Times 220677 – 1977, a year best forgotten?

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I can’t say I jumped for joy when I saw I was blogging another ‘oldie’ this morning (I’ll also blog the 3rd TC Qualifier and post it when the closing date has passed). 35 minutes later, I was just as unenthusiastic; I’d finished the puzzle and submitted a correct solution, but derived little pleasure from it and suffered some frustrations in finding succinct explanations for some of the answers. Maybe the usual suspects can hone it in places.
In 1977 I was living and working in idyllic Co. Tipperary and relying on an occasional copy of the Irish Times, with its fine Crosaire puzzles, to keep the little grey cells ticking along. Much of the doom and gloom in Britain passed me by. I see it was the first year in which the UK held the Presidency of the EC and also when Roy Jenkins left the post of Home Secretary to become President of the Commission. Manchester United were suspended from the European Cup-winners Cup after English fans rioted in Saint Etienne. So, not much has changed.

P.S. the last Down clue in the qualifier today wins the Snowy Owl award for topicality!

Across
1 FRAME-HOUSE – A cryptic definition, of a sort. Perhaps frame houses were a new idea in 1977, more top of mind?
9 NON-EGO – Well, if all stay, NONE GO, and NON-EGO is a metaphysical term for everything which isn’t the EGO. Sounds reasonable to me.
10 TWINKLES – Nathaniel Winkle, chap in Pickwick Papers, inside ST reversed; D star performance. A clue which would pass muster today.
11 OLD HARRY – Well, I’d heard of OLD HARRY as a term for the devil, so biffed it, but I don’t clock the My Hawk senior part.
12 PEER – Double definition.
13 TENDERLOIN – I biffed this defined as ‘joint’; afterwards I looked it up and found it’s a slang term for the red light district of an American city, no doubt some of our Transatlantic regulars are au fait.
15 JOHN DOE – JOHN DONNE loses N N being two points; D man in an old suit. Not a usage I’d heard of.
17 HARLECH – H for hard, each side of (CLEAR)*; a well known castle in Wales.
20 RATTLETRAP – A rattle trap would catch a rattlesnake; D old crock.
21 NETS – Cricket references were of course rife in 1977. A double definition, where you practice, and ‘brings an automatic return’ as in financial gain. Also perhaps, STEN automatic gun reversed?
23 TELLURIC – (RITE CULL)*, D of the earth. From the Latin, Tellus, earth.
25 CLASHING – C = many, LASHING = whips active, D for the Opposition?
26 VIENNA – Not much seen these days, I remember a Vienna steak as a sort of burger coated in a gooey onion or mushroom sauce. And Vienna is a capital city.
27 RHINESTONE – A false diamond, originally made from rock crystal, now coloured glass; were fortune teller’s crystal balls made of rhinestone? Ah, one of our Anon contributors has pointed out way below, it’s an anagram of SEER NOTHIN(G).

Down
2 REWIRE – In 1977 you could wire (telegram? Telex?) someone with a message; and rewiring could improve the flow of current.
3 MANDARIN – My FOI, double definition.
4 HELIOTROPE – Thomas E Stearns was ELIOT; insert into H OPE to get the name of this flower.
5 UNSOUND – UN for A French, SOUND for strait, D unreliable. I think a sound and a strait are not always the same thing, a strait has to be open at both ends while a sound need not be, but it can be.
6 ENID – Dine, reversed, D girl.
7 FEARSOME – (MORE SAFE)*; D frightful.
8 POLYANTHUS – Another plant clue. Sounds like POLLY, ANN and then THUS = this way; D flower.
12 PEJORATIVE – (PRIVATE JOE)*; D a disparaging word.
14 EXASPERATE – SAXE is a pale blue-grey colour; reverse it and join on (PETER A)*, anagrind ‘new’; D to vex us.
16 HOTELIER – D innkeeper. If you make an anagram of HOTELIER and OP (work) you can make heliotrope, as in 4d, I think this is what is going on.
18 LONG SHOT – D outside chance, cryptic definition, why Tom?
19 GRACCHI – The brothers Gracchus, plural Gracchi, Gaius and Tiberius, were tribunes in Rome in 2nd century BC; GR for Greek, AC for account, CH I for chapter one. It was another gap in my classical knowledge, but wordplay alone did it.
22 TANNIN – ANN = girl inside TIN = money; D in-maker. Apparently you can make a primitive ink from tannic acid and iron sulphate, known as iron gall ink.
24 REAR – Double definition; last thing, and bring up, as in a child being reared.

34 comments on “Times 220677 – 1977, a year best forgotten?”

  1. Well, I enjoyed this.. particularly being able to finish it! It is basically sound, and the relative looseness I find pleasing, it gives the imagination a proper workout and makes a change from the Ximenean straitjacket we are in today.
    re 11ac Pip, Harry the Hawk is a character in Dr Doolittle. So it is a triple def.. swearword, Doolittle character, and the devil.
    I was a bit surprised to see John Doe, since he (and Jane) are mainly an American usage, though English in origin.
    I think nets/Sten refers to the gun.
    1. Oh and I forgot to say, re 18dn, a Long Tom is a name for various kinds of naval and field artillery, including a WWII field gun. I knew it from reading Hornblower books
      1. Thanks Jerry, your eclectic knowledge of Dolittle films and C S Forester serves you well!
  2. … more than most retros.
    There are shades of Xim. creeping in. No?
    Needed a bit of help to finish. And email-a-pal explained TENDERLOIN.

    One day I’ll find a way to use OLD HARRY as a swearword.
    Thought I knew them all!

    Why do fortune tellers have glass babies?

  3. Enjoyed the different challenge, as always, though I needed aids a few times. It was Plants 1 – Sotira 1. I assembled HELIOTROPE alright but needed help with the POLYANTHUS.

    Enjoyed the HOTELIER / HELIOTROPE device, and the weird NON-EGO

    Thanks to Pip — above and beyond — and to Jerry for answering my (and Pip’s) remaining questions.

  4. Yeah, I enjoyed it too. Good to break free occasionally of the “Ximenean straitjacket”, as jerrywh says. In 1977 I was living and working in idyllic New England, Australia, relying on The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian Weekly. A memorable non-Ximenean clue from the SMH, “Pig van? (5,6)”.
  5. 19 min, but two errors: having put CLASHERS at 25ac, assumed THERIN was a sort of squid for 22dn.
    For 11ac, I thought of Harry Hawk, who went to Widecombe Fair on Tom Pearce’s grey mare.
    1. Golly, that *does* take me back.. my father, who was as strait-laced a retired old-fashioned bank manager as you could find.. think, a taller Mr Mannering … somehow had acquired all the lyrics to that song and was prone to singing them, all the verses, whilst driving, especially if we were driving down to Devon where his parents lived..
  6. Ah well. I stared at this for a full half-hour and got one single answer. Given how many unknowns there are here — in the clues and the answers — I think it’s fair to say I wouldn’t have finished this given all the time in the world.
    1. I know what you mean but really they are not harder, only different. You need a freer-flowing mind, and then they come… I promise, you would get used to them in time and might even come to prefer them, as I do. Please don’t just dismiss them out of hand as some here do
      1. I haven’t done too badly on a couple of the previous vintage puzzles. However, I’d say about half of the clues in this one rely on knowledge that I just don’t have, which made it pretty impenetrable. Bear in mind I count it a good day when I finish a modern Times cryptic in under an hour!
  7. Ah, 1977, I was 2 years old! I don’t recall whether I did this crossword at the time, possibly not as I was travelling around the USA in a Volkswagen Beetle with my nomadic hippy parents, if the stories are to be believed. I do like these retro ones, but you don’t have to take them too seriously, they’re just a fun blast from the weird and wonderful land that is the past…
  8. I got through this with one resort to aids re TELLURIC to kick-start having got stuck in the SW corner. I had a few unparsed, mostly the same as our blogger. I’d have persevered with them in a modern puzzle but these old clues with their loose references are rarely worth the effort. I think Jerry has covered them all now and I doubt I’m going to be needing them again.

    Wouldn’t a device that traps a rattlesnake be a rattlertrap?

    Edited at 2016-06-22 09:25 am (UTC)

  9. I quite enjoy these now and then too. I just thought “harry” was a loose reference to a kind of hawk known as a harrier – didn’t know the Doolittle character. Yes I’m sure Pip and Jerry must be right about the sten gun. Chicago, L.A. and San Francisco have all had their tenderloins – for some reason NYC doesn’t, at least not so-called although everyone knows about Times Square and 42nd St. NYC was a lot grittier in 1977. That year here was memorable for the Great Blackout in July. We had to climb 16 floors to our apartment but considered ourselves a lot luckier than some… 20.36
  10. Solving via The Times app, I had no inkling that this was a 1977 puzzle until coming here. Some slightly odd clues through modern eyes but not too far away. I would have attempted this (but probably not completed it) in 1977 as I was working in Cambridge coming up to my final professional exams. The crossword was an essential part of the day. Good to see that by 1977, the ‘missing word quote’ clue had disappeared. 17:48
  11. I concur it’s quite interesting to have this sort of challenge occasionally, even if it involves a certain amount of thinking “Was this conceivably A Thing in the 1970s?” and thus safely negotiating a world of Vienna steaks – also a world in which a Times solver is expected to be familiar with all 4000 peculiarly-named characters from Dickens. Luckily, when this was first published, I hadn’t yet graduated from The Puzzler magazine to this sort of thing.

    (also if I may point out a minor typo, Pip, the Gracchi were BC rather than AD. My tutor, from whom I learned much of what I know about crosswords, wrote a book about them – rather less of which has stuck in my memory).

    1. AD BC corrected, apologies, my tutor wouldn’t have heard of the G brothers unless they were early biochemists…
  12. I was like gothick_matt in that I stared at this for ages before the answers slowly yielded, by just plain guessing for a start. These old ones definitely have a different feel to them, and I found some of the “free form” clues very frustrating, eventually missing out on OLD HARRY and TENDERLOIN. Still there were some v. good clues, including REAR (could also almost be seen as a cd as in ‘to bring up the rear’) and NETS.

    Time for the DeLorean home I think.

    Thanks to blogger and our 1970’s setter.

  13. I was living in Offord D’Arcy near Godmanchester and commuting daily into London from Huntingdon via yellow VW Beetle and 125 first-class with breakfast with three colleagues and John Major in the corner. We had 42 minutes to finish the Times and have a peep at the Telegraph or Guardian whichever was to hand. Only once in fourteen years did I complete The Times and The Telegraph in one journey.

    Today 31 minutes – absolutely loved this retro – but I carelessly put in 23ac as TULLERIC thinking of JETHRO TULL as man of the soil(rather than flautist of the period)!

    Clue of yesteryear 10ac TWINKLES – you had to know your Pickwick back then! WOD Heliotrope – the colour of Tony Hancock’s car – which had white-wall tyres!

    horryd – Shanghai

    PS Congratulations to Verlaine for yesterday’s under four minutes! We are not worthy!

  14. I was pleasantly surprised to make it through this with only two errors – TULLERIC and VARLECH. This was much more accessible than some of the old examples which appear in place of the qualifiers, but I’ll still be more than happy to slip back into my Ximenean straitjacket tomorrow!
  15. Did a lot of the Times crossword in 1976, but not sure it helped with this one. Dnk TENDERLOIN, and biffed TINSELTOWN. Also missed on CLASHING. Mystified still by Tom. A nice change nonetheless.
  16. Rhinestone is an anagram of ‘seer nothing ‘ after it has lost the letter g (been de-tailed).
  17. I posted last comment (no, not a Glen Campbell fan!).
    I couldn’t get ‘clashing’ because I had ‘Titian’ for 22 down ( Tia inside of tin). I suppose he would have been more a maker of paint than ink!
    1. I had TITIAN in for quite a long time before I was forced to retrace my steps… just a nicer word than TANNIN!
  18. DNF with 3 gaps – the joint, the vexing and the opposition. FOI was GRACCHI – I remember a school text book called “From the Gracchi to Nero”. I probably attempted this in 1977 – I wonder how I got on then.
  19. I was 5 in 1977, so I didn’t do this first time round.
    I enjoy the challenge of these once I realise that they’re oldies, but the iPad doesn’t tell you so people in my vicinity might have noted some quietly outraged huffing and puffing for the first ten minutes or so. And like pootle73 I won’t complain about returning to the straitjacket tomorrow.
  20. Didn’t get this puzzle in the treeware edition, but I was pleased with my time for the qualifier.
  21. Too free form for me, but no complaints. I did about half before putting it aside. Interesting diversion, but it would take some getting used to on a regular basis. Regards.
    1. I thought so too, but was too polite and on duty to say so.
      I like a man who calls a digging implement a spade.
  23. Given that I was a seasoned solver when this puzzle first appeared (and must have done it before, though I don’t remember any of the clues and even had to biff TENDERLOIN), my 9:15 felt decidedly sluggish, but it seems to have held up pretty well against modern opposition.

    I think phmfantom is right about the provenance of Harry Hawk, though I suspect the clue should have read “Mr Hawk senior …”.

    Nice to finish ahead of Magoo, Jason, Verlaine and the rest for once, even though these vintage puzzles offer the only chance I get nowadays.

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