Q 01/05

Tim Martin named his pub chain Wetherspoon, founded in 1979, after one of his what in New Zealand?

A) Rugby coaches

B) Landlords

C) Schoolteachers

D) Bank managers

Answer · why

C) Schoolteachers

Schoolteachers: Wetherspoon was the surname of a teacher from Martin's New Zealand school days, in one telling a man who could not control his class, ...

Q 02/05

Once a pub's doors are locked for a lock-in, what are the drinkers still inside said to have become?

A) A members' club

B) A hotel's guests

C) A staff meeting

D) A private party

Answer · why

D) A private party

A private party is the legal fiction behind the lock-in: regulars put money behind the bar before closing time, so that no drink is technically sold o...

Q 03/05

From 1916 to 1919, Britain's state-run pubs forbade customers from doing what?

A) Singing at the bar

B) Buying rounds of drinks

C) Playing cards for money

D) Drinking while standing

Answer · why

B) Buying rounds of drinks

Buying rounds of drinks was banned from 1916 to 1919 under the State Management Scheme, which nationalised the pubs and breweries around the Gretna mu...

Q 04/05

What did Francis Crick announce to lunchtime drinkers at the Eagle in Cambridge on 28 February 1953?

A) The first jet engine

B) The discovery of penicillin

C) A working computer program

D) The structure of DNA

Answer · why

D) The structure of DNA

The structure of DNA: Crick told the pub he and James Watson had 'discovered the secret of life', an anecdote Watson retold in The Double Helix and no...

Q 05/05

William Booth's 1865 sermon outside Whitechapel's Blind Beggar pub led to the founding of what?

A) The Boys' Brigade

B) The Methodist Church

C) The Temperance Union

D) The Salvation Army

Answer · why

D) The Salvation Army

The Salvation Army grew out of the East London Christian Mission that Booth set up after that sermon; a century later, in 1966, Ronnie Kray shot Georg...