Those We Lost in 2024: UK People Quiz

Answer: Wimbledon

Alan Mills, who died aged 88, had a very decent tennis playing career, representing Great Britain in three Davis Cup matches, twice reaching the last 16 at Wimbledon and also making the semi finals of the men's doubles tournament in 1966. But he was better known as the "Rain Man", in his role as tournament referee at the Grand Slam event.

He was the man who for his 23 years in charge, had to make the unpopular call to stop play when the rain came. Given the vagaries of the British weather, it made him a regular face on the TV even if he would rather it were otherwise.

He was also well-known for his very polite ripostes to incensed players such as John McEnroe, who believed that they were getting a raw deal from their match umpires.

Answer: The Bridge on the River Kwai

More than 60,000 Allied prisoners of war were set to work by the Japanese to build a railway from Thailand to Burma between 1942 and 1943. Between 12,000 and 16,000 of those POWs did not survive the experience. Jennings was captured by the Japanese in the fall of Singapore in 1942 and remained a prisoner until the end of the war in various camps in Thailand.

The Japanese had captured Burma from the British at the start of 1942. They needed to build a railway to send supplies to their troops there, as the alternative sea supply route was long and vulnerable to attack. The story of the POWs who built what became known as the "Death Railway" was turned into the Academy Award-winning 1957 movie "The Bridge on the River Kwai". Starring Alec Guinness, it showed the British taking charge of the building of a railway bridge in order to demonstrate the superiority of British work and at its climax, destroying the bridge in an act of defiance. In truth, the bridge was destroyed by a US bombing raid in 1945.

Answer: Peter Higgs

It was in 1964 that Peter Higgs posited his theory. For us to live in a universe with stars, planets and the like, then particles have to have mass. What science had yet to establish is how particles could generate mass. Higgs theorised the Higgs mechanism. This mechanism consisted of two parts. The first was the Higgs field, an energy field that exists everywhere, within which particles would interact, thereby obtaining mass. The second part was the Higgs boson, a ripple in the field that would be observable, thereby proving the existence of the Higgs field.

In 2012, the scientists at CERN used the Large Hadron Collider to smash particles together at super high speed. This was done to replicate the conditions in the early universe. By doing so they detected the Higgs boson, confirming the theory that Peter Higgs had posited some 48 years previously.

Answer: Shirley Conran

Dame Shirley Conran forged a remarkable career after her marriage to Sir Terence Conran ended. She entered journalism becoming the women's editor of firstly "The Observer" magazine and then at the end of the 1960s founding the "Femail" section of the "Daily Mail". Her domestic science bestseller, "Superwoman" came in 1975. Her line about the mushroom was written to amuse herself as she did not enjoy the experience of writing the book. Nevertheless, she produced three sequels in the next six years.

Her next book was an altogether different kettle of fish. "Lace", published in 1982, was a work of fiction in a genre that became known as the "bonkbuster". Several more of its type followed before Conran wrote her last novel, 1998's "Revenge".

Answer: Rob Burrow

Rob Burrow, known as "Mighty Atom" because of his diminutive stature, made nearly 500 appearances for the Leeds Rhinos from his debut in 2001 to his final appearance in 2017. In the course of those games he won eight Super League titles, two Challenge Cups and three World Club Challenge titles. He made 18 appearances for England and Great Britain.

Just two years after his retirement, Burrow received the devastating diagnosis that he had motor neurone disease (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease) and was given just two years to live. He immediately set his efforts to raising money for MND charities and lobbying the government for increased funds for research into the incurable disease. He was supported throughout by his former team-mate Kevin Sinfield who took on numerous endurance running challenges to continue raising funds. The building of the Rob Burrow Centre for Motor Neurone Disease broke ground on June 3rd, the day after Burrow's death.

Answer: Michael Mosley

Mosley disappeared when taking a walk back from the beach to his holiday apartment on Symi. The story became front page news and saw several of his colleagues at the BBC have to report on the desperate search for their friend. Sadly the outcome that everyone was hoping for did not come to pass and Mosley's body was discovered at the foot of a steep slope having apparently got lost in very hot weather.

While not without its controversies, particularly around dieting, Mosley's broadcasting career had an undoubted impact and he was awarded medical journalist of the year by the British Medical Association in 1995. He regularly used his medical training to research and promote healthy living tips with his books on the "5:2" diet, promoting the benefits of intermittent fasting, proving particularly popular. He was also happy to experiment on himself for the sake of his work such as injecting himself with snake venom to investigate blood clotting or deliberately ingesting tapeworm for a programme on parasites.

Answer: Kate Hepburn

Hepburn got her big break when she was still a student and her sister married Terry Jones of the "Monty Python" team. This led to work with Terry Gilliam producing the animations on the troupe's TV show and co-creating the tie-in books. She soon moved into working on designing covers for political publications such as the feminist magazine "Spare Rib" and the socialist "Big Red Diary".

Her first foray into the music world was when Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason asked for a design for his drum kit based on Hokusai's "The Great Wave" for the band's tour of Japan. She would continue to work with the band and its individual members for many years, including designing the cover for Roger Waters' 1987 album "Radio KAOS".

Answer: Alex Salmond

Persuading the UK government to hold a referendum on Scottish independence was undoubtedly the high point of Alex Salmond's political career even if it didn't produce the result he was hoping for. He had first got involved in politics as a university student, becoming president of the Federation of Student Nationalists. He then went to work in the Scottish Office as an economist before he became a leading light in the Scottish National Party in 1979, leading a faction on the left of the party who demanded new leadership following the SNP's siding with Margaret Thatcher's Conservative party to bring down the Labour government.

The party had a breakthrough in 1987, now focused firmly on opposing the unpopular Conservative government, winning three Westminster seats including one for Alex Salmond in the north-east of Scotland. Salmond made an impact as an MP and in 1990 was elected the leader of the SNP. When Labour returned to power in the UK in 1997, Salmond skillfully negotiated a role for the SNP in support of Scottish devolution. The price for this support was greater consideration for the matter of Scottish independence. When Salmond, by then a member of the Scottish rather than UK parliament, delivered a majority at Holyrood for the SNP in 2011, the seeds were sown for his greatest political triumph.

Answer: John Prescott

Lord Prescott served as Deputy Prime Minister from Labour's victory in the 1997 election until he stepped down in 2007 following the handover of power from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown. Blair and Prescott were unlikely bedfellows, with Blair the reformer from the right-wing of the party and Prescott an old school trade unionist. But Blair needed Prescott to hold together the left and right of the party and to help persuade the party to push through the reforms that they believed were needed to defeat the Conservative Party who had been in power since 1979.

When the 1997 election was won, Prescott was given the ministerial responsibility for the environment, transport and the regions, leading the UK's contribution to the Kyoto protocol on the environment in his first year. Though his ministerial portfolio was reduced to just the regions following the 2001 election, he still remained an important figure in the cabinet as a negotiator between the warring factions of Prime Minister Blair and his Chancellor Brown. Though often ridiculed by the British press, he gained public support when he punched a protestor who had thrown an egg at him from close range during the 2001 election campaign.

Answer: Barbara Taylor Bradford

Barbara Taylor Bradford started her writing career as a reporter in a British local newspaper aged just 16 before graduating to the national papers by the time she was 20. She moved to New York City after marrying an American businessman in the 1960s and continued her journalistic career as well as writing several non-fiction books.

She had always had a stated ambition of becoming a novelist and she achieved her dream with the publication of her first novel "A Woman of Substance" in 1979. The story of Emma Harte, the teenage kitchen maid who had to leave her job when she fells pregnant only to rise to become a successful businesswoman, was an instant hit, eventually selling over 30 million copies worldwide. Bradford continued to write up until her final year, publishing a total of more than 40 novels, translated into as many languages and sold in huge numbers the world over.