![]() After leaving school, he became a bookseller for some years before becoming a biographer and history researcher. Apart from crosswords, my interests are cricket and classical music, and for a very niche market, I wrote two editions of the Malta Bus Handbook in 20 for British Bus Publishing.ĬOLUMBA is Colin Gumbrell. Jean and I have two children, David and Helen, and three grand-daughters, Elise, Imogen and Cressida. Series – solvers may recall that the 2500 th SpectatorĬrossword coincided with our Golden Wedding on Easter Saturday this year. ![]() I have contributed just over 670 puzzles to the Spectator Since 1974 I have compiled definitional puzzles for every issue of The Puzzler magazine, totalling over 2,700 crosswords so far. For many of these periodicals I compile under different pseudonyms Didymus, Maskarade, Gozo, Busman and Anorak. John Graham (Araucaria) had made his own for many years), Financial Times, The Cricketer, Daily Telegraph and New Statesman and my first crossword in the Times was published in early June this year. Our crossword commitments expanded rapidly and so we now work for various puzzle publishers and I now compile for Prospect, Guardian (I was invited to take over compiling the Bank Holiday Jumbo puzzles which the Rev. I took early retirement in 2002, when my wife, Jean, and I established our crossword compiling and proof-reading company. I was appointed crossword editor in March 1999.Īfter completing my degree, and then my PGSE at the University of Keele, I settled in Nantwich in south Cheshire in 1969 where I taught modern languages at the grammar school (later Malbank School) for thirty-three years. Since when I have compiled just over 650 puzzles, one every third week with very few interruptions. My first puzzle appeared in the Spectator forty years ago in July 1981, when Jac invited me to join him and Mass as the new team as from his tenth anniversary compiling for the Spectator. I was born in Birmingham and started my crossword career as a teenager by submitting simple definitional puzzles to the Birmingham Mail’s “Reader’s Crossword” series. For a spell he and his wife, Pat, moved to Spain, but they returned to north Cheshire for their last few years. His chess problems appeared various newspapers and he also contributed crosswords to The Independent and The Listener. He became poet-in-residence in the University of Manchester’s extra-mural department, receiving three national poetry awards. He then settled in the Manchester area and taught these subjects at secondary schools and a tutorial college, before “retiring” to concentrate on poetry, chess and crosswords. MASS, Harold Massingham, was born in 1932 and after leaving Mexborough Grammar School, he read English language and literature at the University of Manchester. Just over ten years later Jac decided to retire having compiled just under 650 puzzles for the series. This happened twice during Jac’s tenure.Īfter ten years Jac decided to reduce his commitment and so Harold Massingham and I were invited to join him in presenting our puzzles in a three-weekly cycle which began in July 1981. Consequently a “Jac-pot” was offered to solvers, so that, should no correct solution be received, that week’s monetary prize would be added to the prize for the next puzzle. Jac’s style was distinctive, quirky and certainly not beholden to the traditional “fair play” cluing style of Ximenes and Alec Robins, say. Many of his puzzles were compiled on 15×15 grids, but during the latter part of his tenure, he moved to the 14×14 patterns which still distinguish our puzzles to this day. His first crossword, entitled “To Hell with it” was on the theme of the wines of Burgundy. For ten years Jac presented a weekly puzzle, the vast majority of which included a set of unclued thematic solutions which were referred to cryptically in the puzzle’s title. In an accompanying editorial on July 3 rd 1971, it was claimed that the series aimed to be “the most sophisticated published anywhere”. JAC’s first puzzle for the Spectator appeared in the magazine exactly fifty years ago today. The name John Adelmare Caesar hid behind the pseudonym Jac who had recently retired from the post of Town Clerk for Rochdale, it is believed. ![]() These puzzles were compiled by Jac who had already established himself during the 1960s as a challenging and inventive setter for the Listener series. During the early spring of 1971, a package of eighteen unsolicited crosswords arrived in the post at the Spectator’s offices in Goodge Street.
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