If you are so excited you need an extra little bit of 2010 British Open trivia to bore the pants off your work colleagues before you set off to Brum for the weekend, what about these…
1. Frank Renton makes it a ‘Triple Crown’ of Scottish contenders at the British Open this year by conducting Whitburn.
He previously conducted Kirkintilloch in 2002, and 2003 and Scottish Co-op as they were then in 2005 (which happened to be the last time he conducted at the contest before this year).
2. Garry Cutt is the only man to have won the British Open at three different venues.
His first success came with Kennedy Swinton in 1989 at the Free Trade Hall, followed by Marple in 1996 at Bridgewater Hall and Foden’s in 2004 and again in 2008 at Symphony Hall.
3. There are two bands with Temperance in their names at the contest this year – Rothwell and Tongwynlais. This is the first time we think since 1999, when Wingates and Rothwell competed at the contest.
4. Do you know that Tommy Dorsey (who the composer pays homage to in the second movement of the test piece), Mama Cass from the pop group ‘The Mamas and the Papas’ and playwright Tennessee Williams, all left this good earth via a misplaced bit of food in the old oesophagus…
The one who got away was the Queen Mum who was admitted to hospital after she almost croaked on a fish bone in 1993.
He (Hooke) was a bit of a hypochondriac, a great imbiber of all things pharmaceutical, and someone who shall we say, rather enjoyed practicing relief from his troubles by himself...4BR
5. The man who inspired the title of the work, Robert Hooke, is also a character well worth seeking out more information on (try Lisa Jardine’s wonderful book, 'The Curious Life of Robert Hooke – The Man who Measured London'.
A brilliant maverick, Hooke was an engineer, surveyor, architect and inventor and who was instrumental in planning the lay out of London after the Great Fire in 1666.
He was a bit of a hypochondriac, a great imbiber of all things pharmaceutical, and someone who shall we say, rather enjoyed practicing relief from his troubles by himself…
Hooke has a law of elasticity named after him (‘The power of any spring is in the same proportion with the tension thereof’) although the great quote that inspires this test piece is not really an original aphorism (that goes back further than Sir Isaac Newton’s letter to Hooke of 1676)
More famously, Newton acerbically stated after their great falling out over gravitational theory that, '…And why should I record a man for the invention who founds his claim upon an error therein & on that score give me trouble?'
He also described Hooke as, 'a man of strange unsociable temper'.
Sounds as if he would have been a great soprano cornet player then...
