This week’s devilishly fiendish Round Blogworld Quiz question (see the previous ones and their solutions here) has been set by expert solver Adelephant. As usual, find the link between these cryptic clues. A point for each item you get, and an imaginary cream bun of regal proportions if you get them all. If you get the link straight off, please don’t give it away too early!
What connects Jane Eyre’s inheritance to: the place where Churchill, Wells and Lord Palmerston socialised. An English novelist named Henry, accidentally baptised Edward. The French insurance company Groupama. And Gossard House?
Clues will be given as necessary, and the solution will appear later.
I knowwwww the answer!!!! stumbled across it
churchill’s favourite venue was the reform club
Good start, Worm. Have you got them all?
Yes, the Round BlogWorld quiz earns its name!
(I’ve only got the Reform Club and Groupama connections at the moment…)
Jane inherited £20,0000 (which, I read somewhere, is equivalent to almost £50 million today).
I think you’d better hit these two cleverclogs with the extra clue we omitted, Adelephant…
E. M. Forster was supposed to have been christened Henry, rather than Edward; but I’m not sure of the connection, unless it’s in the general idea of a passage to India …
Not quite, Jonathan. Here’s an extra one to keep you going:
An actress who worked with Welles, and a native Costa Rican.
Jonathan, I’m not entirely sure, but I think Jane Eyre’s £20 000 would be worth somewhere between 1 and 2 million pounds today.
The Measuring Worth website
http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/result.php
provides a calculator in which various general measures are used to compute the present-day value of historic sums.
If you enter ‘£20,000’ (Jane’s inheritance) and the initial date ‘1840’ you get the following quite interesting estimates of present value:
£1,480.00 based on the retail price index
£2,140.00 based on the GDP deflator
£15,300.00 based on average earnings (2009)
£22,800.00 based on per capita GDP
£53,300.00 based on share of GDP
Incidentally, the present-day value of the £15,000 paid as stipend to the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1896 comes out as a startling £1.294 million, £1.585 million, £7.123 million, £8.900 million, or £13.780 million based on the same measures.
By all of which you’ll see I’m still thoroughly stumped on the remainder of the question.
I’ll vote for this for the whisky.
Gossard House, currently occupied by something called Matrix Corporate Finance, can be found at 7 Savile Row.
No ideas about your actress / Costa Rican at the moment
Very good, though I hope you’ll be stumped by the last one for a bit longer. And the novelist connection.
actress who worked with orson welles – rita hayworth
Not this one.
em forster was a noted reformist and member of reform club
…and there’s also another chap called forster involved
That might be more like it.
Sacked for bringing shaving water of the wrong temperature, leading to the hiring of a certain Frenchman?
Indeed.
True, but not the answer.
That comment came out in the wrong place – I meant it to link to the reform club connection. Now I have just made a confusing web of comments, and you’ll deserve a cream bun if you can work out which ones go together.
it’s just the costa rican that’s stumping me
Mind too addled for these things, but some more Welles gels off which some bright person may spark:
Agnes Moorehead / Dorothy Comingore in Kane; Janet Leigh / Marlene Dietrich in Touch of Evil
None of these, I’m afraid. I’ll give a clue in 10 mins if no one gets it first.
The actress was German, or Austrian, or possibly French.
Romy Schneider, appeared in Welles’s The Trial?
and the Costa Rican?
Still no idea on costa rican!
What a Costa Rican might call himself.
That’s the final clue.
a costa rican calls himself a tico!