Grand finals puzzles and solutions

Three contestants finished within seconds of each other 38 minutes into the final of The Times National Crossword Championship in Cheltenham yesterday.

For the next 22 minutes the trio sat silently in the hall on the University of Gloucester’s Park campus, resigned to their fate, unsure of their answers and ignorant of the result.

Helen Ougham, the holder, finished first, having completed the three puzzles shown on this page in 37 minutes and seven seconds.

But Peter Biddlecombe, the champion in 2000 who was 41 seconds behind her, was declared the winner after Ms Ougham made two mistakes. The third contestant to finish, nine seconds behind Mr Biddlecombe, was David Howell, the 1997 champion.

They were put out of their misery at the end of the allotted hour when Mr Biddlecombe, 47, a computer analyst from Buckinghamshire who runs a crossword-related website and a blog devoted to The Times crossword in his free time, was declared the winner.

Mr Biddlecombe takes home the silver trophy, which he held for six years from his last victory until the championship was revived last year, and a cheque for £1,000.

The field of 136 at the start of the day was whittled down to 24 through a preliminary round. Mrs Ougham, 51, was one of only two women to make the final which also featured a knight, a hereditary peer and a young RAF pilot. She had found herself stuck on two clues that she knew she would never work out. “I had semi-educated guesses, so I decided to put them in and have done with it. One of them was something to do with cricket.”

Across the hall Mr Biddlecombe was unaware that anyone had finished. He surprised himself by handing in his solutions without checking them. “I always tell people that the 20 seconds it takes to do that rarely matters. But I didn’t really follow my own preaching today. As soon as I got the last two clues the paw went up and it was probably just as well.”

Mr Howell, 54, a maths teacher from Leeds, was right behind him having survived a “mental block” brought on by the pressure of the final. “Crossword-solving is almost an unconscious activity when it’s going well. If that isn’t happening it becomes a real uphill struggle.”

Twelve of the contestants in the final produced perfect solutions to the puzzles, which most felt were fiendishly difficult, but fair. The winning time was six minutes slower than last year.

Richard Browne, the Times Crossword Editor, insisted that the puzzles were no harder than the ones that regularly appear in the newspaper, although he conceded that they were the work of “three of our tougher compilers”.

Although some enthusiasts maintain that the Ancient Egyptians designed crosswords, the modern version of the puzzle first emerged as a parlour game in the US and mid-19th century Britain and became a craze in the US after newspapers began publishing them in 1913. At one point it was said that American readers were spending five million hours a day on crosswords – more time than the nation was losing through labour strikes.

The Times Crossword was born on February 1, 1930, six years after the paper mocked crosswords as “the pastime of a few ingenious idlers”. It soon became an institution, fretted over by Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee and Montagu James, the former Provost of Eton, who would finish it before his egg was (soft) boiled.

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