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Alan Connor discovers how, in 1932, after much sniffing and harrumphing, the Spectator succumbed to the crossword craze
It is nearly 100 years since the crossword as we know it was invented, first appearing in the New York World newspaper in December 1913. It took some time to cross the Atlantic, though, and longer still to establish itself as a pastime which did not need justification or apology.
The newly available Spectator archive tells this story as well as that of any publication. Nowadays, the Speccie is unimaginable without its barred crossword, an intelligent cornerstone of the magazine.
But in 1930, when newspapers and magazines were still tentatively experimenting with the inclusion of puzzles, a Spectator contributor was not so sure. The anonymous author – "a distinguished member of the teaching profession" – writes about the General Paper, an exam set for all members of a school to assess their broader grasp of culture and knowledge as a counter to specialisation. The writer insists that General Papers "supply a 'felt want'" and makes an invidious comparison:
They set minds moving and turn all ages to inquiry in all directions. They perform in a different way the office of the universally popular crossword puzzles, to which even the Times and the Oxford Magazine have condescended.
The Times, indeed, had worried that its readership would find crosswords a touch infra dig and had begun by trialling puzzles only in its weekly international edition. Two months after the General Paper piece, Aldous Huxley writes about the overlap between science and poetry and the pleasure of solving riddles hidden in verse:
I have known such people who, too highbrow to indulge in the arduous imbecilities of crossword and acrostic, sought satisfaction for an imperious yearning in the sonnets of Mallarme and the more eccentric verses of Gerard Hopkins.
"Arduous imbecilities"? Ouch. Another charge against crosswords – their alleged pointless abstraction – appears in February 1931. Reviewing the detective novels of Philip Macdonald, Margaret I Cole writes that Murder Gone Mad does not contain enough emotion to justify the horridness of its crimes:
His detection thus becomes fiddling – doing crossword puzzles – while Rome is burning.
But all this while, the puzzle was gaining in popularity and acceptability. Come September 1932 and page nine of the Spectator contains a think piece by one "JES", which begins by listing some popular crazes such as diabolo and pop-in-taw, and noting that while most fads fade, the crossword "has ceased to be a craze and become a habit".
Is it a bad habit? Not at all, insists JES: the puzzle is sometimes the only bearable part of a newspaper or magazine. Having to read about strikes and revolutions prompts the response: "Oh! take the hateful thing away, hide it under the sofa." Faced with a mad world, the sane man turns to the crossword:
And so, for the next half-hour, the outside world is blotted out. For which relief, considering what the outside world is like in these grinding times, let us be properly thankful. And thankful indeed we are.
JES is not entirely sure where to deliver these thanks, pondering: "Who invented the crossword puzzle? Probably no one could say. It is a truism that the world knows nothing of its greatest men." But the reason for the thanks is clear. Becoming a solver makes you a better person.
The solver is "the master of every science, of every art, of every province of human knowledge", from county cricket to the parts of wireless apparatus: "All is grist that comes to his omnivorous mill."
So puzzles are actually good for you. And in accordance with this more charitable take on crosswording is a small parenthesised announcement at the end of the piece:
[The Spectator will, from next week onward, provide its readers with crossword puzzles.]
Thank goodness for that. And so began a tradition continued in more recent times by the crack team of Jac, Mass and Doc; Columba, Dumpynose and Ascot. One question remains, reader. Do you know who the mysterious "JES" was?
I am a little tempted to imagine that he was Sir James Edmund Sandford Fawcett – the grandfather of Boris Johnson, who went on the edit the Spectator and was the man charged with trying to replace setters with computers while Telegraph deputy editor, but that would be too neat. Wouldn't it?