Finding Friendship and Community Through the World’s Hardest Quiz

The King William’s College Quiz is notoriously cryptic and uncompromising. For twenty-five years, my friend and I tried to get the perfect score.

The average score, they say, is 2.2 out of 180. The two of us, Keir and I, kept playing over the years. We hit 50, then 100. Our numbers crept higher, reaching 178 in 2020. Would we ever get that perfect score?

“Do you know about the King William’s College quiz?” Keir had asked me two decades ago. That’s how our friendship had started, really; Keir asking me did I know about this or that random subject, never with any context.

Keir was originally my upstairs neighbor. He knew me for a bookish type (being a librarian, you get that reputation). This was long before smartphones or even home internet. I would come home from work to find Keir knocking on my door asking did I know about, or have any books on, old movies, or military history, or any of a thousand topics. There would have been a question in the previous night’s pub quiz that had started him thinking, and he wanted to know more. In this instance, when he asked me about the quiz, the answer was no.

There is a private school on the Isle of Man off the English coast, Keir explained, where since 1904 the children have been set a general-knowledge quiz on the last afternoon before Christmas. The quiz is cryptic and deliberately uncompromising. Eighteen rounds of ten questions—two on history and current events, the other sixteen on anything from fictional aunts to prime ministers to the Paris Metro. The theme of each round is up to the reader to discover. Over the vacation, with adult help and access to reference works, the youngsters were expected to research the answers. They would sit the test again in the New Year and—in theory—be amazed by how much they had learned. Though I suspect most of the children really weren’t terribly bothered.

Since 1951 the quiz has also been published in the Guardian newspaper every Christmas Eve. For decades, readers have attempted what calls itself “the world’s most difficult quiz.” One of those readers was Keir; after he introduced me to the King William’s, I was another.

For decades, readers have attempted what calls itself “the world’s most difficult quiz.” 

What makes it such an annual event? What makes it different from other general-knowledge quizzes? In answer, I cite a few of 2021’s questions:

Where does the swan float double?

Who championed the one-armed Sid?

For what was there a reason?

If your response is to think it makes no sense, to wonder how anyone could ever answer questions like these, to experience stupefying bafflement and incomprehension, then it echoes mine when Keir first showed it to me.

But then an answer leaps out, and—surprised at your own knowledge—you’ll think, I know that one! Or you’ll recognize a reference to a novel you’ve read and know that you can take it off the shelf and remind yourself where Horatio did watch Madame Nicolas in the ballet, or whatever. That moment of triumph pierces the fog of incomprehension, and suddenly the question is not a frustration but a challenge. You have one answer. You want more. You’re hooked.

I don’t remember the first question I knew the answer to, but I do remember Keir nodding at me, grinning and growling: “Aha!” He was pleased that I’d solved another question for him but also that I had caught the bug and he had someone to share this annual self-inflicted ordeal with.

Some five years before, Keir had popped downstairs to ask if he could borrow my Tabasco sauce—not for cooking, mind you, but to check the label for where they manufacture it (Louisiana, apparently). It had been a question in the previous night’s pub quiz. This, I thought, was a level of eccentricity I could get on board with. So I asked if I could come along to the next one. As it happened, our team got a perfect score, with a couple of pop-culture questions only I knew the answers to—it turns out that watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a measurable return on investment. So they let me come back the next week. I’ve been playing in that team for twenty-five years now.

That was my introduction to London quiz culture. And Keir—my neighbor, my teammate—and I became friends. Over beers in the pub or cups of tea at home, we talked. I discovered his unselfconscious gift for storytelling, as he’d share bizarre anecdotes about his youth in Hong Kong.

Keir had come from a prosperous family, had enjoyed school, but had somehow never bothered with university. Instead, he was a true autodidact—always hungry to learn, prizing facts and general knowledge across any and all topics, casually erudite about a surprising breadth of subjects. Doesn’t make for the most rigorous scholarship, but it sure as hell makes for someone you’d want on your quiz team.

Our team is called Scum Off the Port Bow, by the way. That was down to Keir. One evening he became convinced that the team seated to their left was eavesdropping to steal answers, and he tried to subtly alert the others. He may have had drink taken at this point. He started repeating the cryptic warning “There’s scum off the port bow!” to his mystified teammates. The phrase stuck, and they adopted it as a team name, usually shortened to the Scum. It’s good to have a little humility. As well as our weekly pub quiz, we played everywhere from Victorian taverns to city wine bars in a tournament run by a London newspaper. Sometimes we traveled even further afield for cash-prize events aimed at hard-core quiz fans.

Keir’s capacity for alcohol on quiz nights could be prodigious—often ordering two beers to everyone else’s one—but he didn’t drink otherwise, and once he stopped smoking his most regular vices at home were tea and chocolate bars. He was a voracious reader, though never novels; “There isn’t time to read about all the real things in the world,” he’d say, “let alone things somebody made up!” He was content to live in the most basic flat or bedsit. As long as it had room for his many books, housed in bookshelves of his own construction—he was a trained joiner, a skill about which he was as modest as he was about so many things. It was only the last time I saw him in the hospice that I discovered he’d once been an expert water-skier.

Keir’s life wasn’t always easy. He had survived three separate run-ins with cancer over the years, his ever-present walking stick in later life a visible reminder of its toll on his health. Bereavement, too. We both lost our fathers far too young. He once mentioned that after long vigils reading to his father at his bedside, he hadn’t even picked up a book since the funeral. For me, I said, it had been my model soldiers—when my dad couldn’t speak, he’d still enjoyed watching as I painted another unit of crossbowmen or knights. By the next pub quiz, I noticed Keir had a book on the table. Meanwhile, I had picked up my paintbrush again.

Eventually the rapacity of our London landlord forced us both out of our building—in my case, to a home on the other side of the river Thames. Of course, I came back for the quiz every week.

When we were no longer living near each other, the King William’s remained a touchstone of our lives and friendship. A text (“it’s out!”) would start that year’s collaboration. After the amiable rivalry of how many we’d each answered on first reading, we’d share our progress in a clipped code (“1.3–4, 11.8,” “5.9 Grenada?”). Working out the theme of a round makes that set of questions a little less cryptic.

When we were no longer living near each other, the King William’s remained a touchstone of our lives and friendship.

The King William’s would best be approached sitting down calmly at a computer for a couple of hours, but this is rarely an option given the time of year it comes out. Christmas with loved ones can be joyful, but it can also be intense and even claustrophobic. There have been times when Keir and I both needed to withdraw briefly from the season’s happy pandemonium. And working with a partner on the quiz gets you, virtually at least, out of the house and talking to a friend. Though being blokes, we let the subtext do the emotional lifting. When we type “3.7 Rigoletto” or “7.5 Mayor of Casterbridge?” what we’re really saying is: “I’m here for you.”

If you’re the sort of person to whom the King William’s appeals, you keep at it, worrying at it in your spare moments like a dog with a bone. As you reach milestones and near completion, each remaining question is a foe that taunts you till you find the answer. Keir and I would get together after Christmas, usually at the first pub quiz of the New Year, and eagerly talk through our progress. Then we would continue to collaborate on it through January until the answers were published. We once considered 150 a good score, but latterly 170 is what we aimed for. That perfect score was still out of our grasp, but there was always next time.

Last year, though, there wasn’t a next time for Keir. One day last summer, in answer to my text checking whether he’d be at the quiz, he responded: “No. In hospital. Moving me to oncology ward tomorrow. Good—view’s much better from there. Hope I get a window bed.”

We spoke on his release from hospital—ten minutes about his illness and an hour about the Tokyo Olympics. I visited him, in his urban aerie lined with books and vintage glassware, as soon as I could. Despite the positive spin he put on his condition, it was apparent how ill he was. Soon he was back in hospital, and from there a hospice. Three days before he died, we were challenging each other to name rivers in Africa. For such had been the language of our friendship for the past twenty-five years.

All the Scum Off the Port Bow attended his funeral in October along with his family, friends from Hong Kong, and a whole busload of coworkers. His chosen farewell music was Nilsson’s “The Most Beautiful World in the World,” reflecting his love of the world, its geography (nobody knew geography like Keir), and its people.

The pub quiz continues. I’m sure we’ve all often thought, Keir would have known that! Or, Keir would have loved this round! But we haven’t said it out loud. Not yet.

At the end of last year, as Christmas approached with its familiar rituals, I realized that the King William’s would be coming out again. It had always been a shared Christmas tradition. I would buy the Guardian each Christmas Eve, treating myself to a few quiet minutes in a coffee shop to make a start on the quiz. On the other side of London, Keir would be at home with his cup of tea doing the same. Soon we would compare answers. But this year, would it be like painting toy soldiers following my father’s death?

On Christmas Eve, I did buy the paper and walk into a coffee shop. I put the newspaper and my notepad on the table and, out of habit, also my phone. Not to research answers—that would feel like cheating on the first run-through—but ready to text Keir my score. When I realized why I’d taken it out, I put my phone away again. I wasn’t sharing a moment with my friend; I was simply the only customer sitting alone in that busy coffee shop.

I came home with the newspaper and a takeaway cappuccino. I sat down at the living room table, and in the pale winter sunlight I opened the King William’s.

And came up with nothing. It made no sense. How could I answer any of these questions? What was the point with Keir gone?

But then an answer leaped out at me . . .I

scored 11 on that first go, for what it’s worth. Not my best start. No message to Keir, or one back from him, anymore. I felt that absence. When I set off to visit family for the holidays, I had my laptop and the quiz in my bag. As I worked on it, I was aware of which questions would have been Keir’s strong suit, would have had me asking him, “How did you know that?” More than once, I thought: “I could have used your help here, mate!”

But I was not alone. My partner, no fan of quizzing but understanding I would be missing my friend, stepped in—and her knowledge of literature made her rather a star player. Her mother, too (“One-armed Sid? That’s Dick Francis’s detective!”). And a friend from games club had been intrigued by my enthusing about this ridiculously hard quiz. While I was out of London, we were exchanging cryptic texts (“18.2 Welsh lamb!”), as Keir and I had. And this year, we got that perfect score of 180.

A new team had formed out of the old one, just as over the years the lineup of the Scum has evolved. A little community of love and friendship, building on what Keir started. The King William’s College quiz has a Latin motto, “Scire ubi aliquid invenire possis ea demum maxima pars eruditionis est,” which can loosely be translated as “The greatest part of wisdom is knowing where something can be found.” Keir knew where to find happiness in what interested him and joy in his friendships. For him, that was the greatest part of wisdom.