Charles Williams – an appreciation by Donald Yule, Life President QLL
WQL and MQL Individual Champion 1985
It seems so often these days that my winter’s tale is of a winter’s toll and this season is no exception. News from my friends in the North, this January, was of the death of Charles Williams, founder of the Warrington Quiz league, a past President and Assistant General Secretary of the Merseyside Quiz Leagues and for many years, my skipper. I know there will be amongst QLL those folk who would see Warrington as a “far off country of which we know nothing” but I would ask them to pause a moment, for Charlie was a remarkable guy in many respects and much of what QLL has today stems from his inspiration.
In contrast to many in QLL, Charlie was a Secondary Modern School boy of no academic pretension whatever. A bit of a tear away as a young man, he suffered a life-changing experience when involved in horrific car crash on the East Lancashire Road which put him in a wheel chair for the rest of his life. It was whilst in hospital in Southport that he first came across Team Quizzing and the Merseyside Quiz Leagues and saw that here was a game where disabled and able bodied alike could participate.
In the 1974-75 Quiz Season, back in his native Warrington, he utilised the good offices of the local paper and the MQL to launch a Team Quiz competition in that very competitive town, winning the first ever Cup competition with his own side, St. Augustine’s. As happened in London 20 years later, from a small start there grew a Team Quiz association which could challenge the established order. That was made plain in 1983 when Charlie’s Causeway Hotel side became the first WQL team to win the Merseyside Challenge Cup. Two years later the same quartet had gelled into a formidable side and I have a photo of a very satisfied Charlie and team after completing the 1984-85 WQL League and Cup double.
Making light of his disability, he was a man of many facets: dog breeder, genealogist, authority on Anglo-Saxon England. But he also “did good by stealth”, in that he provided invaluable counselling for others with a paraplegic condition. A spin-off of being in that side was that I learnt a great deal about the problems faced by wheel chair users in the days before “step-free access” became common, knowledge I was later able to use in a career in Charity Management.
Charlie as a quiz team skipper had the attributes of all the good ones I have played with: he could give the bonus to the correct player and also, get a member of his own side “off the mark”. The success of his sides was no accident and, to give a flavour of playing in the “glory days” of Charlie, Olive, Ray and me, I quote from my 2003 publication, Playing From Memory:
“There was one occasion with Charles which I will always cite as the nearest thing to thought transference I ever met. Sat at Number 4, which is where nature intended me to sit, I got a question about the cathedral which is the burial place of Saxon kings. My first reaction was to pass this back up the line to Charles as he knows a great deal more of Anglo Saxon England than this Scotsman does. Realising I was not intending to answer, Charles gave me a hard look which quite clearly said:” Come on Donnie, you know enough, you can work that out!” Getting the message, as it seemed, loud and clear; I stayed with my question and duly got two points for saying “Winchester”.”
Like most of us he was not infallible. Rather like Arthur Askey telling four young men that “Beatles” was not a good name for a group, Charlie didn’t think that Fifteen to One would be a success. Famously, one night, needing one last correct answer for a career first Full House, he passed on the question: Who composed the musical theme: The Dream of Olwen, - to which the answer, of course, is: Charles Williams!
At its peak the league he founded had over 70 teams in five divisions – this out of a local area with a population of less than half a million! But the reason QLL folk should remember this inspirational man – perhaps as their express train flashes through Warrington Bank Quay station – is that he taught me how to play Team Quizzing properly and he brought me in to the Governance of quiz associations. I had that knowledge on board when I came to London and the rest is history – your history.