OK, so Rats is promoting himself as a quizmaster.....2 can play at that game.
Here's an unlucky 13 notable people who died in motor vehicles on the road.
Some may have died after the incident, in hospital.
Should cheer you all up for the coming Christmas day !
What were the makes of the vehicles ?
1 General George Patton
2 Mike Hawthorn
3 Reinhard Heydrich
4 Marc Bolan
5 David Penhaligan
6 Princess Grace
7 Isadora Duncan
8 Mary Jo Kopechne
9 Desmond Llewelyn
10 Jayne Mansfield
11 Tom Mix
12 Cozy Powell
13 Archduke Ferdinand
Yours morbidly
Ediy It's a Quiz of course....not a Qyiz ! Chubby digits to blame !
Ted
Last edited by: VxFan on Sat 25 Dec 10 at 17:08
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Well I know number 4, I can't get that image out of my head every time a certainly song comes on at a certain pub :p
I will be showing my youth in saying I don't know who half those people are.
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I wont be greedy ;) and only answer the first 5. Leave the rest for others.
1/ Cadillac Model 75 www.motorera.com/cadillac/cad1930/CAD38S.HTM
2/ 3.4 litre Jaguar Mk1 on the A3 Bypass near Guildford. He was a sick man with only a year or two left to live anyway. It was suspected he was racing with Rob Walker. Funniliy enough my wife was the nanny to Rob walkers grandchildren for a year in Melbourne.
3/ Mercedes Benz 320B. Funnily enough it was the car that killed him, the wounds he received in the assassination attempt were infected by fibres from the cars upholstery.
4/ Mini 1275GT (registration FOX 661) on Barnes common. The tree he hit is a memorial, I used to pass it every day to work on a motorbike.
5/ Rover SD1. He was not wearing a seatbelt, despite bing one of the MPs who pushed the bill through parliament,
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>> I will be showing my youth in saying I don't know who half those people
>> are.
>>
Just for you Rats, and without looking at the web.
1 General George Patton
WW2 American General.
2 Mike Hawthorn
Racing driver
3 Reinhard Heydrich,
German SS general responsible for the Holocaust.
4 Marc Bolan
Rubbish Pop Singer
5 David Penhaligan
Liberal MP, the Lembic Opic of his day.
6 Princess Grace
Film Star, became wife of the Head of Monaco
7 Isadora Duncan
Woman, took her clothes off a lot
8 Mary Jo Kopechne
Murdered by a Kennedy
9 Desmond Llewelyn
I would have to check google
10 Jayne Mansfield
Film Star, big tits.
11 Tom Mix
Film Star - cowboy mostly
12 Cozy Powell
You know him rats - drummer
13 Archduke Ferdinand
Started WW1 by getting himself shot.
Last edited by: Zero on Sat 25 Dec 10 at 08:24
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He's too blimmin good that Zero, he even got my Truro one! - lets gang up on him :)
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Very good Z. ISTR Marc Bolan's 1275 was a Clubman.
The Archduke's might be a bit harder ! ( the car, I mean )
Desmond was James Bond's gadget man.
Ted
Last edited by: Ted on Sat 25 Dec 10 at 10:55
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Think my grandad nearly got flattened by Mike Hawthorn's wheel. Was that era. Can't remember which track. My dad was there too and had to pull grandad out of the way. Think it was Mike Hawthorn's accident. Not sure whether it was one that killed him. Will have to check. He was definitely nearly flattened by a lose wheel flying off a car.
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Mike Hawthorn was killed on the road teabelly, not track. Between Guildford and Farnham, after a session in the pub, overtook Rob Walker's new Mercedes 300SL but lost it on a long left-hander, the 3.4 or 3.8 Jaguar being a tail-happy beast even modified for racing... crossed the other carriageway and hit a small tree sideways bending the car in half and chopping the tree off at ground level (I saw the stump, skidmarks and flowers within a few days of the event).
Rob Walker wrote his own take on the crash some time before he died, pretty honest I think, but I wouldn't know where to find it now.
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Some arf decent footage of Mike Hawthorn here ~ www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=35584
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Ah. Wonder if it was him. Might have been Silverstone. Definitely had to jump out of the way of someone's wheel!
Pathe thing shows debris flyng into the crowd in 1953, Silverstone. That must have been it!
Last edited by: teabelly on Sat 25 Dec 10 at 16:44
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I can't see a wheel flying off his car so I wonder if Dad meant debris or it was a wheel from another car?
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>> The Archduke's might be a bit harder ! ( the car, I mean )
It was a 1911 Gräf & Stift Double Phaeton
www.team-bhp.com/forum/international-automotive-scene/38514-day-automotive-history-6.html
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>> Very good Z. ISTR Marc Bolan's 1275 was a Clubman.
www.flickr.com/photos/21924316@N02/4453981511/
scroll down.
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Bolan was a passenger - he didn't drive - and was not wearing a seatbelt, according to reports at the time.
The car was driven by his backing singer and girlfriend Gloria Jones, who survived, but spent some time in hospital.
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Mike Hawthorn wasn't just a racing driver, he was reigning world champion.
Wasn't Desmond Llewelyn Kryten's father?
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Ref: Marc Bolan's prang, I recall that the words were altered from a well known ditty at the time to "Tie a yellow mini around the old oak tree"....
Last edited by: Pugugly on Sat 25 Dec 10 at 12:20
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...Ref: Marc Bolan's prang...
There was the very obvious joke:
What was Marc Bolan's last hit?
A tree.
I was a big fan at the time.
He seemed to make the same musical journey as me: folk/prog rock to glam rock.
I still love to boogie.
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I was a sort of veracious fan - a very close cohort and friend was and still is (judging by his FB page) a fan and some rubbed off !
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His stuff is still played a lot in the indie clubs, not so much in the rock clubs though but they tend not to play 60's stuff.
Such a waste of a musical talent just because didn't wear a seat belt.
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...not so much in the rock clubs though but they tend not to play 60's stuff....
Bolan last toured in 1977 with The Damned as support.
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I reckon much of Bolan's stuff still sounds good today.
A lot of the lyrics were pseudo-mystical tosh, but he was a talented and skilled musician.
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The rock clubs tend to like it harder though, but the indie peopel love all Bolan's stuff :).
I never he supported the damned that would have been a gig worth going to.
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>> I reckon much of Bolan's stuff still sounds good today.
>>
>> A lot of the lyrics were pseudo-mystical tosh, but he was a talented and skilled
>> musician.
Son, 16, is currently talking music and exploring his I-Pod with Uncle, over from Ireland for Xmas. Children of the Revolution has popped up; ride a White Swan will be on there as well!!
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...Children of the Revolution has popped up...
"I drive a Rolls Royce
"Because it's good for my voice."
Except he didn't, not legally anyway, because he never had a licence.
Bolan did own at least one Rolls Royce, which presumably he was driven around in.
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>> 13 Archduke Ferdinand
The thing that always sticks in my mind about the assassination of Ferdinand is that the assassin had given up and was on the way home. If I remember correctly, he stopped to buy a sandwich and then Ferdinand's driver took a wrong turn up the street the assassin had stopped in. He started reversing out, the assassin noticed the car, and that is when he fired into the slowly reversing car.
The most costly wrong turn in history?
Last edited by: SteelSpark on Sat 25 Dec 10 at 14:42
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The Germans would have kicked off anyway probably. John Simpson put it very simply from a documentary about the Balkans, he was interviewing an old lady who was a witness of those times - as he subsequently put it the ripples of Princip's shot are still reverberating now in that region..
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Bizarre fact coming up re the dancer (and clothes remover) Isadora Duncan, the subject of No. 7 in the list of victims above. She died in a freak and horrific accident on the main promenade road in Nice, South of France on St Valentine's Day in 1927. Not many of us here, I wager, will remember the old habit some people had of throwing the longer end of a scarf over the shoulder and tucking it into the belt of their raincoat. Apparently Isadora was a passenger in an open sports car travelling at quite a speed and was strangled by her flying scarf when it became caught in the car's rear axle. Must have been a long scarf. Nasty!
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It was a long scarf. The car was a Bugatti, can't remember the model.
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amilcar
According to Wiki it was an el-cheapo Bugatti
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>> The most costly wrong turn in history?
See? Sat Nav could have saved 20 million people.
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6/ On the On September 13, 1982, Her Serene Highness The Princess of Monaco, Princess Grace, lost control of her Rover P6 after suffering a stroke. The car left the Route de La Turbie in the Monégasque Mountains. Princess Stephanie who was a passenger, survived the crash.
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I'll join in before Z gets them all.
In 1940 the cowboy actor Tom Mix was driving his Cord 812 when he came down a road which had been closed due to a bridge washout.
Witnesses say his speed was something like 80 mph and he was unable to brake enough before ploughing through the barriers and plunging into the river.
A metal case, which he had stowed behind the drivers seat, shot forward crushing Mix's skull and killing him.
The case was fould to contain a huge amount of cash, jewellery and bullion.
A rare car nowadays, I could take you to one 5 minutes away from here, an 812 supercharged open 2 seater. It has been in an acquaintance's drive for 40 yrs to my knowledge !
Ted
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8/ Mary Jo Kopechne was a political campaign worker for Robert F Kenedy. She left a party at Chappaquiddick Island, off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, at 11:15 p.m. with Robert's brother Ted who was driving a 1967 Generation 6 Oldsmobile Delmont 88.
The car plunged off narrow, unlit bridge, landing in upside down in Poucha Pond. Ted Kenedy, managed to escape the scene, leaving Mary Jo to drown. He reported the accident the next morning, claiming he was sober at the time of the incident. He pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, getting a two month suspended sentence.
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Come on, someone else can answer big tits, Q and the drummer!
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"Come on, someone else can answer big tits"
Off the top of my head - 40" 21" 32".
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Jayne Mansfield: Buick Electra. The car went under the trailer of an artic. The accident led to the US government requiring impact bars on the trailers of trucks.
Cozy Powell: Saab 9000. Notoriously lost control of his car at 100mph or so whilst telephoning with his girlfriend. He was also blind drunk and not wearing a seatbelt.
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Q crashed in a Renault Megane with revolving number plates. o the A27 in East Sussex, according to Wiki.
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>> A rare car nowadays,
Cords were always rare Ted. They were expensive and technically unconventional (front wheel drive among other things). They are however to my eye exceptionally handsome cars in a rather offcentre American way, among the best-looking motors ever produced in the US.
There used to be one parked near my day school in Plymouth in the early fifties, in that baby blue colour that suited them so well. I used to take a short detour to stare longingly at it. They were fairly although not super cheap then, worth a king's ransom now though I would think.
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I seem to remember an appalling piece about the untimely end of Princess Grace in the Daily Wail. It completely ignored the circumstances and centred on the fact that she was driving a car made by British Leyland.
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I've loved the look of the Cord since a kid. Wonderful sleek frontal design for its era...
www.seriouswheels.com/images/a_1937_Cord_812SC.jpg
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9 - Desmond Llewelyn (Bond's "Q")
Renault Meganne - head on crash. He was the driver, aged 85.
----
beaten to it by Manatee hours ago... :(
Last edited by: AnotherJohnH on Sun 26 Dec 10 at 14:31
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I think the Cord is a lovely motor - anyone remember the Dr Jason Love books by James Leasor? - but the one word I would never, ever use to describe it is 'sleek'. To each his own...
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Good quiz Ted, well chosen questions.
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>>>would never, ever use to describe it is 'sleek'.
I did say for its era... a period when many headlamps were still pods and rad grilles a slab of chrome and gauze on the front.
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I echo the good quiz - educating and entertaining.
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Likewise. Original too: no Princess of Wales, no James Dean, not even an Albert Camus (anyone remember what he was being driven in when the crash happened?).
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>> , not even an Albert Camus
>> (anyone remember what he was being driven in when the crash happened?).
No? was that a Happy or Sad day?
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>> No? was that a Happy or Sad day?
Sad for the Camus family and that of the driver, one would think.
It was a Facel Vega, a heavy 140mph machine with drum brakes prone to fade in high-speed applications. Like a Mk VII Jaguar but 30mph faster.
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So my little play on dualisms fell on stony ground then.
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Fraid so Zeddo... I still don't get it try as I may. We all have lacunae in our cognitive workings, alas.
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>>We all have lacunae in our cognitive workings
We speak of little else here in the Vale of Aylesbury.
I am most aware of the Facel Vega as one of those cars in my Observer's Book of Automobiles that I never spotted as a child.
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Another Qyiz - RattleandSmoke
