The House of Lords has not always met in its current chamber. Parliament went up in flames in 1834. A new building was designed, the work of Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin, and that is the Palace we see today. In the interim, the Commons met in the chamber of the House of Lords, the walls being strong enough to allow a temporary chamber to be constructed. The Lords met in the ruins of the medieval Painted Chamber. This week’s quiz focuses on the places where the House of Lords has more recently met. As usual, the first two readers to supply the correct answers will be the winners.
1. On occasion during the Second World War, both Houses met away from the Palace of Westminster. Where did they meet?
2. The chamber of the House of Commons was destroyed by enemy bombing on 10 May 1941. The House then met in the chamber of the House of Lords until the rebuilt chamber was opened in 1950. During this period, where did the House of Lords sit?
3. During the occupancy of its temporary home from 1941 to 1950, what arrangements were made for divisions in the House?
I suspect the third question will prove the difficult one, so feel free to submit answers to the first two in case no one comes up with the answer to the third. If no one answers the third correctly, the winners will be the two readers to answer correctly the first two questions.

1) Church House
2) The robing room
3) No idea
1. Church house
2. Robing room
3. Temporary lobbies were installed?
1. The Church House Annexe
2. The Lords used the Robing Room
(still looking into #3)
1. Church House, Westminster
2. The Robing Room
As Lord Norton predicted, the third is proving tricky.
3. They fitted the Robing room with temporary division lobbies, at least according to http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/building/palace/architecture/palace-s-interiors/robing-room/
1) Church House
2) Robing Room
3) ?
I’m sure there was a BBC Parliament programme about this. Apparently Church House was a complete maze for Black Rod to navigate at the State Opening of Parliament.
1) Church House
2) Robing Room
3) Temporary division lobbies through the use of screens
1) Church House annexe
2) The Robing Room
3) Makeshift division lobbies were erected in the RR.
1. Church House
2. The Queen’s Robing Room
3. Temporary lobbies were erected in the Robing Room (according to the Parliament website, anyway)
I have to say you guys are hot at this game. I always have to take a back seat. LOL
I rather agree with maude elwes – a very impressive response. The answers are indeed Church House, the Robing Room, and the creation of temporary screens in the Robing Room. As far as I know, the only reference to the screens is on the page on the Parliament website. It can also be seen on a picture in the Palace of Westminster, showing the Lords in the Robing Room, but that has a more restricted audience!
Tini and Dave H are, then, this week’s winners. Tini got in by guessing that there was a temporary screen and Dave H’s research came up trumps before Michael, Rich and Jonathan got in with the three answers.
I got close once or twice before realising that (a) there was a page specifically dealing with the Robing Room and that (b) it contained the answer. You can see from the timestamps that it took me almost half an hour.
Isn’t a bit ‘old-fashioned’ to hold Quizzes on the same base as used to be the purpose of university-‘education’ ?
namely not to be learning all the answers but rather memorising where to reasonably-quickly find those answers ?
I am still trying to see how this kind of inward-and backward-looking House of Lords Quiz can claim to be “democratic”, or even “citizenry-educative” –
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Furthermore, 13 hours is a totally insufficient timeframe for The People to make participation –
Lord Norton effectively ‘guiillotines’ the thing after the first-two correct answers are received by him –
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and in this Topic of ‘parliamentary meeting places’, surely the first Place that Parliamentarians meet has to be around Virtual-Round-Tables –
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and even more surely it is around a numerous-sufficiency of progressively lateral and vertical v-r-t’s that Democracy needs to be increasingly meeting,
unforgivingly towards our Constitution and Parliaments
because their only ‘interactive-reach-out-educational’ for Public-Participation is this Lord Norton’s weekly LotB Quiz quite narrowly focused upon the esoterics of the House of Lords
and because computer-e-site-networking has long been an effective Instrument for achieving CPD (Continual-Participatory-Democracy)
but continues almost totally ‘squatted’ by individually-capitalistic-opportunity-hedonism-&-sales-pitches,
and continues as negativisingly-effectively neglected by Participatory-Democracy and Lifeplace Individual Human Development educationists.
Where is the democratic discussion, about these full-ish things ?
milesjsd: The clue is in the title: it’s a quiz.
There’s nothing to stop you from not looking at the answers on the page until you think you’ve found them for yourself.
As for the nature of the skills, to misquote something: It’s not what you know, it’s where you know.
It’s not fair! Dave’s good at everything!
Sadly that’s not true, I can’t draw and I’m hopeless at foreign languages to name but two areas.
The quiz is good fun, although one week I was trying to explain to my son how I go about it and it’s actually quite difficult to pin down the thought processes. I guess it’s just down to years of practice and experience to generate the gut feel of what to try next if a trivial query fails to get results. I was taught at school how to use a dictionary and an encyclopaedia, I think the modern generation needs to be taught how to use a search engine.
It’s a good thing Welsh is no longer on the agenda in Westminster then Dave, being foreign to most Welshmen, as well as nearly all English men.
Knowing which search engine terms to use is an interesting subject; knowing the values of the
suffixes dot edu, dot ac, dot org and so on, these three being some of the best ones, and also knowing the unlimited nature of the hundreds of millions of wiki/pedia (and so on) entries, is also of great value.
I think wiki uses the PRE-fix of en dot to give it its credence, rather than www dot but I am not sure about that.
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Completely off topic and slightly commercial
although not ‘arf as commercial as “T8itter” and “T8eet” (rather Frankie Howerd would you not say)….. OT, the AMAZON E-READER must be state of the art for the mini-laptop/tablet/e-reader market now.
No cost 3 mobile link up to download books,
AND Wi-fi, a library of 1/2m books, probably not much good, but a library none the less.
I have successfully identified in that, a cheap no cost gizmo, for a 17 school child, totally flumoxed by the high cost of laptops and other apparatus, monthly charges and so on, (£30pm for the connection alone)so that he may at least become familiar with the humanities and social sciences, however poor he is. PDF may also be downloaded.
Having govt websites linked in school text books can be no encouragement at all to a young person who has no computer and only the text book to work from.
The AMAZON KINDLE E-reader will do nothing to DIS-courage learning, by the poor and under privileged, as would otherwise happen.
The mathematical sciences do require a working laptop pc.
Lord Norton posts at 10:58, Len replies 2 minutes later. Almost Putinesque.
I’m not sure how to respond to that, but I will say that if Twitter is as much an asset to Putin as it is to me, I will be amazed.
Len, absolutely nothing personal, I promise!
Len,
Probably not. But you never can be entirely sure I suppose:
https://twitter.com/#!/MedvedevRussia/following
“Lord Norton posts at 10:58, Len replies 2 minutes later. Almost Putinesque.”
Now if only he replied at 10:57 we could phone cern and tell them not to worry about redoing their neutrinos experiment!
😀
“the ‘clue’is in the ‘title’ ‘quiz’
mehopedfor a Democracy response not a strawmum’d Quizocratic stall
dew re-spects