Grand Christmas Cricket Quiz : Round 1

It’s time to join the Three Wise Men above (Percy Chapman seated and Plum Warner on the far right), not to mention Freddie Brown (second left) for the first round of this year’s Grand Christmas Quiz.

The programme is subject to alteration and the rules to being made up at short notice, but at the moment we’re looking at three rounds of questions over the festive period with the answers to be announced in the New Year (though do feel free to answer at any time).  One point is awarded per question (unless otherwise indicated) and bonus points will be awarded for any particularly amusing or apt alternatives to the correct answer.

First Prize, as usual, will be a year’s free subscription to “The Crimson Rambler”.

So here we go:

Q1     What does Jack Hobbs have in common with internet sensation Zoella?

Q2     Which England batsman of recent vintage was named after a poet who died in the First World War?

Q3     Which current English cricketer described his interests in “The Cricketers’ Who’s Who” as “hunting, fishing and shooting“?

Q4     The father of which England Captain starred for Heckmondwike in the Heavy Woollen and Central Yorkshire Leagues in the 1930s? (His Christian name was Horace.)

Q5     Which future England Captain had previously turned out for Hickleton Main Colliery in the Yorkshire Council League?

Q6     Tom Graveney was once ordered by his Gloucestershire Captain to apologise to David Sheppard for having addressed him inappropriately.  What had he called him?

a)     Shep?

b)     David?

c)     Your Reverence?

Q7     Everyone (I hope) knows Fred Titmus lost four toes in a boating accident, but which other cricketer of the 1960s was missing his big toe?

Q8     The father of which Conservative cabinet minister opened the batting for Somerset with his identical twin brother (with hilarious results!) and once made 92 against Gloucestershire under an assumed name?

Q9     Which well-known cricket writer had this to say about Enoch Powell, in a letter to The Spectator following Powell’s inflamatory speech at Birmingham in 1968?

“If Enoch knew what passions he was about to unleash, he was guilty of an act that was the complete negation of patriotism.  It is possibly more charitable to suppose that his frothy speech was a bid for future political power, which, pray God , he may never achieve.  If “Enochism” were ever to win through, there would surely be a migration from this once great land of white as well as black.”

Q10    Percy Chapman, a heavy drinker, used to keep a lemonade bottle filled with neat gin in the dressing room so that he could keep himself topped up between sessions.  What did the teeetotal Jack Hobbs do when he discovered this during a Test Match (with disastrous consequences!):

a)     Sell the story to the News of the World?

b)     Drink the contents himself?

c)     Empty the gin from the bottle and replace it with lemonade?

Q11    She designed the costumes for an experimental theatre company called The Unnamed Society, regarded her husband as “an attractive stray cat of which she could be very fond without depriving it of any natural independence” and once chose to join him in Australia uninvited, bringing with her a Molotov cocktail painted blue.  But whose wife was she?

 

 

 

And even if you don’t feel inclined to answer, a Merry and Peaceful Christmas to you all and thank you for your custom throughout the year.