The World in a 1935 Handbook Trivia Quiz

Answer: Victor Emmanuel III

Victor Emmanuel III was only the second King of a united Italy. He
abdicated in May 1946, three weeks before the monarchy, in the shape of his son Umberto II, was narrowly rejected by the Italian people in a post-war referendum. Victor Emmanuel was so diminutive that Kaiser Wilhelm II habitually called him 'the dwarf'.

Answer: Mafeking

Bechuanaland had allegedly feared Boer incursion and conveniently asked the British for 'protection'. The town of Mafeking withstood a seven month siege under the command of Robert Baden-Powell during the Boer War (1899-1902), the successful relief of which was greeted with wild rejoicing as the Empire vanquished yet another mighty opponent.

Despite pressure, the Bechuanese never really fancied becoming part of South Africa (hmmm, I wonder why that might have been?) and finally achieved independence in 1966, when the country's name was changed to Botswana. Curiously, Mafeking itself IS now in South Africa and has undergone a name-change, to Mafikeng.

Answer: Mount Godwin-Austen

Now known to the world as K2 and to locals as Chogo-Ri, Godwin-Austen fell victim to the tiresome British habit of naming the world's most towering peaks after the first imperial surveyor-wallah who measured them, "our man" on the spot with the theodolite being on this occasion Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen. K2 is in the Pakistani province of Jammu and Kashmir. K2 is so-called because it was the second peak in the Karakoram Range to be surveyed.

Answer: S.F.Barnes (England)

Few contemporaries hesitated before naming the brooding, gaunt and latterly cadaverous Sydney Francis Barnes the greatest bowler ever to take the field. Preferring league cricket to the county stage, Barnes was invited to tour Australia only after the England captain A.C. McLaren noticed him bowling in the nets! As recently as 1927 he was taking 76 wickets for Staffordshire in the Minor Counties Championship at an average of 8.61.

His 17 for 159 v. South Africa at Johannesburg in 1914 is unlikely ever to be bettered.

But it was, by another Englishman, against Australia .. Jim Laker took 19 wickets for 90 runs vs. Australia at Old Trafford in July 1956.

Answer: 12.11 Florins

The symbol for the Dutch guilder was an italicised 'f' or 'fl' for 'florenus'- a gold coin originally struck in Florence in the thirteenth century and accepted throughout Europe. The Dutch guilder was traditionally expressed as such on foreign exchange markets.

In the (at the time, unlikely) event that you were off to the Algarve in Portugal, your quid would have bought you an extremely dodgy-sounding 110 Paper Escudos, so think yourself lucky that you were heading for Amsterdam. The guilder (and escudo, too) were replaced by the Euro in 1999.

Answer: Spain & Portugal

In typically independent style, the Spanish built their early railways to a gauge of 6 Castilian feet, whilst the Portuguese plumped for 5 of the, well, Portuguese variety. By happy coincidence these matched up reasonably well, and the Iberians were happy with their tubby little trains until the late 20th century when the dead hand of European Union practicality intervened. New track laid since the 1990s has been 'standard' rather than 'broad' gauge.

Many other countries, notably Russia and India, still use a much broader gauge than Europe and North America.

Answer: SS Normandie (France)

Sacre bleu! Launched at St-Nazaire in 1932, the Normandie was one of the finest liners ever built. Displacing 79,000 tons, this holder of the Blue Riband was the largest ship afloat for the greater part of the 1930s. Although the Queen Mary, launched in September 1935 at 81,000 tons was larger, refinements to the Normandie added another 4,000 tons in mid-1936.

But her end was an ignominious one. Commandeered by the Americans during World War II and renamed USS Lafayette, an attempted conversion into an aircraft carrier failed, and the mighty ship was scrapped in 1946.

The Queen Mary has been sunning herself in retirement since 1967 at Long Beach, California.

Answer: Kirkcaldy

Amazingly, Scotland had over 30 counties, and this ocntinued till 1974. Some of them were extremely small, like Clackmananshire (sometimes abbreviated 'Clacks'). Kirkcaldy (generally pronounced 'Ker-coddy') never had a county named after it. In 1974 Scotland was re-arranged into 12 regions with disappointingly sober monikers.

Answer: Eddie Tolan

In the days when political correctness was a thing of the distant future, the genial and bespectacled 'Midnight Express' was the first in a long, long line of superb Afro-American athletes who went on to dominate Olympic sprint events. Tolan was not considered favourite for the event, but pipped the great Georgia sprinter and future Illinois congressman Ralph Metcalfe by a distance estimated to be in the region of two inches. Metcalfe's luck was not to improve four years later when he finished second again to a promising youngster by the name of Owens, in front of a less than completely delighted audience at Berlin 1936.

Answer: camel

Good heavens! Can this be true? "It cannot swim because its balance is wrong, so that its head goes under water and it drowns." claims the trusty manual in one of its rare forays into the animal kingdom and in a manner which suggests that its author is on more comfortable ground when discussing railway gauges or the crowned heads of Europe. Perhaps an early example of an urban (or maybe rural) myth?