Solve the first Times crossword

The first Times crossword was published on February 1, 1930. Its compiler was Adrian Bell, aged 28. He was my grandfather. He was the begetter and architect of the cryptic style that has since characterised the newspaper's puzzles. He continued to set crosswords for The Times - nearly 5,000 of them - almost until his death 50 years later.

My grandfather had escaped an unhappy apprenticeship in a London solicitor's office. He felt a powerful call, almost a vocation, to work on the land, so at the age of 20 he left the metropolis to farm a smallholding in Norfolk. He never returned. For the rest of his life he combined his callings of agriculture and writing. His fascination with words had many avenues, and he had no illusions about the enduring character of his puzzles. But if anyone created the institution that is the Times crossword, it was Adrian Bell.

The Times was not the first British newspaper to publish a crossword. That was The Daily Telegraph, with a cryptic puzzle that first appeared in 1925.

Crosswords were an American import. They became an immensely popular pastime in the US in the 1920s, and the formula proved immediately popular in the UK. The Times lost circulation because of the Telegraph crossword's appeal.

Robert Barrington-Ward, chief leader writer of The Times, asked a friend if he knew of anyone to compile this new-fangled entertainment. The friend was Robert Bell, news editor of The Observer and my great-grandfather.

A strong socialist and republican, Robert Bell considered university education a mark of privilege, so his son, Adrian, received no formal education beyond school. My grandfather was, regardless, a voracious reader with a capaciously stocked mind. He thus found himself volunteered to invent the Times crossword. On protesting that he knew nothing of crosswords, his father replied: “Well, my boy, you have ten days to learn.”

The first Times crossword, reproduced on the right, was far from cryptic. It was more of a literal puzzle. But the crossword rapidly assumed the style that, allowing for the various compilers' idiosyncrasies and diverse interests, it has retained. There are conventions that compilers must adhere to if the puzzle is to be regarded as fair by readers who tackle it. But the method is that the clues provide an obscure and deceptive, though logical, route to the answer. One of my grandfather's was “die of cold” (3-4). The answer (inevitably, when you think about it) is ice-cube.

I started doing Times crosswords in my teens, while my grandfather was still alive. His great enthusiasm was literature. His range of reference was prodigious. The only short cut to solving a crossword is to understand how the mind that set it might reason. I at least knew the authors that my grandfather admired, because he inveterately cited them: not only Shakespeare, Thackeray and other mainstays of the canon, but also writers who, to him, would have been modern, such as G.K. Chesterton.

My grandfather made his own small-scale but distinctive contribution to English fiction, as the author of an elegiac trilogy on rural life. He had his circle of admirers, including F.R. Leavis, the literary critic, and Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter. He kept to his death, and we keep still, a stash of letters from British servicemen during the Second World War, expressing the thanks of those facing danger overseas for reminding them, by his words, of the England they wished to preserve.

The photograph above is him is as I remember him, with his mane of white hair and clutching - he was possibly the last man in England to write this way - a quill pen.

As a great classical writer put it, words are physic to the distempered mind. Plays on words, and the intentional misdirection of cryptic clues, are at least the recreation of those who have been thus cured. Adrian Bell has a place in the history of that noble pursuit.

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