CROSSWORDS

In the early 2020s it was the case that the clear majority of crossword-solvers were men aged over 50.

Boiling

In 1934 the Conservative politician Austen Chamberlain (1863-1937) wrote a letter to The Times newspaper in which he claimed that the writer and schoolmaster M.R. James used to time boiling eggs by the amount of time that it took him to do the paper's cryptic crossword. The M.P. stated that James had a strong dislike of hardboiled eggs.

Inopportunely Interesting

During the Second World War Bletchley Park used a The Daily Telegraph crossword competition to recruit potential codebreakers

Just before D-Day a number of keywords appeared in crosswords that were being composed by a schoolmaster. Unwittingly, his assistant had picked up interesting soundings words that were being used on a local Army base.

Location: 135-141 Fleet Street, EC4A 2BJ. The Daily Telegraph Building. (red, purple)

No One Expects

The Observer newspaper has a tradition of having crossword setters who derive their pseudonyms from members of the Spanish Inquisition. Torquemada (the translator and poet Edward Powys Mathers) set the puzzle from 1926 to 1939. He created the cryptic crossword format. His successor in 1939 was Ximenes (the schoolteacher Derrick MacNutt (d.1971) is credited with having refined the format. While Azed (Jonathan Crowther) - an inversion of (Fray Diego de) Deza - is regarded as having taken it to the highest. The last was offered the position after he had submitted to the paper a large X puzzle in memoriam to Ximenes. In the Azed crossword every square is filled in. There are no black squares.

The Groundlings is composed of a group of devoted Azed-solvers. Some of them are established newspaper crossword setters.

Location: King's Place, 90 York Way, N1 9AG (purple, turquoise)

Torquemada

Torquemada was the poet and translator Edward Powys Mathers (1892-1939). He is regarded as having added lateral thinking to the crossword arsenal by inventing the cryptic crossword.

David Backhouse 2024