Paddling the River Cam Trivia Quiz

Answer: John Harvard

John Harvard studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, between 1627 and 1635. He emigrated to New England in 1637, ministering to a congregation in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but died the following year, aged 30. Childless and having inherited money from a family severely reduced in size by the bubonic plague, he left half his fortune and his considerable library to a college proposed for Newtowne, Massachusetts.

The town was renamed Cambridge, after the alma mater of many local ministers, and the college named Harvard after its major benefactor.

He is represented in a stained glass window in the chapel of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Answer: Christopher Marlowe

Author of "Hero and Leander" and pioneer in the use of blank verse on the stage, Christopher Marlowe was the leading playwright before Shakespeare. Attending the University of Cambridge on a scholarship, he almost had his MA degree withheld because of suspicions that he planned to study at the English Catholic Seminary in Rheims. He was also suspected of atheism, just as dangerous as Catholicism, and faced possible capital charges at the time of his mysterious death, aged 29, in 1593.

Details of his inquest, later shown to have been illegally held, only became known in the 1920s and failed to clear up the mystery. His assailant, who claimed to have acted in self-defence, and the two witnesses had all been government agents whose word could not be relied upon. The consensus today seems to be that Marlowe probably was a spy and that he was murdered, but the details will never be known.

Although Shakespeare was certainly influenced by Marlowe, whose death is alluded to in "As You Like It", the Marlovian Theory, that Shakespeare was a front for the still-living Marlowe, is generally discounted. Marlowe has recently been credited with co-authoring Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy, though this attribution remains contentious.

Answer: Isaac Newton

Cambridge University closed between 1665 and 1667, during which time Newton pursued his studies at home in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. Newton is credited, alongside Gottfried Leibniz, with the development of calculus and formulated the laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation.

His thoughts on gravity were said to have been inspired by apples falling from a tree in the Woolsthorpe garden. A descendant of this tree grows outside Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied.

Answer: John Milton

After graduating from Christ's College, Cambridge, John Milton traveled widely in Europe, meeting Galileo among others. He returned to England in 1639, before the outbreak of civil war. A strong supporter of the Parliamentary cause, he was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Commonwealth Council of State in 1649, weeks after the execution of King Charles I. He retained the post, which involved composing foreign correspondence and producing propaganda, until 1660, but was totally blind from 1652 and therefore had to dictate all his work to amanuenses.

The first modern poet to employ unrhymed verse, Milton dictated "Paradise Lost" between 1658 and 1664. Briefly imprisoned following the Restoration in 1660, he died in 1674, impoverished but famous throughout Europe. The alternative answers were all Cavalier Poets.

Answer: Anthony Blunt

Believing that only the USSR was capable of defeating fascism, the Cambridge Spies were recruited by the Soviet intelligence service, in the hope that they would rise to prominent positions in the British establishment. These hopes were more than realised. Burgess and Maclean fled to the Soviet Union in 1951, having been tipped off by Philby, who himself defected in 1963.

Anthony Blunt, who was older than the other three and had acted as a talent spotter, confessed in 1964 to having passed on wartime secrets whilst working for MI5 and was given immunity from prosecution. A distinguished art historian and Surveyor of the King's/Queen's Pictures, he was knighted in 1956. The knighthood was revoked after he was publicly identified as a traitor in 1979.

Answer: Pink Floyd

Syd Barrett formed Pink Floyd, originally known as the Tea Set, in 1965 with Nick Mason, Roger Waters and Richard Wright. David Gilmour joined in 1968 and Barrett, who had renamed the band after blues musicians Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, was forced to leave later that year because of mental health issues. Pink Floyd went on to become one of the most successful musical acts of all time.

Their 1967 debut album "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and 1979 album "The Wall" were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and the band was inducted into the US Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.

Answer: Ronald Searle

The anarchic, even murderous girls of St Trinian's made their first appearance in 1941, but found fame in a comic strip series starting in 1946. They were inspired by the pupils of two private schools in Cambridge and the school's name was taken from St Trinnean's, a progressive girls' school in Edinburgh. The girls proved so popular that they featured in a series of British film comedies, starting with "The Belles of St Trinians" in 1954.

Nigel Molesworth, self-styled "Curse of St Custard's", appeared in a subsequent cartoon series, written by Geoffrey Willans and illustrated by Searle and collected in a series of books beginning with "Down with Skool!" in 1953. Searle's cartoons featured in the credit sequences for the St Trinian's films and for "Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines" and "Monte Carlo or Bust".

On a more serious note, taken prisoner by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore in 1942, while close to death Searle had secretly documented in his drawings the brutal conditions under which those working on the Burma railway were kept. He subsequently worked as a courtroom artist at the Nuremberg trials and the trial of Adolf Eichmann.

Answer: Olivia Newton-John

Olivia Newton-John emigrated with her family to Melbourne at the age of five. As a teenager she returned to the UK, winning Best British Female Vocalist awards and representing Britain in the Eurovision Song Contest. She moved to the USA in 1974 and went on to star as Sandy in the 1978 movie "Grease" and opposite Gene Kelly in 1980 film "Xanadu".

Answer: Hugh Laurie

Hugh Laurie's father won a gold medal competing in the coxless pairs at the 1948 London Olympics. As well as rowing at Cambridge Hugh Laurie was president of Footlights, the university's theatrical club. Following a successful British TV comedy career, including "Blackadder" and "Jeeves and Wooster", he won two Golden Globe awards for his portrayal of Dr Gregory House.

Answer: Renting television sets

Born in 1904, David Robinson left school at 15 to work in his father's Cambridge bicycle shop, subsequently moving to Bedford to take over a garage. He opened his first radio and electrical shop there in the late 1930s, expanding into other towns after the war. The demand for television sets exploded after Queen Elizabeth's coronation in 1953 and he established Robinson Rentals, a TV rental business which he sold for £8 million pounds in 1968.

Also an extremely successful racehorse owner, Robinson set up a charitable trust, demanding high standards of business efficiency from any recipients. He donated £18 million for the establishment of Robinson College, Cambridge, formally opened in 1981. The trust also donated £3 million pounds towards the building of a long-delayed maternity hospital in Cambridge on condition that it was completed six years earlier than originally planned and in half the usual time. The Rosie Hospital, opened in 1983 and now part of Addenbrooke's Hospital, was named in honour of Robinson's mother, who died in childbirth in 1922.