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40 free 1963 trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
1963 was the year the old order cracked. Britain shivered through its coldest winter in two centuries, a war minister lied to Parliament and a prime minister quit, a mail train was stopped in a Buckinghamshire cutting, and a defector slipped out of Beirut. Across the Atlantic a quarter of a million people heard a preacher describe his dream, and in November a motorcade in Dallas stopped the world. These 40 questions go past the headlines to the second tier of the year: the earl who gave up his title for Downing Street, the report that closed a third of the railways, the diet cola named by a computer, the $45 smiley face, a cat on a rocket, a left-hander's first golf major and the Disney film that turned a boy into a fish. The films, records, sport, science, births and deaths of 1963 all get a turn, with a British lean. Most are pitched at pub-quiz level, with a handful for people who really remember the year. Play on your phone with instant answers and sources, or print it for a pub quiz, a classroom or a 1963-themed birthday.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which sports car, shown at Frankfurt in 1963 as the 901, was renamed after Peugeot objected to the zero in the middle?
Porsche 911
The Porsche 911 kept its 901 name for just 82 cars before Peugeot claimed exclusive French rights to three-digit names with a middle zero; internally the part numbers stayed 901 for years.
Q 02Which earl renounced his peerage to become prime minister on 19 October, after Macmillan resigned citing ill health?
Alec Douglas-Home
Alec Douglas-Home was the last prime minister to take office while sitting in the House of Lords; two of Macmillan's cabinet ministers refused to serve under him.
Q 03Who became the first honorary citizen of the United States on 9 April, under an Act of Congress signed by Kennedy?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill and Mother Teresa are the only people given the honour in their lifetimes; Lafayette, widely assumed to have come first, was not made an honorary citizen until 2002.
Q 04Which Worcester graphic artist drew the yellow smiley face for an insurance company in 1963 and was paid $45?
Harvey Ball
Harvey Ball never trademarked his smiley, designed for State Mutual Life Assurance of Worcester, Massachusetts, so he earned nothing from the billions of copies that followed.
Q 05Which diet drink, Coca-Cola's first, took its name from a list of four-letter words generated by an IBM computer?
Tab
Tab was picked from about twenty finalists after an IBM 1401 spat out over 185,000 one-vowel, four-letter words; Coca-Cola was chasing Royal Crown's Diet Rite, then the only sugar-free cola.
Q 06Which club beat Leicester 3–1 in the FA Cup final of 25 May, pushed back three weeks by the Big Freeze?
Manchester United
Manchester United's final was pushed from 4 May to 25 May by the Big Freeze backlog; Denis Law opened the scoring and David Herd struck twice, five years after eight players died at Munich.
Q 07What machine actually carried the Washington–Kremlin hotline that went live in August 1963 after the Cuban crisis?
A teleprinter
A teleprinter sent typed text over a cable, and no red phone was ever used, despite the legend; leaders wrote in their own language and the message was translated at the other end.
Q 08Which British heavyweight floored Cassius Clay at Wembley on 18 June, before losing in the next round to a cut eye?
Henry Cooper
Henry Cooper's left hook, 'Enry's 'Ammer, put Clay down in round four; Clay's trainer Angelo Dundee then drew the referee's attention to a split in one of his fighter's gloves before the stoppage in the fifth.
Q 09Which country put the first cat into space on 18 October 1963, recovering her alive 13 minutes after launch?
France
France's Félicette, a Paris cat with electrodes implanted in her skull, was recovered alive 13 minutes after lift-off; the press then renamed her Félix after the cartoon cat.
Q 10Which island rose from the sea off Iceland in November, first spotted as a column of smoke by a trawler's cook?
Surtsey
Surtsey is named after Surtr, the fire giant of Norse myth; the eruption began 130 metres down and kept building the island until June 1967.
Q 11What do the letters of the five-digit ZIP code, introduced across the United States on 1 July 1963, stand for?
Zone Improvement Plan
The Zone Improvement Plan codes were voluntary at first, yet within three months they were on an estimated 30 per cent of all mail; the first digit marks a region of the country.
Q 12Where did Britain, America and the USSR sign the treaty of 5 August banning nuclear tests in the air, space and sea?
Moscow
Moscow hosted the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which still allowed underground blasts; its arrival coincided with a sharp fall in radioactive particles in the atmosphere.
Q 13Which British Railways chairman's report of 27 March proposed closing 2,363 stations and 5,000 miles of line?
Q 21Who became England's youngest football captain, at 22, against Czechoslovakia in May, in only his 12th international?
Bobby Moore
Bobby Moore got the armband because Johnny Haynes had retired and Jimmy Armfield was injured; England won 4–2, and Alf Ramsey made the job his permanently in 1964.
Q 22Which osteopath, tried for living on immoral earnings in the Profumo affair, took a fatal overdose before the verdict?
Stephen Ward
Stephen Ward had introduced Christine Keeler to war minister John Profumo at a Cliveden pool party; he died three days after taking sleeping pills, and a 2017 review found the judge's summing-up could not be traced.
Q 23Which ex-MI6 officer vanished from Beirut on 23 January and was named in July as the spy ring's 'Third Man'?
Richard Beeching
Richard Beeching, an ICI physicist, called his report The Reshaping of British Railways; it targeted 55 per cent of all stations, and just over 4,000 route miles were eventually removed.
Q 14Which Great Train Robber, traced by a fingerprint on a tomato sauce bottle, escaped Wandsworth in 1965 by rope ladder?
Ronnie Biggs
Ronnie Biggs's share of the £2.6 million was £147,000, and the raid on 8 August 1963 fell on his 34th birthday; he served 15 months of a 30-year sentence before the 1965 escape.
Q 15Which East African colony, where the Mau Mau had risen a decade earlier, became independent of Britain on 12 December?
Kenya
Kenya's first prime minister was Jomo Kenyatta, who became its first president when the country turned republican a year later; it stayed inside the Commonwealth throughout.
Q 16Which Belfast-born author died in Oxford on 22 November, his death buried beneath the news from Dallas?
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis died of kidney failure a week short of his 65th birthday, on the same day as Aldous Huxley and President Kennedy, so two major authors passed with barely a headline.
Q 17Which 1963 Maurice Sendak picture book sends Max, in his wolf suit, to rule an island of monsters?
Where the Wild Things Are
Where the Wild Things Are won the 1964 Caldecott Medal as the year's most distinguished American picture book, and Max ends by sending the monsters to bed without supper in turn.
Q 18Which Betty Friedan book, grown from a survey of her Smith classmates, named 'the problem that has no name' in 1963?
The Feminine Mystique
The Feminine Mystique sold over a million copies and is credited with sparking second-wave feminism; Friedan's 15th-reunion survey had found her classmates unhappy as housewives.
Q 19Which basketball star, born in Brooklyn in February 1963, was turned down by his high-school varsity team as too short?
Michael Jordan
Michael Jordan stood 5 feet 11 inches when Laney High in Wilmington turned him down; he starred on the junior varsity instead, posting some 40-point games before making the senior team.
Q 20Which 23-year-old's three-foot par putt on the last hole beat Tony Lema for the first of his six Masters titles?
Jack Nicklaus
Jack Nicklaus built his one-stroke win on a second-round 66 at Augusta; three months later he bogeyed the last two holes of the Open at Royal Lytham and missed the playoff by a stroke.
Kim Philby
Kim Philby had been cleared in Parliament in 1955 and sent to Beirut as correspondent for The Observer and The Economist; Izvestia announced on 30 July that he had been given asylum in the Soviet Union.
Q 24In which English city did a four-month boycott in 1963 end the bus company's refusal to employ Black or Asian crews?
Bristol
Bristol's bus company gave in on 28 August, the very day Martin Luther King gave his 'I Have a Dream' speech; the boycott, led by youth worker Paul Stephenson, helped bring about the Race Relations Act of 1965.
Q 25Which Labour MP, unseated by inheriting a viscountcy in 1960, won the 1963 Peerage Act letting heirs disclaim titles?
Tony Benn
Tony Benn, briefly the 2nd Viscount Stansgate, was the first peer to use the Act after it gained royal assent on 31 July; within months it also allowed a Conservative earl to leave the Lords and become prime minister.
Q 26The Big Freeze of 1962–63, with snow lying until April in places, was central England's coldest winter since when?
1739–40
Only 1739–40 and 1683–84 were colder in the Central England Temperature record going back to 1659; snow drifted 20 feet deep, and the cover lasted more than two months in places.
Q 27Which South Vietnamese president was killed on 2 November, a day after his own generals launched a CIA-backed coup?
Ngô Đình Diệm
Ngô Đình Diệm and his brother Nhu escaped the palace but were recaptured and killed on the orders of General Dương Văn Minh, who took over; Diệm's treatment of Buddhist protesters had cost him American support.
Q 28Which Birmingham, Alabama place of worship was bombed by Klansmen on 15 September, killing four girls aged 11 to 14?
16th Street Baptist Church
The 16th Street Baptist Church bomb was 19 sticks of dynamite on a timer under its east steps, yet the first conviction, of Robert Chambliss, came only in 1977 and two more not until 2001 and 2002.
Q 29Which golfer became the first left-hander to win a major, at the 1963 Open at Royal Lytham?
Bob Charles
Bob Charles beat Phil Rodgers by eight strokes over the 36 extra holes, the last playoff of that length at the Open; he had worked as a bank teller in Masterton before turning professional.
Q 30Which Scottish farmer won a then-record seven Grands Prix in 1963 to take his first Formula One title in a Lotus 25?
Jim Clark
Jim Clark clinched the 1963 championship with three races still to run, beating defending champion Graham Hill; he grew up on Edington Mains Farm near Duns in the Borders and also finished second at Indianapolis that year.