The Stickler Weekly 89 Solution

This week I had planned to tell you about a crossword venture that I got involved with in 2003, then I came across something on the web that changed my mind. Last week I stated that I had to be careful about what I said as a professional crossword setter since my livelihood could depend on it. Well, I’m going to break my own rules and talk about an excerpt from the preface to Mungo MacCallum’s new crossword book published on The Saturday Paper website.
The excerpt presents a potted history of the (cryptic) crossword and MacCallum’s association with it. While I can’t argue with the latter, I can set a few things straight regarding that first period of crossword emergence that resulted in the birth of the cryptic. MacCallum is a professional journalist and no doubt wouldn’t write anything in the media without fact-checking. Wrong statements simply destroy the credibility of the whole piece. MacCallum says:

“He (Arthur Wynne) called it a word-cross puzzle, but the term crossword, as a single term, had been used for at least 50 years before.”

From my research that included reading The Centenary of the Crossword (2013) by John Halpern, a leading UK setter, there’s no evidence to support this. The term “Cross-word” appeared shortly after “Word-Cross” in the New York World, which makes sense since they were the only ones publishing crosswords in the US at the time. MacCallum goes on:

“The modern cryptic evolved mainly in England, and by the end of the First World War it had become a regular event in the major dailies.”

Wow, fire that researcher! This is so wrong, and throws the legitimacy of the whole book into question. Could the same person who wrote this craft a good cryptic crossword? The first crossword of any kind wasn’t published in a UK newspaper until November, 1924. It would be decades in most cases that crosswords appeared daily, up to then it was mostly weekly. The Sydney Morning Herald didn’t publish a daily cryptic until 1954! The cryptic itself doesn’t have a definitive timeline (there’s no first official full cryptic), but cryptic elements were apparent as puns from the early days. It’s safe to say that cryptic components became more widespread in the 1930s (in the UK and Oz mainly) and eventually, over many years, whole cryptic crosswords were produced. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the “rules” (or “old rules” as MacCallum puts it) were put in writing and generally accepted in the book Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword (1966) by D.S. MacNutt.
At this point in my reading of the excerpt I was finding it hard to take anything written seriously. What followed, though, I found offensive, as MacCallum dismissed one of Australia’s crossword greats, Noel Jessop, as simply “a longstanding, if somewhat old-fashioned, stalwart”. He didn’t have the courage or decency to name the man he replaced at The Bulletin. Australia has had only a few crossword pioneers and Noel Jessop is one of them and is entitled to some respect and acknowledgement.
I have to admit I haven’t done a Mungo cryptic since his days in The Bulletin, but if the inaccuracies in this extract are indicative of the attention to detail given to his cryptics (and let’s face it, all crosswords should be accurate), then his book won’t be worth buying.