Monday, December 20, 2010

Manchester, So Much To Answer Four

It's that time of year again, people. (Cue cut and paste.)

Anarcho-Stalinist-Wobbly-Zapatista surfer dudes The love child of Dane Bowers and Guy Garvey has the Christmas number 1, and Manchester Branch have once again issued details of the quiz from their end of year Branch social. It's the usual routine on the blog. I reproduce the quiz questions below. I place my own pisspoor answers in the comment box. Not ONE of my seven three readers - what with me just reading books and half-watching films it's been a fallow year for the blog - join in the spirit of the season by trying to supply their own answers and I then post the correct answers in the comments box at a later date.

. . . .Oh, and I once again use a variation on the same post title that I always use for the Manchester Branch end of year quizzes because I can't think of any wittier alternatives, and this year it actually makes sense.

Your starter for ten nine:

1. Which song contains the following lines?


In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,

Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.

We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.

2. How many members did the Party have at its foundation?

3. He was born in Leeds in 1884; Kropotkin taught him to skate; Lord Alfred Douglas sued him for libel; he was the only British journalist present at the founding of the Comintern; he married Trotsky's secretary; he was an agent for MI6; he wrote a best-selling series of children's books. Who was he?

4. Who wrote many theatre reviews for the Socialist Standard in the 1990s?

5. Who was Dic Penderyn?

6. Who was Philoren, and what was the title of his book?

7. Why is Edmund Wilson's book on the background to the Bolshevik Revolution called To the Finland Station?

8. Two people were expelled from the SDF at its Burnley conference in 1904. One was Horace Hawkins; who was the other?

9. What happened in Tilbury on 22 June 1948?

Get googling guessing.

1 comment:

Imposs1904 said...

My considered answers:

1. Damn. Not a good start. I don't have the foggiest and all my Billy Bragg albums are on our broken down lap top.

Maybe the mention of gold in the lyric is a clue? A Spandau Ballet single when Gary Kemp came over all Red Wedgish? Through the Barricades?

2. More than it has now? The number 142 rings a bell for some reason. It's either the number of members at the SPGB's foundation or it's the number of emails I've received from Toys 'R' Us in the last three days.

(Actually, I'll go out on a limb and guess there was 142 signatories at the inaugural meeting but three names were later discovered to be false.)

3. Arthur Ransome.

4. The late, great Michael Gill.

5. I want to say he was the leader of the Newport rebellion in the early nineteenth century, but given the musical tastes of Manchester Branch he probably played the flute in Pentangle.

6. Philoren was Israel Renson and (Ian) Phillips. Their book was Money Must Go.

More info on Renson over here. (Scroll down.)

7. Lenin, sealed trains and the worst Martin Rowson joke in the world . . . ever.

8. I'm guessing Jack Fitzgerald. Hawkins? Whatever di happen to the Socialist Propagandist League?

9. Hard one. It may be the establishment of the Dock Labour Scheme but I'll hazard a guess it was when Attlee's Labour Government sent in troops to smash a Dock Workers Strike.

A controversial answer I know. Not because Attlee is everyone's favourite Labour Prime Minister but because it's controversial to mention class struggle and SPGB in the same blog post. ;-)

I'm probably wrong, anyway.