Twist in My Sobriety Trivia Quiz

Answer: Xenophon

Xenophon was Greek, and lived and worked during the fifth century B.C. He was a mercenary soldier as well as a scholar and philosopher. His survivng works include essays on hunting and horse riding, and also a history of the last years of the Peloponnesian War.

Answer: Women's Christian Temperance Union

The Evanston, Illinois branch was the first Women's Christian Temperance Union, and the movement's National Association was founded the following year in 1874.
When Annie Wittenmyer was President, the group was solely concerned with promoting abstinence from alcohol, but once Frances Willard took over, the group also began to campaign on various other social issues such as labour laws, preventing prostitution, and helping people escape poverty.

Answer: Australia

The Temperance Movement had gained popularity in Australia since it emerged in the 1870s, but it was with the outbreak of World War I that they gained political and legal backing. Pubs and bars were forced to close at 6pm, the idea being that men would have one or two drinks after finishing work at 5pm, and head on home.

In reality though, men would "stockpile" drinks and guzzle as much as they could in the limited time available. Also introduced in New Zealand, the "early closing" laws differed slightly from State to State of Australia, but stood for many years until the last one was repealed in New Zealand in 1967.

Answer: George Cruikshank

Cruikshank's father Isaac had died an alcoholic and this had a profound effect on George. He produced several booklets including "The Drunkard's Children" (1848) and "The Bottle" (1847) to persuade people to sign the pledge and turn away from "the evils of alcohol".
These were very useful in getting people to join the British Association for the Promotion of Temperance, which had been founded in 1835.
Perhaps Cruikshank's most famous work was the original illustrations for "Oliver Twist", when it was first published in 1838.

Answer: Volstead Act

Andrew Volstead was the chairman of the committee which piloted the Act through Congress, and it was enshrined in Law by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
The law was never enforced very rigidly, particularly in big cities, and "speakeasy" drinking clubs sprang up in their thousands all over the country. The Act was eventually repealed via the Twenty-first Amendment, in 1933.

Answer: Theobald Mathew

Father Mathew, as he was known, founded the Total Abstinence Society in 1838, and over the next ten years over half the adult Irish population signed "The Pledge". The actual wording of "The Pledge" itself reads "I promise to abstain from all intoxicating drinks except used medicinally and by order of a medical man and to discountenance the cause and practice of intemperance".

The certificate my gran has, signed by her in 1927, is beautifully illustrated with 'illuminated lettering' and hand coloured - she thinks this was because it was common to have them framed and hung on the wall at that time (in the north east of England, anyway).

Answer: Poor people

The quote in question is from Sims' 1889 work "How the Poor Live". George was a campaigner on social issues, and one of the first people to hypothesize that rather than the drink leading people into poverty and squalor, it was the poverty and squalor of their lives that drove them to drink.

He maintained that any temperance and/or abstinence movements would ultimately fail unless the root causes behind people's drinking were tackled. Perhaps Sims' most famous work is the poem which begins "It was Christmas Day in the Workhouse" which he wrote for a newspaper article in 1879 to criticise the Poor Law of 1834.

Answer: Working class children

Children could join a Band of Hope from the age of six, and they held weekly meetings along the lines of a youth club. There were games and singing, and even organised day trips to the seaside and countryside which poor city children would otherwise never have visited.

It was felt that if children were raised with the ideal of temperance, they would carry it into adulthood with them, and also that the children might be able to influence their parents to abstain from alcohol too.

Answer: Wales

The Sunday Closing (Wales) Act was enacted into British Law in 1881. It was the first piece of legislation since the sixteenth century to apply only to Wales. The Act did however exclude the Welsh county of Monmouthshire from its provisions and it was only during World War I, in 1915, that it was applied there too.
The Act was viewed as a mainly 'religious' measure and well received by the mainly nonconformist congregations of Protestant Welsh churches. It stood until 1961 when it was repealed and Wales was brought into line with the rest of the UK under The Licensing Act.

Answer: Lemonade Lucy

It was Lucy Hayes who first started the tradition of the now famous Easter egg roll on the White House lawns each year.
She was also the first First Lady to have studied for and gained a degree, from the Wesleyan Women's College in Delaware.