Odd Fellows Trivia Quiz

Answer: Pink

Bentick is a great person to start an eccentricity quiz with, as some of his behaviour was quite bizarre. Not only did he only occupy just five rooms in this palatial house, he had all the fixtures and furnishings stripped from all rooms, apart from a commode in one corner of a room. Must have some comforts in life eh? He was also responsible for building an elaborate maze of underground tunnels and rooms below the abbey, including a 910 metre (1,000 yard) tunnel wide enough for several people to walk side by side which connected the main house and the riding house and a two kilometre (1.2 mile) long tunnel which connected with the coach house and was wide enough for two coaches to pass.

Rooms underground included a library, a billiard room and a ballroom complete with a hydraulic lift big enough for 20 guests, but no balls were ever held in the ballroom. All of these underground rooms were of course painted pink also.
The riding house, which at 121 metres (396 feet) long, 33 metres (108 feet) wide and 15 metres (50 feet) high was the second largest in the world, behind only one in Moscow, was never used for riding his horses and although Bentick employed many local people on his building projects, he refused to acknowledge or be acknowledged by them. All staff were instructed to ignore him at all times and there is an account of one employee, who out of respect raised his hat to the duke, only to be dismissed on the spot. There are many more tales about this wonderfully eccentric man, who really is worth checking out.

Answer: Bob The Tray

It seems surreal now that Blackman, aka Bob the Tray would appear on one TV show, let alone be asked to appear on several. Blackman would come out on stage and sing the cowboy standard Mule Train while repeatedly bashing himself over the head with a metal tea tray, and this was classed as entertainment at the time.

Answer: Setting Fire To His Shirt

Mad Jack's unusual cure for hiccups actually worked although it is not to be recommended. According to witnesses, he used a candle, and as the shirt was cotton, it caught light instantly, engulfing him in flames. After servants beat out the flames, Mytton apparently went to bed as if nothing unusual had happened. He was well known for getting caught up in the thrill of fox hunting, to such an extent that he would strip and continue to hunt riding his horse naked, no matter what the weather was like and also one rode a horse into a hotel, up the grand staircase and onto the balcony before jumping down over diners in the restaurant below, although he was apparently fully clothed for that occasion.

On one occasion, when invited for dinner at Halston Hall, Mytton turned up riding a full grown bear, which went well until he applied his spurs to the bear in an effort to make it go faster. The bear instead stopped and managed to bite Mytton in the thigh. So, how did a man such as this get elected into parliament? Simple, he gave people £10 each for voting for him. As that equates to about £900 in the 21st century, people were only to happy to cast their vote, but after just 30 minutes, Mytton decided that parliamentary debate was boring and left the House, never to return.

Answer: Atlanteans

The 8th Earl of Clancarty (1911-1995) was a prominent ufologist of his day which, given the number of believers isn't too eccentric. The Earl took it to new heights however with his belief that Adam and Eve, as well as Noah had originally lived on Mars as experimental creations of aliens and were forced to move to Earth following a Martian polar ice cap melting. He also believed that the North Pole didn't exist but instead in that area, one could find a large and warm sea gradually flowing into the core of the Earth, where there was also a huge network of tunnels and caverns built by citizens of Atlantis.
Trench claimed to be friends with a former US test pilot who had told him of a meeting at Edwards Air Force Base between President Eisenhower and alien life forms from various planets who arrived at the base in their own spacecraft, two of which were cigar shaped and three of which were saucer shaped.

He also claimed to have such a great knowledge of UFO propulsion systems that in 1983, a high ranking employee from Honda allegedly visited him in London to discuss these systems and their practical application here on Earth.
Although the Earl of Clancarty is an Irish title, we'll allow him in this quiz about British people, partly because he was born ten years before Irish independence and partly because his story is just too good to miss out on.

Answer: Reading the "Daily Telegraph"

Boaks certainly made a name for himself whilst with the Royal Navy, being awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his part in the Dunkirk evacuation as well as taking part in the sinking of the Bismarck in 1941. He also made a name for himself with his road safety campaigning, but perhaps not in such a distinguished manner. In the 1950s he attempted to launch private prosecutions against a series of high profile motorists, for alleged traffic offences, including Home Secretary, R.A. Butler, Lady Attlee and Princess Anne.
He also had a habit of stopping his car on a busy road and refusing to drive on until all pedestrians had safely crossed, including in one instance outside Wembley Stadium prior to an England v Scotland football match. For such transgressions he received a series of fines, and finally a week in prison.

To highlight the need for better pedestrian safety he would push a trolley laden with bricks back and forth on a zebra crossing for hours, causing traffic chaos and could also be found sat calmly in a deckchair on the Westway section of the A40 trunk road in London, reading the Daily Telegraph. Interestingly though, for all of his eccentric behaviour, Boaks was on the money occasionally. He was one of the first road safety campaigners to realise the damage caused to roadside properties by pollution and campaigned vigorously for the pedestrianisation of Carnaby Street in London, which was finally achieved in 1973.

Answer: Cauliflowers

Sir Tatton succeeded to the Sykes baronetcy following his father's death in 1863, by which time he was 37 years old and already displaying eccentric tendencies. One of the first things he did was forbid the growing of flowers advising tenants, "If you want to grow flowers, grow cauliflowers!" If, while taking his daily walk he should spy a flower, he was well known for beating it with his walking stick, so great was his hatred of them.

Sir Tatton believed that maintaining a constant body temperature was vital, and in order to so would order coats and trousers in several sizes, enabling him to wear six or more layers, and should he become too warm, simply discard a coat or pair of trousers, either for a servant to pick up or for a child to return to the manor house. Sir Tatton spent the last few decades of his life existing on a diet that consisted primarily of cold rice pudding, yet lived to be 87 years old, dying in 1913.

Answer: The dogs had to wear servants clothes for eight days

Egerton was certainly an animal lover, known for dressing his menagerie of cats and dogs as ladies and gentlemen and expecting them to behave as such in return. Each animal wore handmade leather boots and a custom made linen napkin for dinner, where their meals were served on silver dishes. Unfortunately, a failure to act with decorum at the dining table led to punishments such as being dressed in the yellow coats and knee breeches of Egerton's valets and being confined to the ante-room where they would be deprived of the honour of seeing him for a week. Egerton spent the latter part of his life living in Paris and the sight of him walking alongside his carriage, while his pets sat inside in comfort was a regular spectacle, as was Egerton fox hunting in his grounds, with a huntsman, a pack of hounds and even a fox all imported from England.

Perhaps the most eccentric behaviour demonstrated by Egerton was his habit of wearing each pair of shoes or boots for only one day. Each evening, that day's footwear was taken to a special room and placed on a rack next to the previous day's footwear. This system, claimed Egerton allowed him to calculate the date and, also, by the amount of mud and dust on each pair, to check what the weather had been like on any particular day as well remind him of the days activities.
This surely must have been the most expensive diary ever invented.

Answer: Official Monster Raving Loony Party

All of the answers are or were genuine UK political parties but Sutch, better known as Screaming Lord Sutch despite having no peerage will always be remembered for the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, which he formed in 1983.
Prior to forming the party he had stood as a candidate for the National Teenage Party, the Young Ideas Party and the Go To Blazes party, winning votes at each by-election he contested. At the Bootle by-election in May 1990, he actually won more votes than the candidate of the Continuing Social Democratic Party (SDP), which was led by former Foreign Secretary David Owen and just days after the result the SDP dissolved itself.

Some of the policies of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party include Britain joining the Duchy of Cornwall to benefit from tax exemptions, half the county's grey squirrels will be painted red to increase the red squirrel population, all vehicles will be fitted with bungee ropes in order to save fuel on the return journey and zebra crossings being made open to all animals wishing to cross the road. Not surprisingly, the party have never won a parliamentary seat, but that doesn't mean that some of their previous policies haven't made it into law. The OMRPL were the first to campaign for 24 hour pub opening which became legal in 1995, the first to campaign to abolish dog licences, which happened in 1987 and way back in 1983, the party campaigned for pet passports, which finally came into being in 2001.

Answer: Drink water

Lord Rokeby became fascinated with properties of water after spending time in the German spa town of Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen). Upon his return to Britain, he began bathing regularly, which was unheard of at the time and would visit the Kent coast daily in order to bathe for hours in the seawater. He also had drinking fountains installed on his route between his house and the coast, and would financially reward anyone who he saw using them. Rokeby's beard also marked him out as "slightly odd", as when men were in the main clean shaven, he allowed his facial hair to not just grow, but flourish as it reached down to his waist and was so wide it could be seen when he had his back to someone.

His relationship with water marked him as a true eccentric for the times though and this reputation grew when he had a huge glass topped (solar heated) tank built and filled with water, in which he would spend many hours, even taking his meals in the water. Rokeby did mange to live to be 88 years old though, so who knows? Maybe water is healthy for us and he wasn't quite so eccentric after all.

Answer: Four Zebras

Rothschild was painfully shy and had a speech impediment but came alive when around animals. Apart from his zebra drawn carriage, which he used to prove how tame the animals could be, he also had a pet bear, which he trained to slap women on the backside. I would imagine the word "shock" would not even come close to describing the reaction of any woman on the receiving end. Walter may have been eccentric and enjoyed riding on the back of a giant tortoise, using a lettuce leaf dangling from a stick to encourage the animal to move, but his services to natural history were invaluable.

During the course of his lifetime he discovered and named 153 new insects, 58 types of bird, three spiders and a new sub species of giraffe, named the Rothschild giraffe in his honour. The Natural History Museum at Tring was started by Walter and today houses probably the finest and most extensive collection of stuffed animals in UK, many of which were originally in Walter's private collection.