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About the MQL Archive

About the MQL Archive

One of my main motivations for creating this website was to provide a comprehensive and easily–accessed archive of past results and tables. My main interest is obviously in the details for my own team, but I reckoned that at least some people in other teams must be equally interested in their own past records.

All the historic details we have are now on the website. But there are still gaps, particularly from the early years.

The Information Superhighway is part of all our lives now; but the 1980s were a different world. A lot of the material was hand–written, or produced on a random daisy–wheel printer in someone's office; the format was variable, and so was the standard. There was no electronic copy – at least not in any consistent format – and documents were far less likely to be preserved. Consequently, information concerning the early years of the League is thin on the ground.

The origins of Macclesfield Quiz League seem to lie in a knockout competition that was held in 1981. We have a record of the winners; their team name is engraved on the trophy! (It was the Waters Green Tavern.)

The 1981 knockout seems to have been a great success, because it was followed by a League competition that began in January 1982. The only record we have of this is a set of rules; we have no fixtures or results. But the League does seem to have been established as an annual competition from that time onwards. We have fixture lists for seasons that took place in 1982–3, 1983–4 and 1984–5.

The earliest results we have are for the final round of matches in the 1985–6 season. We have the final League and Individual tables (not quite final in two cases, and the earliest Individual tables are Top Ten only in some cases) from that season onwards.

We have results from the final matches of the five seasons that followed 1985–6, and for one of those (1988–9) we actually have results for nine of the eighteen weeks of competition. For 1991–2 we have results for all but three weeks, and for the following three seasons (up to 1995) we have our first complete sets of results.

Even in the late 1990s there are still a few gaps, and it's only since 1999 that complete records have been preserved.

If you want to explore the Archive, the Archive Menu might be a good place to start.

For details of what we have and what we don't have, please refer to the Archive Summary page. If you have anything from before 1999 that isn't on the website, please let me know!

Thanks to Andy Johnson, Robin Morrell, Tim Findlow, Alan Gilday and Graham Bailey, who have provided information so far – and of course Mark Watson, the custodian of the official League archive.

Haydn Thompson

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