which appeared at the very end of last season. So many years, so many questions,
so many forgotten answers. For any fellow old gits who sometimes find the
present tense and the past perfect here is my half-remembered version of
yesteryear. The rest of you, the better adjusted, should switch channels
immediately or leave the room.
I first heard
of Withquiz when I got chatting to Barry Whitehead at the upstairs quiz in the
Swan in the 1980s (vague memories also of meeting Kieran for the first time at
this venue). A few months later I met Barry again one sunny (in the past all
days were sunny) Sunday afternoon in the Red Lion and he invited me to enter a
team into Withquiz for the following season. We duly did, and made our
debut in what I think was the 1987/88 season.
The Swan was
our venue and the team was stamped '2nd Class' right from the onset. Post
Office through and through - all that is except Marian who had a PhD in American
Literature and could never understand why there were always more questions about
cricket than there were about the collected works of John Dos Passos. We
were all stalwarts of the monthly quiz held at the PO sports and social club on
Quay Street, a frolicking drinkfest cum quiz won all too regularly by a dourly
professional outfit called Wilson, Keppel and Betty, better known in Withington
circles as Mike Heale and his BT engineering cronies. The fact that he
chose to call his team Wilson, Keppel and Betty surely dispels the hoary old
myth that Mike was no lover of modern music. Imagine our unbridled joy
when we discovered that this was the team that had to be beaten in Withquiz as
well. As Kieran says, Mike was a hard man to impress; you just had to
persevere and sure enough, just a few years before he died Mike told us that
the quiz we had just set "wasn't a bad paper". Success!
This is true:
despite being the archetypal oldies of the quiz world (though we weren't always
greybeards, I used to be a dead ringer for Conchita) I still think of us as
being Withquiz upstarts. And if that doesn't prove how old the Withington
Quiz league is, then nothing does. Many have moved on, many have joined,
but the nucleus of what we know as Withquiz today was already in place at that
time. We seemed to be the newbies for quite a while followed, I think, by
the Pigs and the Historymen (although elements of both teams may have been
previous players in various teams - more info please, Gary and Ivor).
Snoopy's Friends (Tony with family and friends) eventually became the new kids
on the block followed by the Chorlton Cricket Club who only survived a few
seasons but managed to create a lasting impression and are still sadly missed.
TMTCH then became the precocious babies of the league followed by the Calluna
Pussycats (neutered after a season) and the universally challenged Meat Raffle.
Here's hoping that Rachael and pals will sit down in the Turnpike in about 50
years time, pay not more than 5 New Scottish Euros for a round of drinks and
write a definitive history of WithQuiz.
