scoring anthem and, inset, the asteroid Vesta
voice, and gave up the ghost.”
It was also in the first English translation of the Bible, by William Tyndale, known as the father of the English Bible. He was burnt at the stake for heresy for his work in 1536 as the Church had banned the Bible’s unauthorised translation into English – just owning an English copy with that phrase was punishable by death.
The Church wanted to keep the word of God under strict control by keeping it in Latin, read by only scholars and the elite – a tiny percentage of the population.
The first handwritten English Bible was produced in the 1380s by Oxford professor John Wycliffe.
He produced dozens of copies, translated from Latin, including the line “and yaf vp the goost”.
The Pope was so incensed that 44 years after Wycliffe died, he ordered his bones to be dug up, burnt and thrown in a river.
PLEASE SEND US YOUR INTRIGUING QUESTIONS ON ANY SUBJECT: By email:
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● to Any Questions, Daily Express, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5AP
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Unfortunately we cannot reply individually, but we will feature the best questions on this page. Josie Smallwood, from Northampton, remembers her mother singing songs at bedtime. She recalls this one, also known as The Boy’s Message, by Edward Rogers, who wrote for music hall singers. Here is an excerpt:
EW Rogers (1901)
“Skylark,” said the dear little boy “Pray where do you go when you fly so high? Skylark, say, is it true That you sing to the angels in the sky?
If so, my mother’s an angel up there
And we do miss her so, you see So would you, please, the next time you go
Take this message from Dad and me?
… Skylark! Twas a message of love Pathetic enough for an angel’s tear Skylark trilled it in song And it reached to the angel mother’s ear
God must have heard, for, that night in his sleep
The boy smiled and said, “Mother dear
I knew you’d come to your own little boy
If my message you got to hear.” “Skylark,” said a desolate man “Your message has robbed me of my dear boy Skylark, death’s angel has come And took up to heaven my pride and my joy
Don’t sing today, for each beautiful note Seems to bring back the days gone by
The wife I adored and the darling who gave you
That message to sing on high.”
If you can’t remember the words to a favourite verse or song from yesteryear, send us a snippet and we’ll do our best to find all the wonderful words.