Pub Quiz thread

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Bolton's Boots said:
... or I currently have the time to research....:)

What is the link between the Channel Tunnel and Wembley Stadium?
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Sir Edward Watkin, Victorian entrepreneur and railway mogul is the link. He was the Chairman of the Great Central Railway, the Metropolitan Railway and the South Eastern Railway between the late 1860s and the early 1890s. His greatest dream was to build a continuous line of railway from Manchester (!) to Paris, via the London Extension of the GCR, the MR (which became the Met Line of the London Underground) and the SER. To that effect, he launched the first serious attempt to tunnel under the Channel which got about 3/4 of a mile out from Kent before being stopped by a nervous government afraid of a French invasion through a completed tunnel....

He also attempted to build a rival to the Eiffel Tower - which got to the first stage before he ran out of money. The Tower (there are photos of it in its incomplete state) was build almost exactly on the centre spot of the pitch in the old Wembley Stadium, before being demolished in Edwardian times and replaced by the Empire Stadium.
 
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That is as far as the Tower reached with its intended height! As far as I am concerned it looks much nicer than that corporate monstrosity which currently occupies the site.

There is also a pub recently opened in Wembley Park (I believe) called Watkin's Folly!
 
As we are on the subject of links, what is the connection between an archaeologic "discovery" in East Sussex and "fragments collected in the Highlands of Scotland"?
 
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vic-rijrode said:
As we are on the subject of links, what is the connection between an archaeologic "discovery" in East Sussex and "fragments collected in the Highlands of Scotland"?
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Perhaps this is a little too obscure. So: What is the connection between an archaeological "discovery" of bones in East Sussex and "fragments of poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland"? Work from the South......
 
vic-rijrode said:
That is as far as the Tower reached with its intended height! As far as I am concerned it looks much nicer than that corporate monstrosity which currently occupies the site.

There is also a pub recently opened in Wembley Park (I believe) called Watkin's Folly!
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There certainly is - and it's near one of the few remaining old fashioned Wimpey bars!
 
hornethologist a.k.a. theo said:
They both turned out to be forgeries, nothing like as old as they were claimed to be.
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Correct theo, they were both fakes - well done. In fact the East Sussex "discovery" of Piltdown man was considered genuine for decades until more advanced techniques were available to verify the bones (which came from at least 2 different sources!). The fragments of poetry "collected" by a Scottish poet James MacPherson and "translated" by him were supposedly from ancient sources written by Ossian. Most experts have considered these for decades as fake and written by MacPherson himself.

Over to you, theo.
 
Observer Books, a series of small, pocket-sized books. The first was published in 1937, and was on the subject of British birds. The last was Wayside and Woodland publiished in 2003.
 
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