Tuesday 10 December 2013

Round Britain Quiz

Question: The owner of a goat well known to Val Doonican and the custodians of Top of the Form and Broadcasting House should put you in mind of a famous traveller who walked the Broken Road. Who is he, and what did he do in the war?

Answer: Val Doonican regularly sang the song "Paddy McGinty's Goat". Paddy Feeney hosted the BBC radio and TV schools quiz "Top of the Form". Paddy O'Connell hosts the BBC Radio 4 programme "Broadcasting House". This should put you in mind of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, also known as "Paddy". In 1933, at the age of 18, Leigh Fermor set off to walk across Europe. He later wrote about the first two parts of his journey in the highly regarded travel books, "A Time of Gifts" and "Between the Woods and the Water". In the recently published "The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos" Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron completed the trilogy, putting together early drafts and diary entries kept by Leigh Fermor.

In the war, together with fellow officers in the Special Operations Executive and members of the local Cretan Resistance, Leigh Fermor kidnapped the German Commander on the island, General Heinrich Kriepe. He then took him across the mountains to the south of the island from where he was transported by submarine to Egypt.

The story was later made into a film starring Dirk Bogarde, "Ill Met by Midnight".