The Swinging Sixties Trivia Quiz

Answer:

The first plans for a capital city in the centre of Brazil were made towards the end of the nineteenth century. Nothing happened until an obelisk was erected on a possible site to celebrate the country's centenary in 1922. It was President Juscelino Kubitschek, who took office in 1956, who set the wheels in motion to fulfill his promise of constructing the new city. In April 1960 Brasilia was inaugurated as the capital of the country.

The 1960s was the main decade of the space race between the USSR and the USA. The first man to make a successful space flight was the Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, in April 1961. The Americans were not far behind when Alan Shepherd made a successful trip in May of the same year. Both countries were working hard, aiming to have a man walking on the moon. The Americans achieved that goal in July 1969.

Ian Fleming published "Casino Royale", the first novel featuring James Bond, in 1953. By 1965 there were ten more books in the series. Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman bought the film rights to the series in 1961, and the first film, "Dr. No", starring Sean Connery as the British spy, was released in 1962.

The iconic BBC television SciFi series, "Dr. Who" had its first broadcast in November 1963. Despite an interval of several years without any new programs being made, it celebrated its sixtieth birthday in 2023 and carried on after that. 1963 is also memorable for the assassination of the American, President John Kennedy, which took place the day before "Dr. Who" went on air. Earlier in the year, Martin Luther King, marking the centenary of President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, made his famous speech in Washington D.C., when he declared that he had a dream that the USA would become a nation that had seen an end to racial segregation.

A major feat of engineering was completed with the opening, in September 1964, of the Forth Road Bridge just to the north of Edinburgh. It replaced an old ferry, and was, at the time, the longest suspension bridge in the world outside the USA. 1964 also saw developments in pop culture with the advent of another iconic BBC television series, "Top of the Pops" making its debut in January. The following month saw the start of what became known as the British Invasion, when the Beatles appeared on the American television program, "The Ed Sullivan Show".

In January 1965 the British statesmen, Sir Winston Churchill, died at the age of 90. He had been Prime Minister on more than one occasion, including both throughout most of the Second World War, and also when Queen Elizabeth II ascended to the throne after the death of her father in 1952. Churchill was granted a state funeral by the Queen, an honour normally reserved for royalty. His body was placed in Westminster Hall for three days, when around a third of a million members of the public (including me) filed past to pay their respects. Then he was taken to St. Paul's Cathedral in London for a service, before being taken by boat and train to be laid to rest in the churchyard in the village of Bladon, near his birthplace of Blenheim Palace.

In 1966 England was the host nation for the eighth FIFA World Cup. Sixteen countries played a total of thirty-two football matches in eight different venues around the country during July. The tournament is remembered for the trophy being stolen shortly beforehand; it was returned after being found by a dog named Pickles. It was also one of the first sporting fixtures to have a mascot; a cartoon lion, named World Cup Willie, was dressed in a Union Jack jersey and appeared on promotional material and merchandise. Perhaps appropriately, England won the tournament after beating West Germany 4 - 2 at Wembley Stadium, in a match that went into extra time.

In 1967 a major medical breakthrough occurred with the first successful transplant of a human heart. The pioneering doctor was Dr. Christiaan Barnard who performed the operation in Cape Town in South Africa. Although the operation was technically successful, the patient died less than three weeks later from pneumonia. However it paved the way for further operations, and by the twenty-first century it was regarded as a routine treatment for heart disease.

In January 1968 Alexander Dubček became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Under his direction changes were instigated to improve democracy in the country. There were fewer restrictions on speech, travel and media publications and broadcasts. There were also initiatives to remove some of the central controls on the economy. These were received with serious concern by the leaders of the Soviet Union and some of the other countries in the Warsaw Pact. In August the Soviet Union, Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary sent 165,000 and 4,600 tanks to 'persuade' the Czechoslovakian people to return to the rather more repressed way of life that been the norm before Alexander Dubček's reforms, which came to be known as The Prague Spring.

At the end of the nineteenth century Joshua Slocum, a Canadian born America citizen, made history by becoming the first person to sail single-handedly around the world. the voyage took around three years, and he made a number of different stops along the way. About seventy years later, in 1966, Sir Francis Chichester became the second person to make the voyage, arriving back in the United Kingdom two hundred and twenty-six days after he set off, having made one stop on the way, in Sydney. On 14th June 1968 Sir Robin Knox-Johnston left Falmouth in Cornwall as one of nine participants in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. He returned three hundred and thirteen days later on 22nd April 1969. He was the only competitor to finish the race, and thus became the first person to make a non-stop single-handed circumnavigation of the world.

"Rock Around the Clock" was recorded by Bill Haley and his Comets in 1954 and re-released in 1955. The first artificial satellite was Спутник-1, which is the Russian for Satellite-1, and was launched by the USSR in October 1957; it is commonly referred to as Sputnik. Designed for the British Motor Corporation by Sir Alec Issigonis, the first Mini car rolled off the production line in 1959; it would continue to be made until 2000.

In 1972 the twentieth summer Olympic Games were held in Munich in West Germany; they were marred by a massacre of eleven members of the Israeli team carried out by Palestinian militants. In 1974, following the revelations of what was known as the Watergate scandal, President Richard Nixon became the first American president to resign from his office. Built in 1961, the Berlin Wall was a concrete barrier which encircled the western part of the city of Berlin preventing citizens of the eastern part of the city and the surrounding country of the German Democratic Republic reaching the west; following increasing unrest in the communist Warsaw Pact countries, the East German citizens demanded to be allowed through the wall in 1989, and eventually the wall was torn down, paving the way for the eventual re-unification of Germany.