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Over our fourteen and a bit years, the family of the Five Towns Quiz League has sadly seen some of its greatest
stalwarts move on to the great quiz in the sky. Here are the ones we know about and a bit about them.
If you know of any other former FTQL players who deserve to be in this section then let the Secretary know.
Obituaries written by Simon Curtis
David Marsh - David was a founder and stalwart member of the Junction team which has now
spent every single year of the Five Towns Quiz League in Division One. He played every match in the 1991-92 season,
our first season and was generally known as a very knowledgeable player and a very nice guy. David passed away in the
summer after our inaugural season and an amount of the money he left was used to buy a beautiful silver salver, which is now
competed for as the curtain-raiser to the Five Towns Quiz League season, normally between the League Champions and the Knockout
Cup winners.
David's family have attended the Charity Shield match every year since its inception in 1992 and have presented
the winners with this fine trophy, which by tradition never leaves the Junction (apart from the odd six months when I leave
on a shelf in a trophy shop after engraving!)
Linda Yelland - Linda played for the Redhill Hotel quiz team, captained by our
Committee member Brenda Clayforth, in their Division Two Championship season of 1994-95. She was a virtual ever-present
in that side, before sadly succumbing to cancer in 1997.
The Five Towns Quiz League was privileged to be given permission to send a wreath to Linda's funeral and
for the 1997-98 season, when the Carlsberg Tetley Handicap Cup was introduced we were very pleased to give the new cup the
name "The Linda Yelland Trophy", the final of which has been played every year at Castleford Anglers. The trophy was
presented to the winning team for the first three years by Linda's husband Paul.
Steve Crew - Steve was not an FTQL player at any time, but he was co-founder of the quiz
solutions company Wise Old Owls, whom the Five Towns Quiz League retained for three years in the mid-1990s to set our questions.
Steve Crew really was the nicest man you could ever wish to meet, and he was also no mean quiz player himself, being leading
light in the Redoubt Inn team of Wakefield. Steve's big principle was the issue of fair play in quizzes and he founded
Wise Old Owls in 1992 or so along with John Rowbottom to tailor questions for the Tetley Quiz League, but when that league
sadly folded in 1996, he and John carried the league on, on an independent basis until Steve's death from cancer in 1999 when
Chris Jones inherited the company name. The Wise Old Owls League carries on to this day and holds a Steve Crew memorial
quiz night every January. Steve Crew is probably the best quiz setter I have ever met and he is fondly remembered in
the Five Towns Quiz League.
 Peter McVeigh - Peter McVeigh, like Steve Crew, was one of life's nice guys. I knew
him myself from the very early 1990s when I used to talk to him about quizzes and cricket and things like that, at the Spread
Eagle pub quiz night in Darrington on Monday nights (yes, before the FTQL started). Peter played later in the 1990s
for the Rustic Arms B team when the Rustics first entered teams in the Five Towns Quiz League. Peter was acknowledged
to be one of the best players in the league and I well remember how devastated we all were, including of course his lovely
wife Elaine, when he passed away a while after a successful operation in 2001.
As I said at the time in the obituary I wrote for the league at the time, it always seems to happen to the
nice guys, and if there was one thing that every single person I have known who met Peter McVeigh agreed upon, it was that
Peter McVeigh was one of the nice guys.
Christine Szmyt - Christine, like David Marsh of the Junction, was one of what we in the
Five Towns Quiz League like to call our day one'ers. She was Captain of the Golden Lion/Cartners Arms/Hope & Anchor
team who along with the Station Hotel were so dominant in the league in the early and mid-period days. Christine was
a very strong-willed and independent person, who didn't take kindly to being told that, as I recall from one incident recited
to me by Keith "the Cardigan Man" King, "Szmyty's wife has won the quiz", and she was apparently heard to counter with "I'm
a person in my own right you know!". When Christine passed on, another victim to cancer, not too long after Peter
McVeigh, in 2002, several of us went to her funeral and attended a very moving service at All-Saint's Church and also
at Pontefract Cemetery. Another one of nature's nice-guys, Christine Szmyt is keenly remembered and sorely missed by
the Five Towns Quiz League.
Shaun Flanagan - Well what can I say about Shaun? He was simply my best mate, and
easily the best and most loyal friend I've ever had. His death aged only 38 on 21 June 2003 was such a terrible personal
tragedy to me that I realised at that time that I have never ever experienced such a feeling of loss and bereavement in my
life before, regardless of how many funerals I had been to at that point. Shaun died in the Wakefield Hospice a week
and a half after complications having suffered a heart stoppage in Pontefract Infirmary, caused by an undetected heart condition,
Cardiomyopathy. This one single incident in the lives of the people close to Shaun made me realise how you really can
be here one minute and gone the next and it prompted me to do something I never thought I had in me prior to that, and I wrote
a book about it. We also introduced the Shaun Flanagan Memorial Quiz Night in his memory, played yearly at
the Albion Street WMC (the Irish Nash) in Castleford. Shaun was a devoted family man, a hard worker, a wonderful dad
and a top mate. I realise now why some people take twenty or thirty years to cope with loss, and sometimes never
at all. Shine on you crazy planespotter.
If anyone sees anything here that they think is wrong,
offensive or inaccurate or if any of the above people's families would like it removed completely then please let me
know (07903 876450) and I will of course do exactly what you ask. My intention here was to pay tribute to these people.
I hope I have succeeded in everyone else's eyes as well as my own...
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