2017 Quiz Analysis and Winners

Sincere apologies for the time taken to do analysis on the questions and identify winners. This was not the intention but the lingering flu bug this year severely delayed finalising the details. If you want to refamiliarise yourself with the quiz after all this time, it can be found here.

Thanks to everyone who took part! We had forty submissions to analyse.

Question 1. As expected, everyone spotted the error on the cover of the timetable.

Question 2. Only 27 out of 40 answers had answers relating to extended hours of operation (either peak or total hours) on the Waterloo & City line. Quite a few answers referred to 4G mobile phone coverage but we felt this was neither specific to the month of October nor was it extending anything – it was the first pilot scheme on the Underground.

Question 3. 29 out of 40 people realised the answer was Cavendish Square. The most popular wrong answer was Hanover Square showing people had at least grasped it was something to do with Oxford St pedestrianisation.

Question 4. Coincidentally, 29 out of 40 answers correctly identified Weighhouse Street as the answer. Despite it being related to question 3, quite a few people got one of these two correct but not the other. Not surprisingly no-one supplied a wrong answer. There was either no answer or it was correct.

Question 5. We were genuinely surprised that 35 out of 40 people got this right given there was no obvious way in deducing the answer Szlumper from _ z _ _ _ _ _ _ if you did not know the name.

Question 6. Probably the first question where promising candidates started to fall at hurdles. 32 people got the first half (Abbey Wood) correct but only 23 managed to correctly name Acton Main Line or West Drayton as the only valid correct answers for part b.

Question 7. 29 people out of 40 answered correctly with Iver (for Ivor the engine). Two further unexpected answers of Bexhill (for Boxhill) meant that 31 people in total provided a correct answer.

Question 8. Quite unexpectedly, this proved a lot more challenging than anticipated thanks to the LT Museum website leading people astray. Most people realised that the station in question was on the Brecon Mountain Railway and that there were only three stations it could possibly be.

19 people guessed at Pant because that was the main station and the one at which the LT Museum website mentioned that the certificate in question was handed over. 9 people went for Torpantau despite this being implausible given the station has no shelter at all, but as one respondent wrote ‘I went for this because it was the highest station so the most likely’.

Only 11 people got the correct answer of Pontsticill.

Question 9. 29 people realised we were referring to terminals at Heathrow. Of those correct answers only two of them had a suggested next in sequence that was completely implausible (as they both referred to ‘1’).

Question 10. Nearly everyone got this picture question correct and realised (or discovered) that the soldier in question was off to Crimea or more specifically, probably, Balaclava. There were only three answers left blank or wrong.

Question 11. The diagram showed the track layout of a station. Despite clearly marking out two mounted stop lights in the middle of the running track which is not exactly normal, 10 people ignored this and plumped for North Greenwich. Other stations with a similar layout were also suggested including two for Hainault.

The correct answer was Tower Hill for reasons explained in the answers, which 14 people got correct.

Question 12. This rather cryptic question had Acton Town (formerly Mill Hill Park) as the answer. 21 people got this correct and quite a few others established the fact that it was to do with mills, but were unable to pick the correct station on the Piccadilly line.

Question 13. The ‘baby’ question that lots of people moaned at and thought unfair. Nearly all entries gave the answer as ‘3’ and this seems to largely stem from taking a Guardian article at face value and ignoring the bit in the question about a source close to TfL main offices. So this question is unlikely to have made much difference because nearly everyone got it wrong.

Congratulations to John B (and that is not John Bull) for not only getting the answer correct, but also proving it wasn’t a fluke by mentioning Southwark Tube station ticket office as the source of the information.

One is very tempted to have a whole sequence of ‘according to …’ questions in the next Christmas Quiz.

Question 14. A challenging question about the London Borough of Sutton coat of arms. Too much emphasis was placed on telling us that Croydon Airport was (largely) in Sutton so there was nothing wrong with that – which we knew. Others pointed out the plane may have been misdescribed – but that would not have affected the issue of the pictorial coat of arms being a lie.

We were looking for anything that pointed out the chronology in that the airport closed in 1959, but that the London Borough of Sutton was only created in 1965 so could not have had a plane flying from or to Croydon Airport. Only 11 people managed this.

Question 15. The question about destinations shown on the DLR that required a change. Lots of inventive answers but only 16 correct ones which made it clear the entrant had grasped it was about flights from City Airport.

Question 16. 32 people got this question correct. It was about an apparent bus stop which was actually a taxi rank sign. This figure was surprisingly low given we are told it was easy to look up on Google Streetview.

Question 17. A question relating to a man smoking on the Underground. Nearly everyone realised Sherlock Holmes at Baker Street was a suitable answer and some even added that there was a mosaic of a man smoking a cigarette at Leytonstone. So 37 out of 40 had the correct answer and this was beaten only by question 1.

Question 18. This question about Deep Level Shelters foxed a lot of people so only 14 people got it correct. All but one gave Cromwell and Disraeli as the politicians used as names for identifying areas within the bunker, which makes us wonder if there were others or not. We presume there must have been at least an ‘A’ and a ‘B’.

We are pretty sure one answer of Churchill and Disraeli was one of those mental aberrations for which Cromwell and Disraeli was intended. As the essential point of the question had been grasped (and we can’t actually provide any evidence to prove that no part of the shelter was named after Churchill) we have allowed that.

Question 19. A three-part picture question. A surprising number of completely correct answers (30 out of 40). In addition there were two or three entries with two parts correct.

Question 20. The ‘pointless’ question. In fact fairly pointless as a question because the first five (out of six) parts did not prove much of a challenge to anyone with only the very occasional wrong answer. This was not entirely surprising as they should not have been too difficult to deduce with a bit of thought and a computer in front of you. In any case it was largely intended as a lighthearted end to the quiz…

A surprise to us from the answers given was that there was once a station called Hull Cannon Street which is a forerunner to Hull Paragon. So an excellent answer in the spirit of the question but no extra marks for selecting this rather than Cannon Street Road.

The last part – the engineer (other than a Brunel) who built a tunnel under the Thames in the early 19th century – was not a great challenge to most people and 32 people got this correct. Of the wrong answers Maurice FitzMaurice who built the Rotherhithe Road Tunnel at the start of the 20th century was the most popular choice.

Winners

We counted up the errors in each set of answers and once five were reached the set of answers were discarded. There were two people with only one error, a further two people with only two errors and a further three people with only three errors. One answer at four errors just missed being in the final selection.

Joint Gold: timbeau and SC
Joint Silver: EP and DMcC
Joint Bronze: ME, OO’B and JW.

We will try and individually confirm this during the week.

Prizes – or lack thereof

We are aware that our promises of at least a token prize have failed to get delivered in some years. During the current year we will attempt to try to sort this out so that the process is more orderly and, hopefully, eventually clear the backlog.

The decisions are final but if you do wish to enter into correspondence then please email [email protected].

Our thanks again to everyone who entered!

17 comments

  1. And thanks for another challenging quiz. I’m pleased that my wrong answers were all for the best possible reasons….

    Except “Acton Town (formerly Mill Hill Park)” which I went off on one because I got
    Arsenal (Highbury Hill) station from the Hills not the Mills (Mill Hill Broadway, Mill Hill East, Pudding Mill Lane). Still not sure how you get from Pudding Mill Lane to Mill Hill Park?

    I’m still happy with my wrong answer for the number sequences question 9, because it still works.

    Twickenham Station (platforms) – next in sequence is 3,4,5

  2. Thanks POP for the feedback on the quiz I don’t think people are worried about a delay particularly if the fact there will be a delay is put out for info. It is good to get feed back particularly for the people who entered.

  3. Adding my thanks to PoP for arranging the quiz and for following up with answers, statistics and reasoning. The time and effort you put into this is appreciated!

  4. “Others pointed out the plane may have been misdescribed – but that would not have affected the issue of the pictorial coat of arms being a lie.”

    So referencing something that closed 6 years previous while telling an area’s history with reference to who owned the area in 1086, former lords of the manor, etc is a lie, but a (theoretical) misdescribing wouldn’t have been a lie? Please can we have the quiz master’s definition of a lie so we know for next time what we ought to be looking for instead of going on snipe hunts for inaccuracies, falsehoods or mistruths when there were none?

    The people who, like me, put something along these lines were clutching at straws as it was the only possibility we had of any form of mistruth on the Coat of Arms that’s transport-related, once we excluded the obvious answer about Croydon airport’s location. I’m surprised as many as 11 people got this, rather than the ‘only’ suggestion in the analysis that this was meant to be easier than it turned out to be.

  5. Si,

    I didn’t set the question and probably wouldn’t have worded it in quite that way but having said that …

    I was not given the answer but I thought it quite reasonable to expect people to deduce, in a transport quiz, that it had something to do with Croydon Airport and the fact that it suggested that planes flew from the borough seemed a reasonable basis for the ‘lie’. That was the conclusion I came to so I thought it reasonable that others could do so also.

    When it comes other things such as Carew Manor they do form part of the borough’s history and are still there. I think if it was establish that the airport control tower was in the London Borough of Sutton and the coat of arms had the control tower (which is still there) then that would have been reasonable.

    There is always the nagging feeling that the answer might be wrong as I have never had it confirmed that my answer was the correct answer. In fact this is not the only case where people have provided the question but not the answer (or all the allowable answers). The trouble is these questions get slipped in and the first I see of them is when they are published.

  6. Philosophically, there is no such thing as “the correct answer”. It would not matter what the question setter intended, as question 7 (Ivor/Boxhill) shows. A mark will be awarded for any answer which the marker judges acceptable. Unfortunately it is always possible for others to disagree with the marker’s judgment, but (fortunately) any such disagreement has already been provided for, by the convention(common to all such competitions) that it [the marker’s decision] is final.

  7. “Lie” seems a bit strong – achievements of arms often reference something to do with the grantee long after the thing has disappeared eg seaxa had fallen out of use a good 1000 years or so before Middlesex County Council appeared, or on a more personal note, a banking friend of mine was granted arms showing bezants (a gold coin that disappeared from circulation 600 years ago). Heralds like jokes apparently. Planes seem a bit naff on shields really.

  8. Sutton is not unusual in having references to long-past history in its heraldry – there are references in its own arms to former connections with the Diocese of Canterbury, Chertsey Abbey, and the families that used to be lords of the manor in Cheam and Carshalton. But none of these had any transport connection.

  9. Sutton’ Coat of arms is, in part, an amalgam of the three constituent parts of the ‘new’ Borough, namely Beddington& Wallington, Carshalton and Sutton & Cheam, The ‘Hannibal aircraft flying over the rising sun’ is carried over from the Beddington and Wallington coat of arms granted in 1937

  10. Just for amusement (and my apologies for sliding off topic), I had some extensive dealings with the College of Arms during the BR privatisation process (!). One such occasion concerned the flag that we might fly over the Board’s offices once OPRAF had taken away the double arrow symbol. I went to see Garter King of Arms to obtain a correct drawing of the Board’s achievement of Arms. How should we display those on the flag – perhaps on a white background? I asked. “Oh no my dear, that would be such a louche eighteenth century habit”. Our conversation was interrupted by Garter’s secretary appearing with messages such as “Garter, the Earl Marshall of England would like a conversation on the telephone”. Only in the UK at the end of the C20. (Some Americans would pay a lot for that I imagine…)

  11. Re. Croydon Airport, whilst most of the land used for the aircraft was within the Sutton (Beddington) boundary, the main airport buildings, including control tower and hotel were (and remain) in what was the County Borough of Croydon and more particularly the Waddon Parish. More info here (illustrated): http://www.controltowers.co.uk/c/croydon.htm

    I come from an age, as a former Croydonian, as one who has actually flown from Croydon Airport. The revolving searchlight beam (like that from a coastal lighthouse) used to sweep after nightfall right over Shirley to the east of the town where we lived right until the end and it remains one of my most enduring childhood memories.

  12. Thanks again for another very entertaining quiz. And, as always, one’s person easy question is another’s impossible challenge. I thought the changes in station management had been quite well-publicised so I got that answer straightaway; I also worked out 2 and 7 fairly quickly. On the other hand, unlike most people, I didn’t have a clue about 3,4,5 or 9.

  13. Graham H
    IIRC very few of the Pre-Grouping companies had “proper” coats/achievements of Arms.
    Again, IIRC, the GCR had one such, which was then re-worked for the LNER.
    Most of the others simply appropriated towns or counties served ( LCDR, for instance, or twinned London-&-Bristol for the GW. )

  14. Thank you for doing this, PoP. It is very interesting and instructive to see how many people got the tougher questions correct, in particular, the fact that only one person managed to get the ‘baby’ question. (Unlucky number 13 indeed!)

    It is also somewhat reassuring to me that all 5 of the questions I failed to answer were among the 7 hardest (in terms of fewest correct answers given) with only one of them being correctly answered by more than 50% of entrants (the ‘Mills’ question).

    All in all, I am happy with how I did and the fact that only 20% of entrants beat me (8 out of 40) and can come away with lessons learned for the next quiz!

  15. @Greg Tingey – I suspect that’s right; even the Met simply used a combo of the arms of the counties it served. The Board, however, had done the job properly and had a formal grant of arms on parchment, I had this framed and exhibited on the wall of one of my meeting rooms; what happened to it when we left Eversholt St, I don’t know. The arms also appeared on the Board’s Great Seal which was applied by a fearsome machine that was a cross between a mangle and a wine press. Besides the lion holding the wheel which was applied to such good effect on the cl 81-86, the Board had other less wellknown bits of the Arms, including a racing greyhound on a wavy background, which made a splendid giftware replacement as a silver brooch for the nasty acetate scarf with the z sign that had been handed out to ladies for some years previously…. [I’m pleased to say the band carried on playing, as you see, as the Board slipped into the briny …]

  16. Sorry, but what are the correct answers for questions 19 and 20?

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