A century ago, on 2nd November 1924, the Sunday Express published the first crossword in a British national newspaper.
Devised in America in 1913 by the Liverpool-born Arthur Wynne for the New York World, the cross-word (a printer’s error for word-cross) properly arrived in Britain with the publication in April 1924 of The Cross Word Puzzle Book.
The British edition added a warning: THIS IS NOT A TOY. The following note asks ‘fathers and mothers, uncles and aunts’ to solve half a dozen of the puzzles themselves before passing the book on. ‘You’ll be able to go back to your work in about a week’, it concludes sardonically.
This mischief recognised the scare that the craze had already caused in America (the book sold 350,000 copies in its first year), where publishers of novels, distributors of films and producers of plays were already crying foul, blaming declining sales and audiences on the evils of cross-words. Eminent ophthalmologists warned of the puzzles’ deleterious effect on eyesight.
The first crossword to appear in Britain, in 1922, was probably in Pearson’s Magazine, a fairly highbrow publication carrying pieces by the likes of Maxim Gorky and H G Wells.
Although the Express’s heyday in the late ’20s and ’30s was yet to come, it had already broken the mould. Beaverbrook was an unashamed populist, and he had seen how American papers used the crossword as a way of increasing circulation.
The Sunday Express’s crossword was an adaptation by C W Shepherd of one of Arthur Wynne’s. Shepherd had had to reconstruct the original to exclude an American spelling. It was a small and simple version, seven squares by seven (the number should always be odd in order to give a central square), with 11 clues in each direction. Eighteen of the 22 words were of three letters: BOB, ERA, YEN, EEL and so on, and there were four seven-letter words.
The answer to ‘Eminent political figure’ (clue 3, vertical) was BALDWIN. Stanley Baldwin was confirmed as PM on the Tuesday following the appearance of the crossword. He and Beaverbrook were to become bitter adversaries.
The Express didn’t stay ahead of the game for long. In January 1925, the Sunday Times also began printing a crossword. In July that year, there was a game-changer. Previously, clues had been definitional, with the occasional anagram. Now the Daily Telegraph introduced the first cryptic crossword, composed by Leonard Dawe. Dawe later became notorious for having included JUNO, GOLD, SWORD, UTAH and OMAHA in his crosswords shortly before D-Day.
The Times did not ‘succumb’ until February 1930: the puzzle could now be said to have become a staple, no longer a craze.
True cruciverbalists will know that 2024 also marks the centenary of Russian-language krossvordy, the first of which was composed by none other than Vladimir Nabokov.
The Oldie November 2024
