April 18, 2013

CHURCHILL QUIZ: FINEST HOUR 152, AUTUMN 2011

BY JAMES LANCASTER

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Each quiz includes four questions in six categories: contemporaries (C), literary (L), miscellaneous (M), personal (P), statesmanship (S) and war (W), easy questions first. Can you reach Level 1?

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Level 4

1. Which Prime Minister told Churchill in 1924: “I wish to make a Cabinet of which Harrow can be proud”? (C)

2. Rear-Admiral Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence 1939-42, wrote of his boss: “His battery of weapons included persuasion, real or simulated anger, mockery, vituperation, tantrums, ridicule, derision, abuse and tears…” Who was his boss? (M)

3. In an article written in 1929, which town in California did WSC refer to as the “Peter Pan Township”? (M)

4. “If he trips he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes they must be covered. If he sleeps he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good he must be pole-axed.” Who was WSC referring to in Their Finest Hour? (M)

5. To whom did Churchill say during dinner: “…do stop interrupting me while I’m interrupting you!”? (P)

6. “With his enormous head, gleaming eyes and flexible countenance, he looked uncommonly like the portraits of Charles James Fox.” Whom is WSC describing? (C)

Level 3

7. Which recent British prime minister referred to Churchill as “Winston”? (M)

8. Who complained to Asquith in 1915 that Churchill “out-argues me”? (C)

9. Which Zionist leader told Violet Bonham Carter in Tel Aviv in 1957 that Sir Winston was his hero, quoting Churchill’s 4 June 1940 speech “with zest and fire”? (C)

10. “The future is unknowable, but the past should give us hope.” Of which Churchill book is this the penultimate sentence? (L)

11. Which turning point in World War II did Churchill refer to as the Second Climacteric? (W)

12. In which book did WSC write: “… there was nothing dulce et decorum about the Dervish dead; nothing of the dignity of unconquerable manhood”? (W)

Level 2

13. Which Churchill book contains this play on words: “The desire to provide three Army Corps…is unhealthy. It betrays immoral yearnings…”? (L)

14. Who complained to Churchill that he would not speak to her in the Commons, prompting him to reply: “Because I find a woman’s intrusion into the House of Commons as embarrassing as if she burst into my bathroom, when I had nothing with which to defend myself, not even a sponge”? (P)

15. In which book did Churchill write: “I must explain that the epithet which the average soldier uses so often as to make it perfectly meaningless…is always placed before the noun it is intended to qualify”? (L)

16. Who wrote of Lord Randolph Churchill: “He was the chief mourner at his own protracted funeral, a public pageant of gloomy years”? (L)

17. “I wish the tones in which [Churchill] spoke this could have been ‘recorded’—the first phrase a rattle of musketry, the second ‘grating harsh thunder.’ the third a ray of the sun through storm-clouds; the last, pure benediction.” To which epigram did Edward Marsh refer? (S)

18. When did WSC arrange for turtle soup to be on the menu for a dinner with Franklin Roosevelt? (P)

Level 1

19. In which broadcast did Churchill say: “I told you hard things at the beginning of these last five years; you did not shrink, and I should be unworthy of your confidence and generosity if I did not still cry: Forward, unflinching, unswerving, indomitable, till the whole task is done….” (S)

20. Of whom did WSC write in The World Crisis: “What he did in April, 1917, could have been done in May, 1915. And if done then, what abridgment of the slaughter; what sparing of the agony; what ruin, what catastrophes would have been prevented…?” (W)

21. What was the colour of Churchill’s silk underwear? (P)

22. Which U.S. President said WSC’s Fulton speech “was a fire-bell in the night, a Paul Revere warning that tyranny was once again on the march”? (S)

23. What did Churchill refer to in Parliament on 9 July 1941 as “an event of first-rate political and strategic importance”? (S)

24. In February 1903, WSC said he been told “that in the British Army there were fewer bayonets and fewer sabres and more generals than in any army in the world except that of…” which country? (W)