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Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Manchester Branch Quiz 2023 - answers

1. From which song are the following lyrics taken?

‘I heard a siren from the docks / Saw a train set the night on fire / I smelled the spring on the smoky wind’

[Dirty Old Town by Ewan MacColl. The town is Salford.]


2. Which was the first language in which a translation of Marx’s Capital was published?

[Russian, in 1872, which I found rather surprising] 


3. In Liverpool, what was known as the dockers’ umbrella?

[The Liverpool Overhead Railway, which ran above the docks and Pier Head. It closed in 1956.]


4. Who described British people to his mistress as follows: ‘people who carry an umbrella can never … understand the moral significance of war, because they cannot love that supreme, inexorable violence which is the chief motor force of world history’? 

[Mussolini]


5. In the American South, what was the underground railroad?

[A secret network of escape routes for slaves. In this connection I recommend Colson Whitehead’s alternate history novel The Underground Railroad]


6. The COP28 climate summit was held recently in UAE. What does ‘COP’ stand for?

[Conference of the Parties (very boring answer)]


7. What happened in Spain on 26 April 1937?

[The bombing of Guernica]


8. Why is an early australopithecine skeleton known as ‘Lucy’?

[After the skeleton was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, the Beatles song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was played in the expedition’s camp] 


9. Which city has a monument to the cholera epidemic of 1832, in which 402 people died?

[Sheffield. The monument is on a hill, the other side of the railway station from the city centre]


10. What does Bruce Springsteen’s song ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’ refer to?

[A character in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. The following lines from the song echo a passage from the book: ‘Now Tom said "mom, wherever there's a cop beatin' a guy /

Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries /

Where there's a fight 'gainst the blood and hatred in the air /

Look for me mom I'll be there”’.

The Springsteen song is based on an earlier song on the same subject by Woodie Guthrie]

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