Chance Encounters Trivia Quiz

Answer: Paul McCartney and John Lennon

McCartney went to the annual Woolton Parish Church Garden Fete and ended listening to a high school band called The Quarrymen. A mutual friend introduced him to the lead singer, a certain John Lennon, and the rest is musical history.

According to National Public Radio, John Lennon and Paul McCartney are credited with writing almost 200 songs together. As all Beatles fans know, quite often one or other was the principle songwriter, but they agreed early on to have joint credits for all their songs. If you ever want to start a fight between Beatles fans, ask who wrote better songs: Lennon or McCartney, then watch the sparks fly.

On that note, I'll leave you with the words of Alex Kapranos, lead singer with Franz Ferdinand, who said the Lennon vs McCartney rivalry "...is rooted in the mistaken presumption that any rivalry between the two appeared when Ono came on the scene. It was always there. It's what they thrived upon; simple competition, trying to outdo each other with better songs. Like the best of group dynamics, theirs was based upon a sweet combination of collaboration and jealousy.

Answer: His mistress

In 1932 Wallace Simpson and her second husband, Ernest, were invited to a hunting weekend at the home of Lady Thelma Furness. Prince Edward was the presumptive heir to the throne; a man born to be king. Thelma Furness was his lover. She introduced him to Wallis Simpson and he was said to be enchanted by her irreverence and vitality.

Edward was born in June 1894. He was the first child of King George V and Queen Mary and therefor destined to be king in his own time. He was Prince of Wales from 1911 until 1936, when his father died. His love affair with the divorced American Walis Simpson had been known about for some time.

After he was crowned king, Edward tried to convince the British establishment he could reign with Wallis Simpson by his side. Led by the Church of England, the establishment resisted. Politicians, too, tried to dissuade him, to no avail and on on December 10, 1936 Edward abdicated. He had been monarch for 326 days. On June 3, 1937 Edward and Wallis Simpson were married in Paris. The marriage endured until Edward's death in 1972.

Answer: Washing his car

In 1971, Jobs went to visit Bill Fernandez, whom he had known at Cupertino Junior High School. Steve Wozniak lived nearby and Fernandez believed the two would hit it off. They walked around the block and encountered Wozniak washing his car in the street.

Wozniak and Jobs became close friends in those early days. Both worked at Hewlett Packard, and they set up Apple Computers in April 1976. Although they did not always remain close, Wozniak and Jobs complimented each other. Wozniak was regarded as the more competent computer designer: Jobs knew what he wanted computers to do. It was that drive for simplicity and beauty by Jobs that was to be the bedrock of Apple. Wozniak left Apple in 1985, although retained a financial interest. Jobs went on to become a billionaire, probably more through selling his holding in Pixar to Disney, while 'Woz' did not do too badly, with an estimated net worth of $100m in 2020.

Answer: Women's suffrage

Both Stanton and Anthony were firm abolitionists and Stanton set up the First Women's Rights Convention in 1848. Three years later, Anthony travelled to Seneca, New York State for an anti-slavery meeting. A friend, Amelia Bloomer, introduced Anthony to Stanton when they met on a street corner. The two women were to set up a newspaper, "The Revolution", and Susan B. Anthony became the voice of suffrage.

Anthony came from a Massachusetts farming family and was raised as a Quaker. Those beliefs were to colour her entire life. She was also a slavery abolition activist and made many speeches demanding freedom for slaves. Stanton was the well-educated daughter of a New York lawyer and became involved in anti-slavery after her marriage to abolitionist lecturer Henry Stanton in 1840. After Stanton and Anthony became friends, they spent the next 50 years campaigning for women's suffrage. Stanton was the strategist: Anthony was the impassioned public speaker.

Answer: Google

Sergey Brin was a student in computer science at the time and the group he led included Larry Page, who was an engineering major from the University of Michigan. The two men did not actually hit it off at first, they were said to find each other "obnoxious".

They went on, though, to establish Google, the Western world's dominant search engine. By 2018, Google was recording 63,000 searches per second: that is 5.6 billion searches per day. In 2020, "Business Insider" gave Larry Page a net worth of $64.6bn and Sergey Brin a net worth of $62.3 bn.

They were number seven and number 10 respectively in the world.

Answer: Deep Throat

At the time they first met, Woodward was an officer completing his term in the US Navy. One of his duties was to deliver packages to the White House. On one occasion, Felt was the man who signed receipt of a package. Woodward asked for his phone number and they became friends.

After Woodward became a journalist, Felt was an anonymous source and was to be the source that Woodward and Carl Bernstein needed in breaking the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Over a series of reports in the "Washington Post", Woodward and Bernstein revealed how Republican Party representatives had been behind break ins at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex in Washington DC. Their work helped the Post win a Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

Answer: Sacagawea

Sacagawea was a member of the Shoshone people who was abducted as a teenager by the Hidatsa. She was take to South Dakota, where she was sold to a fur trader to be one of his wives. Recognising her gift of languages, they waited for her son to be born and they joined the expedition that would take them to the Pacific shore.

Answer: Thomas Edison

Ford was working for one of Edison's companies in 1896 when he attended a convention of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies in Brooklyn, New York. While going around the convention, Edison stopped to speak to Ford to learn more about a mechanical quadricycle that Ford had developed and encouraged him to carry on with the work. Years later, Ford was to single out that conversation as the moment that led him to develop the greatest motor car company of the early 20th Century.

Answer: At a dance

In July 1918, Fitzgerald was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama, awaiting movement to the war front. One night he decided to go to a dance at an off-base country club, where he met a young socialite called Zelda Sayre. According to some accounts, Zelda was not that interested in him at first. She was, after all, well regarded in society and he was a humble soldier and aspiring writer.

Two years later, after his first novel "This Side of Paradise" was published, he persuaded her to marry him. Both went on to writing careers, even if their marriage was a stormy one. Eventually, he was to take lines from her personal diary and include them in his seminal work, "The Great Gatsby".

Answer: Frederick Douglass

Garrison was the editor of "The Liberator", then the leading abolitionist newspaper. Douglass was a runaway slave who read the paper. In 1841, Garrison was in Massachusetts to make a speech and Douglass went along to hear him. Persuaded by a friend to tell his own story, Douglass impressed Garrison. Encouraged by Garrison, Douglass went on to become a leading voice in the campaign for the abolition of slavery.

Douglass was born in Maryland in about 1818 and by the age of six was working on a plantation. He was sent to work in Baltimore and learnt to read and write. When he began to teach other slaves to read and write, he was transferred to new ownership, where he was badly treated. In 1838 he escaped and made his way to New York. He began his abolitionist work in Massachusetts. In 1843, Douglass was part of the American Anti-Slavery Society's "Hundred Conventions" project,that toured throughout the United States. he was at times beaten up.

In 1860, the first of several autobiographies, "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave", was published. He continued his activity until his death in 1895. Incidentally, Douglass was not his birth name, that had been Bailey. He took the new surname after a character in the Sir Walter Scott poem, "The Lady of the Lake."