Paradise By Way of Kensal Green Quiz

Answer: Wilkie Collins

An introduction with Charles Dickens in 1851 set William Wilkie Collins on his course to success as a novelist. After co-authoring several plays and short stories with Dickens, his first mystery novel "The Woman in White" was serialised in Dickens' periodical "All The Year Round" in 1859 and 1860. Eight years later "The Moonstone" was also serialised in the same publication and its success spawned the now over-crowded literary genre that is the English detective novel.

Whilst it may not strictly be the first English detective novel (there are several claimants to that achievement, such as Charles Felix's "The Notting Hill Mystery" published in 1865), T. S. Eliot described it as "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels".

Answer: The Great Blondin

Blondin was inspired to his future career at just five years old by a funambulist he saw when the circus visited his home town. On his return home, he strung a rope up in his back garden and began practising immediately.

The idea of crossing Niagara first came to him when he visited North America with a troup of acrobats in 1851 and it soon became his over-riding obsession. The feat was achieved on June 30, 1859 with the help of a nine metre balancing pole and a 335 metre long rope. The journey took twenty minutes to complete.

Not satisfied with merely crossing the gorge, Blondin used props to entertain crowds of onlookers in many future crossings, such as pushing a wheelbarrow across on the rope, carrying his (not insubstantial) manager, Harry Colcord, on his back and even cooking an omelette on a stove as he crossed.

The Great Farini (aka William Hunt) was Blondin's great rival who complete his first walk across Niagara in 1860 and attempted to outdo Blondin's feats with such stunts as crossing blindfolded. Professor Jenkins rode a bicycle across a rope over Niagara in 1869 and Henry Bellini's crossings were notable for his leap into the water below at the end.

Answer: Charles Babbage

Babbage died a disappointed and frustrated man, as his dreams of building the difference engine, a hand-crank driven calculating machine, and the analytical engine were not realised in his lifetime. The analytical engine was eventually built by his son from the detailed notes that Charles Babbage had written about it.

The analytical engine was a development from the idea of the difference engine. The revolutionary idea behind it was that, with the use of punch cards, programs could be created that would allow the engine to run without any further human input and produce complex series of calculated results.

Whilst Babbage is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, his brain is preserved at the Science Museum in London.

JH Muller was the engineer who first proposed the idea of the difference engine and Martin Wiberg was an inventor who built a difference engine that could produce logarithmic tables. Alan Turing was a 20th century mathematician and logician who developed many theories about computation that underlie modern computer science.

Answer: Marcus Garvey

Born in St Ann's Bay, Jamaica in 1887, Marcus Garvey was inspired to fight for the cause of social reform, particularly the discrimination suffered by black workers, from his experiences traveling through Central America. He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914 with the belief that unifying all people of African ancestry throughout the Americas and the world into one body was the only way to overcome the suffering and discrimination that they were subject to and achieve economic independence.

Garvey moved to London in 1935 where he lived for the remainder of his life. He died in West Kensington, London in 1940 and because of travel restrictions caused by Britain being at war with Germany, it was not possible to transport his body back to his native Jamaica so he was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. On his body's return to Jamaica, Garvey was buried in National Heroes' Park in Kingston with great ceremony.

Answer: Freddie Mercury

Freddie Mercury formed Queen in 1970 with May and Taylor; Deacon joined a year later. They released their first album in 1973 and achieved the first major chart success with their third album "Sheer Heart Attack". Notable successes in the band's career were the 1975 single "Bohemian Rhapsody" which topped the UK charts for nine weeks and hit the top again (and the number two slot in the USA) when re-released following Mercury's death, and Queen's appearance at the 1985 Live Aid concert in London.

Rumours about Mercury's illness had been circulating for some time, fervently denied by Mercury himself, before he decided to make a statement confirming that he had contracted HIV and AIDS in November 1991. Sadly, just one day later he died of pneumonia.

Answer: William Makepeace Thackeray

Initially beginning his career as a journalist writing for journals in Britain and France and most notably for the "Times" (London) and "Punch" magazine. Thackeray published his first novel "Catherine" in 1839. His fondness for "immoral" characters was notable from this first novel through "The Luck of Barry Lyndon", a story of a gambler and adventurer who fights on both sides of the Seven Years War and then returns home to make his fortune, to Becky Sharp in "Vanity Fair", probably his best-known work.

Thackeray died suddenly on Christmas Eve, 1863. He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery and a bust of his likeness was placed in Westminster Abbey.

Answer: Anthony Trollope

An important figure in the development of the political novel, it is therefore no surprise that many senior UK political figures considered Trollope their favourite novelist. However, he was also a fine satirist of Victorian life. "The Chronicles of Barsetshire" were a series of six novels that examined the role of the clergy in the life of a fictitious town in rural England. George Eliot declared that the example of these works was a major inspiration for her masterwork "Middlemarch".

Answer: Euston

Euston Station was built in 1837 as the London terminus for the London and Birmingham Railway. Hardwick also designed the Birmingham terminus at Curzon Street.

Hardwick's main influences came as a result of the travels he undertook as a young man, sponsored by his father Thomas Hardwick, also an architect. It was particularly the Greek architecture he encountered in Italy that inspired him.

This influence was most notable in his design of the Euston Arch, a giant sandstone propylaeum of the Doric order. Sadly, this arch was demolished when Euston station was rebuilt in the 1960s although the gates can still be seen in the National Railway museum in York. His building at Curzon Street, Birmingham, is still standing.

Answer: WH Smith

William Henry Smith took over his parents' news vendor business that they had set up in the late 18th century and on the back of the railways boom, turned it from a central London business to a nationwide one.

WH Smith & Son (William Henry's son, also called William Henry, became a partner in 1846) opened their first railway station newsstand at Euston in 1848. Their virtual monopoly of the railway newspaper selling became complete in 1998 when the company bought all the retail outlets of their main rival, John Menzies.

Answer: Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Where to begin with Brunel? If ever a man embodied the Protestant work ethic then Brunel was that man. Constantly smoking and, if rumours are to be believed, rarely sleeping, Brunel's engineering feats were considerable; tunnels, bridges, railways and steam ships were all tackled with varying degrees of success.

His first major achievement came in conjunction with his father, Marc. The Thames Tunnel was built under the River Thames between Rotherhithe and Wapping thanks to a revolutionary tunnelling shield devised by Marc. It was a project fraught with danger; several men were killed in its construction and Brunel himself nearly drowned after one collapse, and was left with serious injuries that remained with him for the rest of his life. But despite the hiatus caused by this accident, the project was completed in 1841, sixteen years after its commencement, making it the first tunnel built under a navigable river.

Brunel completed some pioneering projects of his own alongside the Thames Tunnel success. Much of his work shares the tunnel's link with the railways. Before the tunnel had been completed Brunel was commissioned as chief engineer for the Great Western Railway, connecting London to Bristol. Many bridges on this route that are in use today are the original ones that Brunel designed and built, including many huge and elegant viaducts. Several stations on the route that he designed are still in use also, the most famous of which is London Paddington.

From the railways, Brunel moved on to the world of shipping. In 1837 he built his first steam ship, the Great Western, which was the largest steamship of the time. In 1838 it set the record for the fastest transatlantic crossing completing the westward journey in just over 15 days and the eastward return in under 13 days.

Brunel died of a stroke in 1859 at the age of 53. His son Henri Marc, also an engineer, was buried alongside him in Kensal Green cemetery after his death in 1903.