Q1
The painted one, the little girl and the mother of Jesus: where did they go?
CLUES
- They’re associated with a rather significant ‘discovery’.
- Translating the phrases might help you.
Q2
What would Fred Hoyle think of a writer of pulp Westerns, a Restoration Archbishop of Canterbury, a penal reformer and British India?
CLUES
- In real life Fred Hoyle would have had to have lived for a few more years to see this connection.
- The four clues should give you four first names.
A1
To America with Columbus: they are the three ships of his 1492 expedition.
Pinta means ‘the painted one’ or ‘the spotted one’. The so-called ‘first sighting of the New World’ was by Rodrigo de Triana from the Pinta on 12 October 1492.
Niña means ‘little girl’ (the female equivalent of ‘el Niño’ or ‘little boy’, as in the ocean current). The Niña replica, built in 1992, sails the world as a travelling Columbus museum and is the most famous of the three replica ships that currently exist.
The third and largest of the three ships was the Santa María, whose full name was in fact Santa María de la Inmaculada Concepción – unambiguously named for the mother of Christ.
A2
Astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, FRS (1915–2001) is known for his vehement opposition to the model of the creation of the
universe known as the ‘Big Bang’ theory. You can probably see where this is going.
Hoyle’s contention was that the ‘Big Bang’ theory of the origin of the universe was pseudo-science, and he favoured the model known as the Steady State theory. The very phrase ‘The Big Bang’ was coined by Hoyle in a BBC radio interview in which he intended it as a scornful putdown.
Elmore Leonard (1925–2013) made his name writing pulp Westerns in the 1950s, but later turned to crime novels and screenplays. His best known stories include Mr Majestyk, The Big Bounce, Get Shorty and Rum Punch, which was adapted by Quentin Tarantino as Jackie Brown.
The Archbishop of Canterbury in 1663–77 was Gilbert Sheldon, who would be utterly obscure if he hadn’t also been Chancellor of Oxford University and commissioned the Sheldonian Theatre, designed by Sir Christopher Wren and completed in 1669.
The Howard League for Penal Reform is named after John Howard FRS (1726–90), philanthropist and prison reformer. It was founded long after his death, in the 1860s, but took up the cause of many of the same basic improvements in prison conditions for which he had argued.
The period of British rule in India, from the early seventeenth century until after the Second World War – especially in its Victorian and Edwardian pomp – is popularly known as the Raj.
Leonard (Hofstadter), Sheldon (Cooper), Howard (Wolowitz) and Raj (Koothrappali) are the four nerdy student heroes of the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory (2007–19).
Q3
Where would you be most likely to find a durable Welsh-language soap opera, a plant with bell-shaped flowers and a highwayman hanged in 1670?
CLUES
- The highwayman is not Dick Turpin: he is not, in fact, English, though he did pursue his activities in England.
- You’re looking for phrases in more than one language.
Q4
By adding nothing, how do you turn a pulse into a comic, some clothing into Anna Christie, and a trademark into Terry Malloy?
CLUES
- By Round Britain Quiz standards this is a very straightforward (and typical) crossword-style question.
- Anna Christie and Terry Malloy are characters in films.
A3
In the valley.
Pobol y Cwm (pronounced roughly ‘pobble-a-coom’), the Welsh language soap opera, is the longest continuously running soap made by the BBC, having begun in 1974 and thus pre-dating EastEnders by 11 years. Since 1982 it has been broadcast on S4C and is regularly that channel’s highest-rated show. Its title means ‘People of the Valley’.
Lily of the Valley, Convolaria majalis, is a poisonous flowering plant found in woodland, also widely cultivated in gardens, with delicate white, sweet-smelling, bell-like flowers.
Claude Du Val (1643–70), a Frenchman born in Normandy to a noble family who had fallen on hard times, was one of the most flamboyant and notorious highwaymen in English history. Robbing coaches travelling in and out of London, especially in the Highgate area, he was noted for his gentlemanly dress and behaviour, and, reputedly, he never used violence against his victims. A famous legend has him agreeing to let a gentleman traveller keep his possessions in return for being granted a dance by the roadside with his wife – a tale portrayed in an 1860 canvas by William Powell Frith. He was eventually arrested in the Hole-in-the-Wall tavern in Covent Garden, and hanged at Tyburn.
A4
Add the letter o (nothing) each time.
A pulse = bean + o = Beano, the British children’s comic first published in July 1938.
Clothing = garb + o = Garbo, Greta, the silent screen star (1905–90), whose first sound picture Anna Christie (1930, based on the play by Eugene O’Neill) was famously billed: Garbo Talks!!
A trademark = brand + o = Brando, Marlon (1924–2004), one of the all-time great screen actors. He won Best Actor Oscars for his role as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront (1954), and for The Godfather (1972).
Q5
Why could Martha Jane Canary, Lenin’s would-be assassin and a police van all provide alternative titles to a Tchaikovsky opera?
CLUES
- Martha Jane Canary is a figure from American history, better known by another name.
- If you think you have the connection, beware of showing your hand too early.
Q6
What relationship is there between two who mutilated their own feet; three who met after the battle; and Farrow, Hershey and Wiest?
CLUES
- The two who mutilated their own feet will be familiar to you but the mutilation might not.
- The last three names are actresses, as you’ve probably guessed. Think of a film in which they all appeared.
A5
Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades (premiered in St Petersburg, 1890) was based on a short story of the same name by Alexander Pushkin. The other clues give us three nicknames used by card players for the Queen of Spades: Calamity Jane, Fanny Kaplan, and Black Maria.
Martha Jane Cannary (sometimes given as Canary) was ‘Calamity Jane’. She claimed to have been Wild Bill Hickock (‘Buffalo Bill’)’s lover, but documentary evidence calls this into question.
Fanny Kaplan (b.1890) was executed in 1918 after she attempted to assassinate Lenin. As a teenage revolutionary she was imprisoned in Siberia for her involvement in a bomb plot. She came to view Lenin as a traitor to the revolution, and she fired three shots at him as he left a factory in Moscow in August 1918.
The police van referred to is a Black Maria. There are many theories as to the origin of the name, one of which is that it came from a large and powerful black lodging-house keeper named Maria Lee, who helped constables of Boston, Massachusetts in the 1830s when they needed to escort drunks to the cells.
A6
These are all about groups of sisters.
In the Grimm Brothers’ version of ‘Cinderella’, when the Prince is trying to find the mysterious girl who left the glass slipper behind, the Ugly Sisters are so anxious for their feet to fit the slipper that one of them cuts off her own toe, and the other slices off part of her heel, to enable them to squeeze their feet into it. When the Prince notices the blood, he realises neither of them can be the object of his quest. This detail, like so many of the less savoury features of the Grimms’ tales, is usually omitted in modern versions.
The Weird Sisters or the three witches, in Macbeth, ask one another on their first appearance: ‘When shall we three meet again/In thunder, lightning, or in rain?’ to which the answer is ‘When the hurly-burly’s done/When the battle’s lost and won’.
Mia Farrow (Hannah), Barbara Hershey (Lee) and Diane Wiest (Holly) are collectively Hannah and her Sisters in Woody Allen’s 1986 romantic comedy, which many consider one of the best movies of his career.
Q7
A journalist working overseas checks into a Caribbean hostelry with a Hebrew woman, using a common pseudonym for unmarried couples, and arousing the doubts of the proprietor. To which wartime sequence does this all refer?
CLUES
- The ‘wartime’ referred to is the Second World War.
- You’re looking for five titles.
Q8
Why could the teenaged singer of ‘I Will Follow Him’, a dancer who was a muse to Toulouse-Lautrec and Mike Nichols’s comic partner take their place among the Calendar Girls?
CLUES
- ‘I Will Follow Him’ dates from the 1960s.
- If you think the reference to the Calendar Girls means they all took their clothes off, think again.
A7
It refers to five titles of films made, consecutively, by Alfred Hitchcock during the Second World War.
A Caribbean hostelry might be Jamaica Inn; the Hebrew woman is Rebecca; the reporter is a Foreign Correspondent; they check in as Mr and Mrs Smith; and they arouse the proprietor’s Suspicion.
A8
Because their surnames are all months of the year.
Little Peggy March sold a million in the US in 1963 with her song ’I Will Follow Him’ when she was 15 – and is still the youngest female artist to have a solo American no. 1. She became very well known in Germany, and made two bids to represent them in the Eurovision Song Contest in the 1960s and 1970s. She also had major hits as a songwriter in the 1980s and 1990s.
Jane Avril (1868–1943) was a Paris nightclub dancer with whom Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec became fascinated in the 1890s. Her gaunt figure, often high-kicking in a can-can, features prominently in posters he created for the Jardin de Paris, the Moulin Rouge and other nightclubs. She died in poverty and is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery.
Film director Mike Nichols was in an improvisational theatre group, the Compass Players, in Chicago in the 1950s, with a young actress called Elaine May (b.1932). After splitting from the Compass Players they started performing improv comedy routines together as Nichols and May, managed by Charles H. Joffe who would later steer Woody Allen’s career; and they enjoyed sell-out Broadway shows and hugely successful comedy albums. They were at their peak around 1960–1. Like Nichols, Elaine May later moved into directing films, the best known being The Heartbreak Kid.
Q9
The warden of Hiram’s Hospital, the founder of the National Trust and a Roman assassin according to Mozart: why do they count?
CLUES
- Hiram’s Hospital is not a real place.
- It may be relevant that these people were (probably) all members of large families.
Q10
Why might it be appropriate for an unscrupulous saloon-bar owner ‘out west’ to slip a knockout beverage to half a Tyrannosaurus rex?
CLUES
- The saloon-bar owner appears in a film.
- ‘Knockout’ means what it says – it doesn’t just mean ‘first rate’.
A9
The people in the question have names that are also ordinal numbers: Septimus means seventh, Octavia means eighth and Sesto or Sextus means sixth. Names of this kind were often given to children born into already-large families when the parents had run out of inspiration.
Septimus Harding is the eponymous protagonist of Anthony Trollope’s first novel in the Barsetshire novels sequence, The Warden. He is the holder of that position at Hiram’s Hospital, an almshouse in Barchester, and is a mild-mannered, but much put-upon, old man, who was played in a BBC adaptation by Donald Pleasence.
Octavia Hill was the eighth daughter (and ninth child) born to James Hill, hence her name. She was not only the founder of the National Trust, but also a pioneer of social housing (much influenced by her early friendship with Ruskin), a founder of the charity that became Family Action, and one of the first women to serve on a royal commission, the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws of 1905.
Sesto – also known as Sextus – is one of the more interesting characters in Mozart’s final Italian opera, La Clemenza di Tito (1789). In a plot drawn from Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, Sesto, a friend of the Emperor Titus, is in thrall to Vitellia, the daughter of Titus’s sworn enemy, who promises his daughter to Sesto on the condition that he assassinate Titus.
A10
The key lies in the name ‘Mickey Finn’
A Mickey Finn is a drug-laced drink, supposedly named after a dodgy Chicago bartender. He probably inspired the name of the unscrupulous saloon-bar owner at Brushwood Gulch in Laurel & Hardy’s classic 1937 film Way Out West, played by the great James Finlayson.
And Mickey Finn was the name of the British percussionist (in full, Michael Norman Finn) who, in 1969, joined Marc Bolan in the pop duo Tyrannosaurus rex, which was soon to truncate its name to T.Rex and achieve monumental success. He died in 2003.