Competition time (3)

The competition has proved a jolly enough distraction and made it a good deal easier to keep Salut! active during my week in London.

Mary Black, one of De Dannan's ladies
Picture: ca1951rr

There is still time to enter. As one of those who has already done so said to me, finding the answer to the question I set does not require a huge amount of research.

I will announce the results next week. The competition closes at 6.30pm French time on Wednesday and I will make a random selection from the correct responses received at colinrandall2001@yahoo.fr by then.

The encouraging trickle of replies reminds me of a short period at that Other Place when I offered prizes linked to my journalistic sideline of writing about folk music.

On the first occasion, I rather optimistically made the question harder than was wise for a mainstream publication: name each of the women who, up to that point, had served the Irish band De Dannan as lead singer.


I think there were only four replies. One reached me from within the newspaper office where I worked, two arrived in identical writing on postcards sent from the same town and the fourth collected the prize.

This was before the internet age, which has pretty much removed the slog from finding the right (and yes, sometimes wrong) answers to most questions.

So for my next little contest, I posed a relatively simple Fairport Convention question (which member of the original line-up was still in the band?) and the letters and cards flooded in.

Consider the hurdles. You had to buy the paper, open the section, locate the small listings item mentioning Fairport, read it, know the answer, care a jot about the prizes (four pairs of tickets for the band's annual Cropredy festival), bother to reply.

About 150 did. It seems a small number given the circulation of the paper at the time - well over a million - until you look at hoops listed above.

Simon Nicol, Fairport old lag
Picture: bruciebonus

I wish to this day that I had not been pompous enough to disqualify the wag who said he was replying only because he was sure there couldn't be three other Fairport fans among the Telegraph readership.

You'd need to do a lot worse than that to be thrown out of Salut!'s competition.