Firsts and Lasts Trivia Quiz

Answer: New York

In 1978, Geraldine Ferraro, then an Assistant District Attorney in Queen's County, New York, made the decision to run for legislative office, and stood as the Democratic Party candidate for New York's 9th Congressional District. From the start of her time in the House of Representatives, she became a significant figure in the Democratic Party, serving as one of the deputy chairs of President Carter's re-election campaign in 1980. Ferraro was re-elected in both 1980 and 1982, and in 1984 became Chair of the Platform Committee at the 1984 Democratic National Convention.

In that year, following the selection of former Vice-President Walter Mondale as the Democratic nominee for President, there was a move to have a woman selected as his running mate. On 12 July, Mondale chose Ferraro for the ticket.

At the election, Mondale and Ferraro lost by a landslide to incumbents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Following the defeat in 1984, Ferraro twice ran for the United States Senate, and served as the US Ambassador to the UN Commission on Human Rights under President Clinton.

Answer: Last person to be discharged from National Service

In 1948, the United Kingdom passed a new National Service Act that extended conscription, following the realisation that the armed forces needed to be much bigger than voluntary recruitment could provide. This act stated that healthy men aged between 17 and 21 would be called up for military service for 18 months, after which they would be placed on the reserve list for four years.

The period of service was extended to two years after 1950. National Service began to be wound down from 1957, with initially anyone born after 1 October 1939 exempt.

The call-up ended on 31 December 1960, with the last men entering the services in November 1960. One of the men called up in the last intake was 22 year old Richard Vaughan, who was posted to the Royal Army Pay Corps, having had a deferment to undertake his accountancy exams. Following his training, Vaughan was posted to West Germany, eventually being commissioned as an officer. On 4 May 1963, Vaughan left Germany to return to England, where he became the final National Serviceman to officially be discharged back to civilian life.

Answer: Sri Lanka

In 1959, following the assassination of S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, the Prime Minister of Ceylon, his widow Sirimavo Bandaranaike agreed to run as a candidate in her late husband's parliamentary seat. The planned by-election did not take place, as a general election was instead called for March 1960, which saw Dudley Senanayake, leader of the United National Party, become Prime Minister. Within a month, Senanayake lost a vote of confidence, and a second election was called for July 1960.

In May, Sirimavo Bandaranaike was elected as the new leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, which won the July 1960 election by a landslide, making her the first woman to be elected as a national head of government.

At the time, she had no seat in Parliament, and would therefore be barred from remaining in office unless remedied within three months. To provide her with a seat, M. P. de Zoysa resigned from the Senate, with the Governor-General appointing Bandaranaike to the vacant seat. Bandaranaike eventually served a total of three terms as Prime Minister, including between 1970 and 1977 when she oversaw Ceylon's transition to the new Republic of Sri Lanka.

Answer: Last surviving castrato of the Sistine Chapel Choir

Alessandro Moreschi was born in November 1858 in the town of Monte Compatri, near Frascati, which was part of the Papal States. At an early age, probably no later than 1865, Moreschi underwent surgical castration. During this period he was a member of the choir of the chapel of the Madonna del Castagno.

Moreschi was taken to Rome in about 1870, his singing abilities having been noticed by Nazareno Rosati, a former member of the Sistine Chapel Choir. In 1873, having been under the tutelege of Gaetano Capocci, he was made First Soprano of the Papal Basilica of St John Lateran, while also being part of a group of soloists hired out by Capocci for society events in Rome.

In 1883, he was appointed as First Soprano of the Sistine Chapel Choir. Following the retirement of the choir's senior castrato singer in 1886, Moreschi was appointed as Director of Soloists, as well as subsequently undertaking a number of administrative posts within the choir.

However, at this time, moves were being undertaken to stop the use of castrati within the church.

In 1902, Moreschi undertook a series of recordings for the Gramophone & Typewriter Company, with more made in 1904. In between, Pope Pius X ordered that all soprano and contralto musical parts be performed by boys, ending the tradition of castrati in the Sistine Chapel. Moreschi officially retired at Easter 1913, and died in April 1922. His recordings of 1902 and 1904 remain the only known instances of a solo castrato voice being recorded.

Answer: Chemistry

Helen Sharman was born in Sheffield, attending the University of Sheffield to study for a BSc in chemistry from which she graduated in 1984. Following this, she began working as a research and development technologist for GEC, while studying for a PhD at Birkbeck College in London.

In 1987, she moved to work for Mars Confectionary as a researcher. While working for Mars, in June 1989 she responded to a radio advertisement asking for applications for Project Juno, a private consortium of British companies that had partnered with the Soviet Union to train the first British person to fly in space.

In November 1989, Sharman was selected as one of the final four candidates, before becoming one of the final two to undergo the full eighteen months of training. On 18 May 1991, Sharman was one of the three cosmonauts to be launched on mission Soyuz TM-12 to the Mir space station. Eight days later, she returned to Earth with the crew of Soyuz TM-11. Following her flight to Mir, Sharman subsequently applied twice for astronaut selection to the European Space Agency (ESA).

She was the only wholly British (i.e. without dual citizenship of another nation) space traveller for almost 25 years, until Tim Peake became the first British ESA astronaut when he was launched to the International Space Station in 2015.

Answer: Strangeways

On 9 April 1964, petty criminals Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans were charged with the murder of John Alan West, a van driver who had been killed in a robbery attempt in his own home in the town of Seaton in Cumberland two days previously. The pair were jointly put on trial at Manchester Assizes beginning on 23 June, with the indictment being for the charge of "capital murder", an offence brought in under the terms of the Homicide Act 1957.

This legislation brought in strict limits on the use of the death penalty for murder, with one of the instances being murder committed during the course of a theft, as was the case in the murder of West.

The jury found the two defendants guilty, and the pair were sentenced to death. An appeal was dismissed by the Lord Chief Justice on 20 July, while on 10 August the Home Office announced that the Home Secretary would not ask the Queen to invoke the Royal Prerogative of mercy and commute the sentences.

At 8.00am on 13 August 1964, Evans was hanged at Strangeways Prison in Manchester, with Allen simultaneously hanged at Walton Prison in Liverpool.

Answer: Soviet Union

Although combined events had existed for men as part of the track and field programme at the Summer Olympics since 1904, it was not until the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo that an event was introduced for women. The initial pentathlon event was held over two days and consisted of the 80m hurdles, shot put, high jump, long jump and 200m, with Irina Press of the Soviet Union the first Olympic champion.

The pentathlon was held at the next four Olympics until 1980, by which time the two track events had been changed to the 100m hurdles and 800m.

At the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, which saw a total of 65 countries boycott the event for various reasons, the pentathlon had a total of 19 entrants, including three from the host nation. The title was won by Nadiya Tkachenko with a world record score of 5,083 points, with Olga Rukavishnikova winning silver and Olga Kuragina the bronze.

The following year, the International Amateur Athletics Federation replaced the pentathlon as the standard outdoor combined event for women with the heptathlon.

Answer: King John

In 1899, Herbert Beerbohm Tree was both a well-regarded classical actor and the manager of Her Majesty's Theatre in the West End of London. Having staged a number of critically acclaimed productions of Shakespeare's works during his time as manager of the Haymarket Theatre, he built on this reputation by making Her Majesty's the premier British theatre for staging the work of the Bard.

In September 1899, while preparing for the opening of his production of "King John", Tree and other members of his cast went to the open air studio of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company on the Embankment, where they shot four short films of heavily edited scenes from the theatrical production, which were combined together to make a single film of 5 minutes duration.

Answer: Christian Democratic Union

In 1981, Sabine Bergmann-Pohl, a medical doctor from Berlin, joined the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), one of the so-called "bloc parties" in East Germany that formed the umbrella organisation known as the "National Front", which existed to provide the impression of East Germany being a multi-party state, despite the domination by the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the SED gave up its monopoly, and the bloc parties began to function more as independent political organisations, with a multi-party election to the Volkskammer, East Germany's legislature, planned for 18 March 1990. Bergmann-Pohl was elected to the Volkskammer as a CDU member in the election and, on 5 April, became its president.

The abolition of the State Council, East Germany's collective presidency, saw her also assume the duties of Head of State. In September, the Volkskammer voted to accept the unification treaty with West Germany, which took effect on 3 October 1990. Following reunification, Bergmann-Pohl became a member of the Bundestag, the lower chamber of the German legislature, and was appointed to the cabinet of Chancellor Helmut Kohl as a Federal Minister for Special Affairs. Following the first all-German election in December 1990, she was re-elected to the Bundestag, and served as a junior minister at the Ministry for Health until 1998, eventually leaving the Bundestag in 2002.

Answer: Sheffield United

The Premier League was founded on 20 February 1992, when the 22 clubs in the First Division of the Football League elected to break away and form their own competition, to take advantage of the increasingly lucrative area of television rights that were becoming available. Of the 22 clubs that formed the initial break-away group, three, Luton Town, Notts County and West Ham United, were relegated from the First Division at the end of the 1991-92 season, and were replaced by Blackburn Rovers, Ipswich Town and Middlesbrough. The FA Premier League was constituted on 27 May 1992. Its first season started on 15 August 1992.

Brian Deane joined Sheffield United for £25,000 in 1988, and had scored 43 league goals in his first two seasons that saw the club to successive promotions from the Third to the First Division, while the two seasons that the club had been in the First Division had seen him score another 25 league goals. In the club's first Premier League game, at home to Manchester United on 15 August 1992, Deane opened the scoring after five minutes, the first goal in the history of the Premier League. Deane followed up with a second after 50 minutes to give Sheffield United a 2-1 win.