WITH interest waning in the World Cup, my attention has been drawn this week to the Brabazon Trophy in Seaton Carew. It is a prestigious competition for the world’s leading amateur golfers, and it has very similar letters to Brazil, only they’re arranged in a different order.

But what an extraordinary chap this Brabazon was – Lord Brabazon of Tara, who presented the golfers’ trophy, and who achieved far more than England’s footballers managed in South America.

He came from a wealthy Irish landowning background. While at Cambridge University at the start of the 20th Century, he became an unpaid mechanic to motoring pioneer Charles Rolls. From there, he graduated to motor racing with Darracq in France where he discovered the joys of early aeroplanes – wooden biplanes covered in floppy canvas.

In May 1909 in Kent, he became the first Englishman to fly a heavier-than-air machine.

First time up, he managed 450ft, then 650ft and finally 1,500ft before crashing badly, but five months later, he won £1,000 from the Daily Mail for becoming the first Englishman to fly a whole mile.

On November 4, 1909, he put a small pig in a wastepaper basket which he tied to the struts of his wing, and took off. His purpose was to prove that pigs can indeed fly, but he is also credited with the first live cargo flight.

In March 1910, he received the first pilot’s licence ever issued, and on his car he had what is said to be the first personalised number plate: FLY1. However, he was grounded by his wife when his mentor Rolls became the first Englishman to die while flying a plane in July 1910.

During the First World War, Brabazon took once more to the skies, pioneering aerial reconnaissance on the Western Front and won a Military Cross. After the war, he became a Conservative MP and Winston Churchill’s private secretary. During the Second World War, he was Minister of Transport and aircraft production, but he was forced to resign when a private speech became public. In it, he had expressed the opinion that it would be good if the armies of Germany and Russia – the latter, of course, being Britain’s ally – annihilated each other.

Lord Brabazon had great panache – he smoked cigarettes in a long holder, he was one of the last MPs in the Commons to wear a top hat, he did the Cresta bobsled run nearly every year, he was a pioneering yachtsman.

And he was a keen golfer. In 1952, four years after presenting the Brabazon Trophy, he became captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club at St Andrews.

He died in 1964, but apparently clocked up yet another notable first the year before when he sat on the first Pools Panel. I wonder if he would have put a match between mighty England and the Costa Rican minnows down as a boring scoreless draw.

BACK to Brazil, the land of beautiful people, which I was surprised to learn is named after a tree. The brasil tree grows in east India and was much sought after by Europeans to turn into red dye.

When those Europeans landed in South America in about 1500, they discovered a similar hard brownish-red tree growing there and so named it “terra de brazil” – “the land of red dye wood”.