Kicking off a Villa thriller
QUESTION Where is the villa from which Aston Villa Football Club take their name?
ASTON Villa FC began life after a meeting between four members of Villa Cross Wesleyan Chapel cricket team in Heathfield Road, Handsworth, Birmingham, 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 during 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 association football rules.
Aston Villa, one of the founder members of the Football League in 1888, have played at Villa Park since 1897.
Villa Cross Wesleyan Chapel, established in 1865, took its name from Villa Cross, the junction of Heathfield Road, Villa Road and Lozells Road, around 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. Previously, it was Aston Villa boarding school, which may have been the original villa-type house after which the football club is named.
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. The Villa Cross pub was closed after the Handsworth riots of 1985 and became a community centre.
James Charmian, Solihull, W. Mids.
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 ‘P. J.’ Kennedy. His was not the rags-to-riches story some biographers would have you believe.
Kennedy attended Harvard and, on October 7, 1914, married Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald, the eldest daughter of Boston Mayor John F. ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzgerald.
Kennedy first worked as an assistant bank examiner and, as he had a head for business, he became a stockbroker after World War I.
He made his first fortune through insider trading and stock manipulation, but at the time, this was legal.
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 thus ironic Franklin D. Roosevelt later made Kennedy the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, with a mandate to end market manipulations and dissemination of false information about securities.
In the mid-Twenties, Kennedy became a film mogul and had a dalliance with actress Gloria Swanson. He sold out just when the industry was consolidating, earning himself $5 million.
Kennedy became even wealthier during World War II through property and, in 1945, he made the deal that was to be the cornerstone of the Kennedy fortune.
He bought the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, a wholesale emporium that had cost at least $30million to build, for a paltry $12.5 million.
By the Fifties, the annual gross in rent exceeded the purchase price.
In 1957, Fortune magazine declared Kennedy one of the richest men in America, with assets of $300 million.
Joe Kennedy was what Americans call an operator — someone who sails as close to the wind as possible with his business dealings. The one time he might have crossed the line is during Prohibition. Some claim that he was an out-and-out bootlegger and, in 1973, mob boss Frank Costello claimed he and Kennedy had been bootlegging partners.
After Prohibition, he became involved in the liquor trade.
He founded Somerset Importers in partnership with Congressman James Roosevelt II, the business that acted as the exclusive U.S. agent for Haig & Haig Scotch, Gordon’s Dry Gin and Dewar’s Scotch. It is rumoured they had assembled a large inventory of stock, to be sold at great profit when Prohibition was repealed.
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.
Michael Fanshawe, Edinburgh.
QUESTION Tom Cruise broke his ankle, but have any actors been seriously injured or killed on a film set?
FURTHER to earlier answers, Stewart Granger told the following story about when he was making the 1952 film Scaramouche.
During a swordfight, he had to fall on the floor, then the villain was to cut through the cord holding up a spiked iron chandelier, which was to fall upon our prone hero.
Granger told the director, George Sidney, that it looked risky and asked for a test run. Sidney said it was perfectly safe, but the actor insisted. The chandelier crashed on to the mattress intended to break Granger’s fall — and tore it to shreds.
B. Dallow, Kempston, Beds.