Forget Wordle and Sudoku… how the Observer’s crossword has stood the test of time | Crosswords

Readers, how might one describe “the angry outburst of a common man who is stumped by a cryptic clue on his birthday”? Answer: Everyman’s anniversary crossword. This weekend, with the sort of opening riddle that would never pass muster alongside our weekly Everyman grid, the Observer is taking time to mark the 4,000th outing of its celebrated, supposedly entry-level Sunday puzzle.

First published in August 1945, Everyman is one of Fleet Street’s most established and beloved crossword challenges and yet has passed down through only six skilled compilers’ hands. This Sunday the occasion is celebrated in a special anniversary layout, featuring an appropriate selection of historic Everyman clues.

In popular imagination, a newspaper crossword was once something chiefly enjoyed by bowler-hatted Englishmen, whiling away a morning commute into town, or by landed gentry applying marmalade to their weekend toast. The truth is they were introduced to these isles from America. Alan Connor, Everyman’s current setter, points out this meant they were initially looked down upon as a silly, low-brow transatlantic distraction.

“Crosswords received a frosty welcome when they first appeared,” he said. “It was felt in the serious newspapers that these puzzles were keeping workers from their toil, mothers from their charges.”

A change in attitude among newspaper editors came, as it often does, with the realisation that crosswords were driving up circulation at the Sunday Express.

Since then the appeal of this neat format of cleverly intersecting answers has withstood incursions from newfangled rivals such as Sudoku, or more recently Wordle, not to mention Candy Crush, so that it remains a favourite pastime for anyone with a love of words and a matching competitive streak.

When the Observer first made space for a puzzle 97 years ago, a new era of problem solving was quickly under way, with the birth of the cryptic clue. This newspaper’s Torquemada set the pace. His brand of advanced puzzle, now compiled by only its third setter, Azed, is still posing tortuous but satisfying problems for devotees. And Everyman also owes it a debt of gratitude, because it was Azed’s predecessor, Ximenes, who came up with the idea for another cryptic companion. This would be a crossword that, in the words of Connor, “might be solved by the beginner, or the lapsed solver, or one who’s simply not prepared to comb through dictionaries for the answers”.

Connor, who has occupied the Everyman seat for four years, only sets one regular newspaper crossword and has a day job writing scripts, books and working as the question editor on Richard Osman’s BBC TV quiz show, House of Games.

The line of succession that led directly down to him from Ximenes, real name Colin Macnutt, includes “kindly classics teacher Alec Robins and tax office head Dorothy Taylor”. After that came the insurance man and keen golfer Allan Scott, and then the bookseller, biographer and history researcher Colin Gumbrell.

Setters have had their trademark quirks, but Connor believes the different eras of the puzzle “do have at least two things in common: a commitment to traditional cryptic grammar and an urge to be solvable – or, as they put it in the 1960s, ‘soluble’.”

“That said, it would be overstating things to say that there has been a uniform Everyman style,” he has said. “I’ve been solving the puzzle since the late 1980s, through three eras with distinct personalities: Scott’s puzzles, for example, are fonder of a classic film or a proper name, as I recall, than those that came after from Gumbrell, or those before from Taylor and Robins.”

It was Taylor who inspired crossword enthusiast Colin Dexter to create a police sidekick for his fictional detective Inspector Morse. Taylor’s pseudonym in print was “Mrs B Lewis”.

And this is not the only link the Everyman crossword has with hit television shows. Connor worked with the creators of the BBC2 series Inside No 9 to create the highly-rated episode The Riddle of the Sphinx. Not only that but, with Connor’s encouragement, the show’s co-star and co-writer, Steve Pemberton, set his own cryptic crossword for the Guardian to accompany the broadcast.

The anniversary puzzle carried in this Sunday’s paper is special in several ways. Not only are all the previous setters’ names referenced, it includes clues from every era, including one from Everyman No 1 and one from last week. “The remaining clues – those needed to hold together the edifice – were compiled by the three surviving Everymans and it was a thrill for me to collaborate with those whose work got me hooked in the first place,” said Connor, justly proud of the challenge they have jointly set.

“The resulting puzzle is perhaps surprisingly consistent, testament to the eight decades of effort in making fair crosswords which will reveal their secrets after a bit of solving exercise,” he said.