We start with ten questions that we hope won’t prove too tricky, and which should help you get used to the way typical Round Britain Quiz questions work.
Q1
Why might Atticus’s daughter, Jay Silverheels’s horse and Haydn Dimmock be drawn to the highest point in the Peak District?
CLUES
- Atticus’s daughter is a fictional character but Jay Silverheels and Haydn Dimmock were real people.
- The highest point in the Peak District was the scene of a famous trespassing incident.
Q2
If Edinburgh’s a bit hard of hearing and Inverness gives you the needle, why is Coventry proud of its achievements? And what’s saucy about Hemel Hempstead?
CLUES
- You need to address yourself particularly carefully to the wording of this question.
- By the same logic, Maidstone is self-centred and Bristol talks complete rubbish.
A1
The common link is the word Scout.
Atticus’s daughter, the child narrator of the Harper Lee novel To Kill a Mockingbird, is Jean Louise Finch, known throughout as Scout. Mary Badham played her in the 1962 movie (which starred Gregory Peck as Atticus).
Jay Silverheels played Tonto in the long-running US television series The Lone Ranger; Tonto’s horse was called Scout (the Lone Ranger’s was Silver).
Haydn Dimmock, children’s writer and editor, edited the boys’ magazine The Scout between 1915 and 1954. He invented the famous Boy Scout tradition of ‘Bob-a-Job Week’, and promulgated the idea in the magazine.
They may all be drawn to the highest point in the Peak District, which is the summit of Kinder Scout (636 m). Kinder Scout was the scene of a mass trespass in April 1932, by people protesting at being excluded from private land in areas of natural beauty. It’s often seen as having given important momentum to the National Park movement.
A2
This is about UK postcodes.
Edinburgh is EH, which makes it a bit deaf (eh?).
Inverness is IV (intra-venous).
Coventry is proud of its CV.
Hemel Hempstead’s postcode is HP (as in HP sauce).
Q3
Why would Steve Bell and Lindsay Anderson feel at home on an island fortress off Marseille?
CLUES
- The island fortress is the scene of one of the most daring escapes in fiction.
- Rudyard Kipling and Telly Savalas might feel at home there too.
Q4
Which Scottish church has been linked, at various times, with a self-mutilating painter, a young man with a horn and a crucified rebel slave?
CLUES
- The church is generic, rather than specific.
- The painter, the young man and the slave were all real people, immortalized in a particular way.
A3
The answer is: because the island fortress is called If.
The island of If, off the French Mediterranean coast near Marseille, has a castle dating from the 1520s which was featured as the place of imprisonment of the hero Edmond Dantès in the Alexandre Dumas novel The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–5). In one of literature’s all-time classic pieces of derring-do, Dantès makes his escape from the château d’If after 14 years’ incarceration, by taking the place of a dead fellow prisoner, being sewn into a burial shroud and tipped over the wall into the sea.
The British director Lindsay Anderson’s If … (1968) was the first film in an increasingly surreal anti-establishment trilogy, starring Malcolm McDowell as Mick Travis. In it, he and a group of classmates enact their fantasy of causing mayhem at their hidebound public school by taking up positions on the battlements and machine-gunning half of the staff and pupils to death. The other two films in the sequence are O Lucky Man! (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982).
Since 1981 Steve Bell (b.1951) has drawn and written the savagely satirical Guardian strip cartoon If …
A4
The Scottish church is a kirk – because the question refers to three people portrayed on screen by Kirk Douglas.
Kirk Douglas’s performance as Vincent van Gogh (1853–90) in Lust for Life (dir. Vincente Minelli, 1956) is regarded as one of the finest of his career; he went so far as to take extensive painting lessons to prepare for the role. Van Gogh cut his own ear off on 23 December 1888 in an incident the exact circumstances of which are still disputed.
Bix Beiderbecke (1903–31), the pioneering white cornet player who became one of the jazz lifestyle’s earliest and most notorious casualties, inspired Dorothy Baker’s novel Young Man with a Horn, which was filmed in 1950 by Michael Curtiz. In the film, Kirk Douglas’s supposed horn playing was dubbed by Harry James.
The real historical Spartacus, the slave born in Thrace who was trained at gladiatorial school in order to make him marketable to coliseum owners as an (expendable) attraction in the amphitheatre, led a rebellion of some 70,000 slaves against the Roman Empire in c.73 bc. He was actually hacked to death in battle rather than crucified, as he is in the Stanley Kubrick movie of 1960. Kirk Douglas starred alongside Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov, Tony Curtis and Charles Laughton; Jean Simmons played his wife Varinia.
Q5
Can you place in order Dorothy’s aunt, Arthur’s foster brother, Dakota’s sister and Garrulus glandarius?
CLUES
- By Dorothy in this case we mean the character in The Wizard of Oz.
- These are single-syllable answers.
Q6
If 509 is a German painter and 601 is a senior police officer, can you explain why 1009 is a cowboy and 1200 an entire cricket team?
CLUES
- The painter and the cowboy have surnames that rhyme.
- 501 would be a slightly less senior police officer.
A5
The four elements in the question give us Em, Kay, Elle and Jay – so the correct (alphabetical) order is clearly Jay, Kay, Elle and Em.
Dorothy’s aunt in The Wizard of Oz (1939) is Aunt Em. After Dorothy runs away from home, early in the film, she is shown a crystal ball by the fortune teller Professor Marvel, in which Aunt Em is apparently dying of a broken heart, prompting her to rush home. In the movie Aunt Em was played by Clara Blandick.
Dakota’s sister is a reference to Elle Fanning (b.1998), the actor sister of Dakota Fanning, whose most notable roles have included 11-year-old Cleo in Somewhere and Alicia in The Beguiled, both directed by Sofia Coppola.
Sir Kay, in many re-tellings of the legend of King Arthur including T. H. White’s classic The Once and Future King and the animated Disney movie The Sword in the Stone, is the foster brother of Arthur. He becomes a Knight of the Round Table and Arthur’s steward.
Garrulus glandarius is the bird known as the jay, widespread across Europe and Asia. (The bird known as a jaybird or blue jay in North America is an entirely different species.)
A6
This is an old-fashioned RBQ question involving Roman numerals which spell out names or abbreviations in English.
The painter is Otto DIX (Roman numerals for 509), twentieth-century German realist artist bitterly opposed to, and suppressed by, Nazism.
By the same logic, 601 in Roman numerals gives us DCI – a senior police rank.
So 1009 is MIX, giving us the screen cowboy Tom Mix (Thomas Hezekiah Mix, 1880–1940), Hollywood’s first superstar of Westerns.
And 1200 is the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club).
Q7
Where and why does a Welsh island turn up in Cambridgeshire, a Yorkshire city in Kent and an Essex town (with acute political instincts) near Reading?
CLUES
- These could all confuse an unwary visitor to Britain.
- There’s a stately quality to this question.
Q8
If Abba recorded a minus two, Fleetwood Mac a minus three and Simon & Garfunkel a minus four, what might we be talking about?
CLUES
- This is nothing to do with chart positions, millions of albums sold or awards won.
- If you aren’t confident of the answer you might need to wing it.
A7
In the names of three stately homes or castles, those names being most readily associated with somewhere else entirely.
Anglesey Abbey, a few miles northeast of Cambridge, a mostly sixteenth-century former priory restored by the 1st Baron Fairhaven in the 1930s, was acquired by the National Trust in 1966.
Leeds Castle in Kent is one of the most picturesque of all English castles, famous for its lake setting on two islands, the halves of the castle joined by an arched bridge. The smaller half, known as the Gloriette, was mostly built by Henry VIII.
Basildon Park is an eighteenth-century house and estate in Berkshire, near Pangbourne on the Thames. The town of Basildon is often seen as a key predictor of the outcome of a general election: its result is declared early and its swing often closely mirrors that in the country as a whole.
A8
This is not about album sales or number ones, but about golf.
Two under par in golf is an eagle, and Abba’s song ‘Eagle’ was a highlight of Abba: The Album released in 1978.
Three under is an albatross, a title with which Fleetwood Mac (in their original all-British 1960s incarnation) had an instrumental no. 1 hit.
And four under, very rare indeed, is a condor – as in the song on Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water album, ‘El Condor Pasa’.
Q9
If a gathering includes 12 who are religious, 13 who are guiltless, 13 who are courageous and 8 who are city-dwellers, why would only one make an impression – and who are they all?
CLUES
- In fact all of them might be said to be religious, but 12 proclaim it in a particularly obvious way.
- As so often with the people in Round Britain Quiz questions, they could never meet in real life. Thinking of them as a succession, rather than a gathering, may help.
Q10
Why do the following seem all confused: the one whom Roy’s drowning girl refuses to call for help; an Elizabethan woman of easy virtue; and a suit of armour for a horse?
CLUES
- ‘Roy’s drowning girl’ is a reference to a famous painting.
- A knowledge of historical vocabulary is very useful for this question.
A9
They are Popes, and the references are to the number of times these Papal names have been used throughout history.
There have been 12 Popes called Pius; 13 called Innocent; 13 called Leo (and thus surely courageous); and 8 called Urban.
And the one who would leave an impression is Pope Mark – there has only ever been one of these, in ad 336.
A10
They seem confused because they’re mixed up, in the sense that they’re anagrams of one another.
Roy Lichtenstein’s painting The Drowning Girl (1963) depicts (in his trademark ultra-magnified comic-book style) a girl losing consciousness as she’s pulled under the waves, and a thought-balloon coming from her head which reads, ‘I don’t care! I’d rather sink than call Brad for help.’ In another similar canvas from the same year, a blonde girl sits wringing her hands, looking out of the picture with the caption, ‘I know how you must feel, Brad’. It’s a name that conveys an instant image of a stereotypical all-American male.
A drab is a Shakespearean word for a low-life prostitute. In one of the witches’ scenes in Macbeth, where they list the recipe for their infernal stew, one of the ingredients is ‘Finger of birth-strangl’d babe / Ditch-deliver’d by a drab’. In contemporary parlance to ‘go drabbing’ was to go out visiting brothels.
Medieval armour-plating for a horse was called a bard – usually consisting of large linked metal plates to protect the horse’s flanks and exposed breast during battle or jousting. As you’d imagine, they were often very heavy and likely to impair the horse’s movement.