- By Lewis Peers
- Sports presenter and presenter
November 22, 2023
Updated 7 hours ago
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Frank Soo (second from right) waits to shake hands with General Koenig, the French Governor of Paris, before England’s 2-2 draw with France at Wembley Stadium in 1945
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The voice of ` commentator Raymond Glendenning crackles from the radio.
“And this time there’s a neat back pass from Soo Matthews…”
The date is October 20, 1945. World War II has only been over for a month. As people across England crowd around their radios, they can hear 54,000 fans cheering on their team against Wales at the Hawthorns.
Although Stanley Matthews remains one of English football’s most enduring names almost 80 years later, Frank Soo is a relatively unknown player.
Still, Soo’s story, a tale of adversity, fame and then obscurity, is significant. And slowly being recognized again.
Three years earlier – on May 9, 1942 – the 28-year-old Soo played his first game for England, also against Wales, in front of 30,000 spectators at Ninian Park in Cardiff.
It was a historic debut. Soo was the first non-white man to play for England. He was already the first Chinese player in the English Football League. And he remains the only player of Asian descent to represent England at the senior level.
In the 1930s, Soo was a star. He was a household name, appearing on cigarette cards and mentioned in newspapers. He was described as a talented central defender, clever, quick, with a flair for incisive passes and capable of playing in any position.
England teammate Stan Mortensen summed up Soo’s style. “Everything he did was marked,” Mortensen wrote in his book “Football is My Game.” “He seemed incapable of making any awkward movement.”
But Soo’s fame faded in the following decades. His name is unknown to the vast majority of fans.
image source, Getty Images
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Soo spent the majority of his club career at Stoke City
Soo was born in Buxton, Derbyshire in 1914, a few months before the start of the First World War.
His mother Beatrice was English and his father Quan was Chinese. They met in the Manchester area and were registered at the same address at the time of their marriage.
In the 1911 census, England and Wales had only 1,319 Chinese-born citizens out of a population of about 35 million. The main source of income for many Chinese immigrants, including Quan, was running steam laundries, a typical blue-collar job for many settlers.
Laundry work was traditionally done by women, so the Chinese community faced less hostility as they were more likely to take on women’s work rather than men’s.
Yet Chinese workers found themselves in an impossible situation. When they worked, they were accused of stealing local jobs. If they did not do this, they were considered inactive.
Women who married immigrants automatically lost their British citizenship and became foreigners.
The hostility they faced occasionally turned into social unrest. The first Chinese laundry in London was stoned shortly after it opened in 1901. During the Cardiff riots of 1911, all 30 Chinese laundries in the city were targeted.
Quan and Beatrice moved to Buxton and, after stints in various areas, settled in West Derby in Liverpool in 1920, where they ran a popular laundry on Town Row.
Soo’s footballing abilities were evident from a young age and he joined the Prescot Cables in 1932 as an 18-year-old. Although he was scouted by Liverpool and Everton, Stoke City expressed their interest and manager Tom Mather signed him for £400 in 1933.
Stoke gained promotion to the top flight in Soo’s first season and were an exciting and stylish side, with Soo in harmony with the legendary Matthews.
In 1938, a 24-year-old Soo was captain of Stoke and calls from fans and journalists for his call-up by England were growing.
The outbreak of war delayed his rise to the international stage before he made his debut in 1942.
Soo played 260 games for Stoke between 1933 and 1945, including wartime friendlies and cup matches, scoring 20 goals.
He also became a national icon. His wedding to his first wife, Beryl Lunt, made headlines in the Staffordshire Sentinel in 1938 after it attracted a crowd of 2,000 well-wishers despite attempts to keep the ceremony secret.
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Soo and Beryl Lunt pose after their wedding in 1938 with Soo’s parents Quan and Beatrice to the bride’s right
The article also revealed that the honeymoon would be spent in Bournemouth. The media rarely published details about the personal lives of footballers, but Soo’s fame caused a stir.
His Chinese heritage was part of the intrigue.
“It was seen as a novelty,” said Susan Gardiner, author of “The Wanderer: The Story of Frank Soo.”
“They were fascinated by the fact that this very young, talented Chinese player had moved to Stoke City… and not.” [being] hostile towards him.
Still, Soo has had to deal with regular references to his race and the use of his name in disrespectful, pun-filled headlines.
Ronnie Soo, Frank’s nephew, said in the documentary Frank Soo: The Forgotten Legend that there were “cartoons of him as a Chinese character with a soccer ball at his feet.”
In general, Soo received positive coverage, and when you see him grinning in photos from the time, it’s easy to see why he was nicknamed “The Smiling One.”
Soo served in the Royal Air Force during World War II, but continued to play association football after the Football Association suspended the Football League and organized regional war leagues. He was also a captain in the Royal Air Force and Forces XI.
Soo played nine games for England, including a 3-2 win over Scotland in front of 133,000 fans at Hampden Park in 1944.
However, as he only played during the war and the games were classified as unofficial by the FA, these appearances were never recognized with caps.
The usual club competitions were suspended when war broke out and the practical effects of the conflict affected international games.
“Players in military or civilian service could only play if it did not interfere with their military service or war work,” said Dr. Alexander Jackson, curator at the National Football Museum and author of “Football’s Great War.”
“While the FA promoted good relations with the armed forces and the release of service players for international matches, it could not force the armed forces to release a player due to their importance in boosting morale and raising funds for charity.”
“The deployment of military personnel overseas and the loss of players through military service meant that the FA had limited choices.
“The war would have made it more difficult for FA selectors to monitor players and recommend them for international awards in the same way as in peacetime.”
Soo was 25 when war broke out, the peak of many players’ careers. When the war ended he was 31 years old.
He was still close to making his England career official. Soo was called up to another England peacetime international in 1946, but dropped out with an ankle injury and was replaced by talented young star Billy Wright.
Wright, a future captain of the England national team, earned his first official international match against Ireland eight months later, replacing Soo in the team and ensuring that his international career was never officially recognized.
image source, Rex functions
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Soo’s managerial career included two-year spells at St Albans City and (via) Scunthorpe
After short stints at Leicester City, Luton Town and Chelmsford City, Soo moved into management.
It took him abroad in 1952 and his memory of English football faded.
His reputation was boosted abroad when he led Norway to the 1952 Olympics and won the Swedish top flight with Djurgardens IF in 1955.
Very little is known about Soo following his last documented managerial role with Danish club Akademisk Boldklub in 1965–66. It is believed that he moved back to the north west of England in the mid-1970s before settling in Stoke.
Fans remember seeing him at local games and being shown cigarette cards from his glory days.
“When he was back in England he suffered from something called Alzheimer’s disease,” Ronnie said. “He was in care but in later years his condition deteriorated.”
Soo died of dementia on January 25, 1991 in Staffordshire.
His ethnicity, his move abroad, the impact of war and the relatively sparse media coverage of football during his playing days contributed to Soo’s relative anonymity, but much has been done over the last decade to celebrate his achievements.
In 2016, Gardiner’s book stitched together local history, family records and newspaper archives to create the most comprehensive record of Soo’s story to date.
A year later, after reading the book, trainer and community champion Alan Lau founded the Frank Soo Foundation to promote Soo’s story.
In 2020, the foundation worked with Google to feature Soo as the search engine’s “Doodle,” introducing his likeness to millions of web browsers worldwide.
Across town, on the site of Stoke’s former home at the Victoria Ground, is Frank Soo Street, named in honor of a club legend.
There is room for further commemoration.
In March, Jack Leslie was posthumously awarded a cap by the FA. Leslie was the first black player to be called up to the England national team in 1925, but his invitation to play for his country was withdrawn when, his family believes, the selectors recognized the color of his skin.
Soo and the Asian players who followed him are still waiting for an England breakthrough.
Li Ke, who was known as Nico Yennaris while growing up in London and playing for age-group teams Arsenal, Brentford and England, became the first naturalized player to represent China in 2019.
Jiang Guantai, known as Tyias Browning while he played for Everton, Sunderland and the England Under-21 team, is now a regular for China.
On the women’s side, Aston Villa’s Maz Pacheco said she was unsure whether to play for the Philippines or England.
Before them all came Soo – a pioneer of non-white representation in English football, a Stoke City icon and a successful manager who overcame adversity in life and emerged from anonymity in death.
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