1961 Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free 1961 trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
1961 was the year the space race got a human face and Berlin got a wall. A Soviet pilot circled the Earth in April, an American followed with a fifteen-minute hop in May, and in August East German troops strung barbed wire across a city while the new president in Washington promised the Moon within the decade. These 50 questions cover the news, sport, music, film and television of the year with a British lean: a League and FA Cup double, a 42-year jail sentence for a spy, a satirical magazine's first issue, a 14-year-old at number one, a clarinet tune written for a young daughter, a grey winning at Aintree, a Hancock episode read off teleprompters and the car Enzo Ferrari reputedly called the most beautiful ever made. Most are pitched for a pub table, with a handful for people who really remember the year. Play on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print it for a pub quiz, office quiz or a 1961-themed birthday.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which cosmonaut became the first human in space on 12 April, ejecting from Vostok 1 to parachute down separately?
Yuri Gagarin
Yuri Gagarin's ejection was kept quiet because record rules said a pilot had to land inside his craft, and once the truth came out the rules were rewritten to fit him.
Q 02Which club completed the first League and FA Cup double of the 20th century by beating Leicester 2–0 at Wembley?
Tottenham Hotspur
Tottenham Hotspur faced what was in effect ten men, because Leicester right-back Len Chalmers was hurt early on and substitutes were not yet allowed.
Q 03Which 150 mph sports car, launched at the Geneva Motor Show, did Enzo Ferrari reputedly call the most beautiful ever made?
Jaguar E-Type
Jaguar E-Type fever at the show was such that the factory sent for a second car, and a test engineer dashed it from Coventry to Geneva with minutes to spare.
Q 04Which Yankees outfielder broke Babe Ruth's home-run record with his 61st on the last day of a newly lengthened season?
Roger Maris
Roger Maris never actually got the famous asterisk, because commissioner Ford Frick had no say over the record books and publishers listed the new mark without one.
Q 05Which musical, released in October and inspired by Romeo and Juliet, was the highest-grossing film of 1961?
West Side Story
West Side Story won ten Academy Awards from eleven nominations, a record for a musical, and Natalie Wood's songs were dubbed by Marni Nixon, who had to re-record them to fit Wood's filmed performances.
Q 06Which Joseph Heller novel had its number changed from 18 to avoid confusion with Leon Uris's Mila 18?
Catch-22
Catch-22 had its opening chapter printed in 1955 as Catch-18; Heller signed for $1,500 and the book became very popular among teenagers.
Q 07Which future royal bride was born at Park House on the Sandringham estate on 1 July, a daughter of Viscount Althorp?
Diana Spencer
Diana Spencer began life as the Queen's tenant, since her father rented Park House from the royal estate, and twenty years later she married the landlady's eldest son.
Q 08Which campaigning group grew from Peter Benenson's Observer article 'The Forgotten Prisoners', published on 28 May?
Amnesty International
Amnesty International was planned only as a press campaign called Appeal for Amnesty, 1961, but the flood of offers to help turned it into a permanent organisation that July.
Q 09Which astronaut became the first American in space on 5 May, a 15-minute suborbital hop in the capsule Freedom 7?
Alan Shepard
Alan Shepard flew again ten years later as commander of Apollo 14, and ended his moonwalk by hitting two golf balls with a makeshift club.
Q 10Which East German leader insisted that 'no one has the intention of building a wall', weeks before sealing Berlin?
Walter Ulbricht
Walter Ulbricht raised the wall himself, since the West German reporter had only asked whether the state border would be drawn at the Brandenburg Gate.
Q 11At which Berlin crossing did Soviet and American tanks face each other on 27 October before both pulled back?
Checkpoint Charlie
Checkpoint Charlie's standoff grew out of a night at the theatre, after East German police stopped a senior US diplomat heading to a show in East Berlin and asked for his papers.
Q 12Which Holocaust organiser, seized by Mossad in Argentina, sat in a bulletproof glass booth at his trial in Jerusalem?
Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Eichmann was hanged the following year, and his ashes were scattered at sea beyond Israel's territorial waters, leaving no grave on land.
Q 13Which UN Secretary-General died when his DC-6 crashed near Ndola, flying to negotiate a Congo ceasefire?
Q 21Where did Kennedy first pledge, on 25 May, to land a man on the Moon within the decade?
A joint session of Congress
A joint session of Congress heard a goal picked for its distance, since his advisers judged a Moon landing far enough off that America could still get there first.
Q 22In which Alabama town did a Klan mob firebomb a Freedom Riders bus on Mother's Day, 14 May?
Anniston
Anniston's mob was kept at bay by an unlikely guard, an undercover Alabama highway patrolman riding the bus, who stood in the doorway with his revolver drawn.
Q 23Which drug, sold for morning sickness, was pulled from the German market in November after being linked to birth defects?
Thalidomide
Dag Hammarskjöld
Dag Hammarskjöld's crash is still an open question, since the UN's own 1962 inquiry could not find the cause and half a century later a panel of jurists urged it to look again.
Q 14Over which Arctic archipelago did a Tu-95 drop Tsar Bomba, the most powerful weapon ever tested, on 30 October?
Novaya Zemlya
Novaya Zemlya got only half the intended blast, because the bomb was a 100-megaton design whose uranium layer was swapped for lead to cut the fallout.
Q 15Which country became a republic and left the Commonwealth, not rejoining until 1994?
South Africa
South Africa had asked to stay in as a republic, but Hendrik Verwoerd withdrew the request in London once it was clear fellow members would refuse it over apartheid.
Q 16Which Kirov Ballet star defected at Le Bourget airport in Paris in June, slipping away from his KGB escorts?
Rudolf Nureyev
Rudolf Nureyev was stopped at the gate and told he was wanted in Moscow for a special Kremlin performance, a story he refused to swallow as the company boarded for London.
Q 17Which novelist died by suicide in Ketchum, Idaho on 2 July, days after leaving the Mayo Clinic?
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway's death was first reported as an accident, because his wife Mary told the press he had been cleaning the gun, and she acknowledged the truth publicly only five years later.
Q 18Whose embalmed body, displayed beside Lenin's since 1953, was quietly removed from the Red Square mausoleum in October?
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin's eviction was urged at the party congress by an old Bolshevik, Dora Lazurkina, who said Lenin had appeared to her and complained about lying next to him.
Q 19Which 86-year-old poet, unable to read his poem in the glare at Kennedy's inauguration, recited 'The Gift Outright'?
Robert Frost
Robert Frost had even let the president-elect edit him, agreeing to alter the poem's last line so that it looked ahead with more confidence.
Q 20Which chimpanzee flew a Mercury capsule on 31 January, three months before any American astronaut did?
Ham
Ham worked his levers in flight almost as fast as he had on the ground, which showed that an astronaut would be able to operate controls in space.
Thalidomide never went on sale in America, because a new FDA reviewer, Frances Kelsey, kept refusing the application until its maker could prove the drug safe.
Q 24Which Mercury capsule, flown by Gus Grissom, sank in the Atlantic when its hatch blew after splashdown in July?
Liberty Bell 7
Liberty Bell 7's pilot was long suspected of panicking, yet the hatch plunger kicked back hard enough to injure Wally Schirra's hand when he fired his on purpose, and Grissom's hands were unmarked.
Q 25Which race did the grey outsider Nicolaus Silver win under jockey Bobby Beasley?
The Grand National
The Grand National winner dodged a doping gang, because trainer Fred Rimell grew suspicious of a visitor to his yard and put another grey in the horse's stable as a decoy.
Q 26Which young heavyweight learned how to sell tickets from wrestler Gorgeous George after the two shared a Las Vegas radio show?
Cassius Clay
Cassius Clay, the future Muhammad Ali, saw the wrestler's bragging sell out an arena and decided that the more he talked, the more people would pay to see him.
Q 27Which Swedish warship, sunk less than a mile into her maiden voyage in 1628, was raised after 333 years on the seabed?
Vasa
Vasa was lopsided from the start, because her builders worked with two kinds of ruler, some marked in Swedish feet of twelve inches and some in Amsterdam feet of eleven.
Q 28Which Gulf state, a British protectorate until June, asked for British troops within days when Iraq claimed it?
Kuwait
Kuwait's appeal worked, since Iraq backed down once British forces arrived, but the claim never died, and in 1990 Saddam Hussein's army crossed the border to enforce it.
Q 29Which Minister of Health announced that the pill could be prescribed on the NHS for two shillings a month?
Enoch Powell
Enoch Powell had told a mental health conference that March that most of the old asylums would close, the speech now seen as the start of care in the community.
Q 30Which MI6 officer turned double agent was jailed for 42 years, then escaped from Wormwood Scrubs over a rope ladder?
George Blake
George Blake's rescuers included two peace campaigners who thought 42 years inhuman, and when they finally stood trial in 1991 the jury acquitted them.