Football’s trailblazer
QUESTION Did a Chinese footballer play for Stoke City in the Thirties?
Frank SOO, who was born in Buxton, Derbyshire, 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 nonwhite player to represent England in unofficial wartime internationals.
Soo was quick, intelligent and regarded by many top players of the era as the best 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 halfback), 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 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 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 his 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 referred to mass murder by fire, such as in L. ritchie’s Wanderings By The Loire in 1833: ‘Louis VII . . . once made a holocaust of 1,300 persons in a church.’
nathaniel Hawthorne used it in the title of his 1844 dystopian short story, Earth’s Holocaust, in which all the world’s literature and art are burned.
The term became linked with the nazis’ 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 other than 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 Holocaust. It took the 1978 TV film Holocaust, starring Meryl Streep, for its use to become widespread.
R. E. Reid, Codsall, Staffs.
QUESTION How much of HMS Victory and Cutty Sark are original?
NELSON’S flagship at Trafalgar in 1805 was HMS Victory, a 104-gun, first-rate ship of the line of the royal navy, laid down in 1759 and launched in 1765.
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 and neglect. It has been estimated that just 17 per cent of the original remains.
The oak timbers decayed due to the continuous cycle of wetting and drying. a 20th century invasion by death watch beetle meant they had to be replaced.
as oak was scarce and expensive, teak and later the hardwood iroko were used. Combined with insecticides and increased ventilation in the ship’s hull, death watch beetle was eradicated.
Cutty Sark was built on the river Leven, Dumbarton, in 1869 for the Jock Willis shipping line. One of the last tea clippers to be built and among the fastest, she was launched just as sailing ships gave way to steam propulsion.
Her Victorian engineers combined state- of-the-art materials with a sleek hydro- dynamic hull that could slip through the water with little resistance.
The hull was rock elm planks below the waterline and teak above, fixed to a wrought iron framework.
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 a restoration project.
Conservationists saved much of the iron framework and 90 per cent of the hull on display today is that of 1869.
Ralph May, London E6.
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