Times 230365 – when sausages had taste and puzzles had orchises.

Author   piquetPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
The first qualifier puzzle for the 2018 TCC is published today, so this puzzle from yesteryear* appears in the online section instead. (I’ll blog the qualifier after the closing date for entries). I can’t say I enjoyed it. Even when after a few tries I thought I had a version with all the answers correct, going on to explain each one precisely, in the way we would for a contemporary puzzle, proved even more of a headache. Certainly, in whatever year this was, solvers needed more leaps of imagination, as well as TLS type knowledge, to get through. Maybe some of you who were doing puzzles then will be more adept, I’ve only had the time to solve regularly since retiring from full-time work (or becoming unemployable).
Please excuse me therefore if the blog seems a little vague here and there. Definitions underlined, where they exist; CD = cryptic definition, DD = double definition.
* the puzzle number suggests it was 23 March 1965.

Across
1 Nip across for a bun (7)
POPOVER – POP OVER to see a neighbour, I suppose. Apparently a popover is a kind of pastry, I’d never had the pleasure but Mrs K knew about them, being a retired Home Economist.
5 Conversely, what did the vegetarian eat: can you beat it? (7)
PULSATE – Well, vegetarians ATE PULSE, so conversely that sounds like PULSE ATE I think.
9 Ship’s writer (5)
LINER – I presume a DD, Someone who writes lines could be a liner? There are several meanings of ‘liner’ in Collins, as you can imagine, and one of them is

“a person or thing that uses lines, esp in drawing or copying”.
10 Associate oneself with Robbie in a cheeky appearance (9)
SIDEBURNS – I did think of our Scottish poet friend, but then thought he would have been Rabbie not Robbie (or Robert). Then guessed the answer from SIDE (with) = associate (with). And it was said poet.
11 The whale belongs to him generically speaking (6)
ORCHIS – ORC is a version of ORCA, the killer whale. HIS = belonging to him. I knew orchis was Greek for testicle and that the genus of plants, orchids, were so called because of the shape of their tubers. So is the definition just orchis as an example of a genus = generically speaking?
12 Have a fruit drop! (8)
WINDFALL – Vague cryptic definition.
14 One of the glossies? (5)
ELEMI – Another vague cryptic definition I think. I knew ELEMI was a resin from an Asian tree (Chinese olive) which has very glossy green leaves. Once I had E*E*I I wrote it in. But how one is supposed to get to that without any checking letters, in a world full of glossy things, is a mystery.
15 They make a deep impression? (9)
ENGRAVERS – Not very cryptic definition.
18 Good chap, he goes to the masthead full of fire (5,4)
SAINT ELMO – Self explanatory, if you knew about St Elmo’s fire, which I did.
20 Envious rent-maker (5)
CASCA – Straightforward if you knew Casca was in there with Brutus, stabbing Caesar, and that in the Bard’s play Mark Antony says “See what a rent the envious Casca made”
22 David Balfour’s beloved brought to book (8)
CATRIONA – More TLS expertise needed. David Balfour is the main character in Kidnapped and the sequel with his ongoing story is another RLS book called Catriona. Burns, RLS … was our Setter from North of the border I wonder?
24 After all, I am in my element though wan (6)
PALLID – Insert ALL, I into PD, or Pd, palladium, an element. Why my element?
26 Single stones are wanted for these ornaments (9)
MONOLITHS – Well, monoliths are single stones erected as markers or ornaments, I suppose. Is there more to this?
27 Italian travel book? (5)
GUIDA – CD. Well, it’s Italian for guide, or manual, so once the checkers are in, you can plump.
28 There’s no place for the likes of him (4,3)
ALSO RAN – Another CD. No first, second or third. Or tenth, if you were betting on the Masters and getting paid for that place.
29 “All for your ____, We are not here” (M.N.Dream) (7)
DELIGHT – K.Y.S.

Down
1 Woolly finishes to tug of war? (9)
PULLOVERS – CD. One of the better clues, I thought.
2 That’s a feather in your cap, Sir! (7)
PANACHE – alternate meaning for the word, a plume in a helmet, from Latin pinna, feather.
3 How does Victor sit for the artist? (9)
VORTICIST – no anagrind that I can see, but (VICTOR SIT)* does it. Wyndham Lewis and co, a group of eleven modernists from 1913 on. I’d heard of them because I used to browse through my daughter’s art degree books.
4 Just the girl for love (4)
ROSE – Well, a rose is the flower for symbolising love, as you’ll remember from forking out a small fortune before 14th February.
5 Green for Pretty Polly (10)
PADDINGTON – maybe before Verlaine’s music period, Harry Clifton composed a musical hall song called “Pretty Polly of Paddington Green” in 1864, maybe it was more remembered when this puzzle was first published than it is now (i.e. not at all).
6 In a divided way, Othello bedevilled the whole thing (5)
LOBED – Hidden word in (OTHEL)LO BED(EVILLED).
7 The poet loses fifty for a start but gets gold nevertheless (7)
AUREATE – LAUREATE loses L.
8 Otium provided by a supporter of art? (5)
EASEL – Otium means leisure, especially time spent being cultural, so ‘at ease’ I presume, and you add an L for no particular reason except to get a ‘supporter of art.’
13 Military establishment (10)
WELLINGTON – I assume this refers to what is now the Defence Services Staff College, previously Wellington Military Academy, in Tamil Nadu. Not the school. Nevertheless, it’s either a boring GK clue, or I’ve missed the point.
16 First-class port (9)
ARCHANGEL – My FOI. Archangels are first-class angels, you see. Northern Russian port on the White Sea.
17 How to endure self-denial (5,4)
STAND FAST – I think this must be referring to a New Testament passage, but I’m not going to look it up. Self-denial is not a practice I endorse, at this time of life.
19 Aims to get under canvas (7)
INTENTS – IN TENTS = under canvas. Reminds me of a rude schoolboy joke.
21 Preserving the Bequest (7)
SALTING – DD. Salting is a means of preserving, and a chap called George Salting made a Bequest of 192 jolly good paintings to the National Gallery in 1910.
22 The mark of the butterfly (5)
COMMA – Another DD, a clue we’ve seen recently in TfTT. A comma is a species of British butterfly.
23 Mr Sober himself (5)
IDLER – If you’ve read Samuel Johnson’s The Idler (I haven’t) you’d know that Essay no. 31 is entitled “Disguises of idleness. Sober’s character.”
25 Accustomed to employ copper (4)
USED – USED (TO) = accustomed to; USE – employ and a D was a copper (not a P) when this puzzle fist saw daylight. Pity it got resurrected, IMO.

38 comments on “Times 230365 – when sausages had taste and puzzles had orchises.”

  1. How annoying. In a hotel in Liverpool, looking forward to the crossword in bed with only online means available and no printer. And what do I get? Nuff said.
  2. Having woken at 5am with a headache and decided I might as well get up, this really wasn’t the puzzle I was best-equipped to face. I put in eight answers in my hour, and frankly I was just pleased that all of them were right. I’m going to give myself a bonus point for actually getting the Shakespeare quote at 29a; I think that’s my first ever successful fill-in-the-blank answer.

    Thanks for the blog, Pip! At least now I know I wasn’t just being dense because of the headache. Not really a puzzle aimed at a software engineer born in 1973, this one!

  3. I gave it 20 minutes before deciding life is too short.

    Medal of Honour to Pip for completing and explaining all this. Thank you

    1. That’s about 19 minutes and 50 seconds longer than I gave it.

      The thought process (starting at around 7am) ran something along the lines of “ooooh, it’s qualifying week, I’d best warm up with the quickie”, followed by “bugger it’s qualifying week and I haven’t got a printer on the train”, and finally “the replacement’s from 1965? Sod that I’m having a nap”.

  4. I wasted too much time on this. But I liked VORTICIST, despite the shaky clue, and pressed on… until the blog put me out of my misery. (The contest puzzle was fun, though.)
  5. This was splendid! A proper Old Timer’s puzzle on which I was raised. I started on The Telegraph and moved to The Times just around this time. Lots of literary GK and lo-tech cluing making parsing a journey in itself! I was there in 27 minutes and not a bloody IKEA in sight! And a Shakespearean blank!

    Rosa ‘Love’ was a variety of Rose – thus I made 4dn ROSA.

    13dn WELLINGTON Barracks perhaps – but the man himself was a pillar of the establishment.

    In the fifties 22ac CATRIONA was published in one volume ‘Kidnapped & Catriona’.

    26ac MONOLITHS – it’s all a matter of scale.
    12ac WINDFALL is a fruit drop!

    FOI 9ac LINER was a chestnut.
    LOI 27ac GUIDA wasn’t.
    COD 1dn PULLOVERS
    WOD 29ac DELIGHT

    Re-24ac I wonder if the setter’s ‘nom’ was ‘Palladium’?
    (Not for The Times) Thus my element being Pd.

    You have to be a certain age to appreciate this one.
    Caveat youngster!

    Edited at 2018-04-18 07:21 am (UTC)

  6. I took the military reference at 13 to be Wellington Barracks in London, round the back of Buckingham Palace, but who can possibly tell what this setter had in mind for many of the answers.

    More generally, I gave this one a real shot and was very pleased that I managed to complete all but the SE corner with only one outright cheat (I knew 22 referred to ‘Kidnapped’ but I had no idea who Balfour’s girfriend was, so I looked her up). But then I ran out of steam in the SE and looked up the Shakespeare quote at 29, guessed ARCHANGEL and resorted to a solver for the final few.

    If we were faced with this style of puzzle in the Times every day I would find myself another newspaper and I certainly wouldn’t volunteer to blog. Well done, Pip!

    Edited at 2018-04-18 06:38 am (UTC)

  7. Would you be so kind as to forgive my sense of enjoyment derived from this classic? Pip does brilliantly to slide (however disgruntled!) round the can-you-see-what-it-is-yet clues, so much done from associating with the setter’s stream of consciousness.
    I rather thought ROSE at 4d was there for the crossing Burns connection: “my love is like a…” but other justifications are equally worthy.
    I can still sing bits of the Polly song:
    “She was as beautiful as a butterfly and proud as a queen
    Was pretty little Polly Perkins of Paddington Green”
    I liked the envious rent maker, but then I did JC at school and we watched the Marlon Brando version of Mark Anthony’s speech.
    I’m not sure how a monolith becomes an ornament, but hey ho.
    Good old fashioned fun. We’re spoiled, these days, with the straitjacket of precise cluing.

    Edited at 2018-04-18 11:26 am (UTC)

  8. Was this also a reference to Pilgrim’s Progress, where Standfast was a right good pilgrim?
    Literary references were huge in the puzzles in the 60’s, if I remember correctly.
    Peter P
    1. I thought it was simply a pun, suggesting that if you can stand a fast, you can endure self-denial
      1. That’s how I saw it: one of the clues that could turn up in a present day puzzle. Endure gives you the answer, if you can stand a fast (a form of self denial).
        1. Yup, I agree – stand=endure, fast=self-denial. Very good time Z, must be all that TLS training. I just managed to clock in under the 30 which pleased me.
  9. Sort of interesting, but rather unsatisfying. I needed aids for the “fill the blank”, David Balfour’s beloved and PANACHE to finish in about 55 minutes. Thanks for explaining the clues Pip. I had similar doubts to yours about how some worked, but a lot were rather loose. I remembered the song once you mentioned it. I can only conclude that I prefer the current style over this.

    Edited at 2018-04-18 08:09 am (UTC)

  10. Help!

    Please can someone tell me in simple terms how to print off the competition puzzle? I really have no idea, even though I must have managed it in previous years.

  11. I see the Snitch says this is the hardest puzzle since forever. The Provost of Eton would have a tough time with his eggy soldiers.
    1. I must confess I didn’t submit-to-leaderboard this morning, having cheated my way (only on a couple of clues, but still) to a sub-20 minute time.
  12. …a time which I didn’t submit to the leaderboard, as it included a) successfully solving all the clues which would pass muster today; b) remembering that this was a different age as far as crosswords went, and I probably shouldn’t waste too much time expecting to understand exactly what was happening in the rest of them, and c) remembering how lucky we are compared to 1965, because some other poor bugger* will have thought about it for me, and I can just come here for an explanation of PADDINGTON, WELLINGTON, SALTING, IDLER etc. etc.

    *thanks to Pip for drawing that short straw

  13. 29 minutes, but ‘generic’ at 11ac led me to enter ORCHID, without taking note of the wordplay. With no anagrind for 3dn, took 4dn similarly as anagram of EROS. No problem with 5dn as I also remember Ms Perkins.
    The whole thing took me back to the days when the first thought for ‘copper’ was ‘d’.
  14. I’d forgotten that “it’s that time of year again”. Standfast is one of the work-names for George Smiley in Smiley’s People. Polly Perkins comes up in one of the Rumpole stories and I believe it was a favourite ditty of John Mortimer’s father. I dithered over rose/rosa and I had “guidO” for a while which didn’t help matters. We used to get ELEMI a lot in NY Times puzzles. Sort of par for the TLS and I rather enjoy them once in a while. Nice work Pip. 29.29
  15. Many thanks, pipkirby, for your magnificent blog explaining everything in this puzzle from the past, most of which was totally unknown to me. I got about eight answers with fairly full understanding, correctly guessed a small number of others, had a bit of a go with the aid of Bradford’s, then gave up.

    As some of the comments on the blog suggest, this would have been very popular at the time. Solvers would have been used to tackling this type of puzzle every day, over which they would have become familiar with the literary references used (mainly classic English literature). Not old enough myself then but remember my Dad enjoying them and consulting guides to literature. It was not so long into the TV age in those days and this crossword would have been nearer in time to the first ever crossword in 1913 than to today. Few, if any, solving guides then and no Times Championship which would have led to some accepted and generally agreed standards having to be introduced. Favourite clue: ALSO RAN

    1. I wonder if the lack of the competiton element in those days meant it was more permissable to look things up that one just didn’t happen to know.
      1. In those days Jack, if you didn’t know it, it didn’t matter a damn. Another one along tomorrow.. you did them just for fun
  16. Heavens, is it that time of the year already? Seems like only yesterday etc. etc. And once again, poor Pip has drawn the short straw, very well done Pip for being able to blog this old thing!
    But how I love these old bangers, they are not smooth, effortless and reliable like today, you have to change the oil every 500 miles, and grease the nipples .. but they do have their charm. If you drive them every day, instead of once or twice a year, they do get much easier. It is an attitude of mind.
    Unfortunately I could not quite finish this because I put pinnate for 2dn and thus couldn’t get 11ac either. Otherwise, it took me right back. I *might* have done this one the first time round, but it was right at the beginning of my solving career. If I did I doubt if I finished it
  17. I’ve probably done this puzzle before. I started doing the Times crossword at university in 1963 or ’64 when there was some sort of special offer for students. I didn’t realise it wasn’t the normal offering until I had taken the printout up to bed with my morning cuppa. I couldn’t be bothered to go back downstairs so had to have a go at it. After 39 minutes I had all except GUIDA – a complete unknown. No problem with the literary references but the loose clueing makes me realise just how much the puzzle has improved since the ’60s. I’m now going to tackle the “proper” puzzle. Ann
  20. I’m happy to report that I did about as well with this puzzle as I would have when it first appeared in 1965. I would have been three at the time.

    I’m not quite sure why, simply because there’s a TCC puzzle, they have to dredge up something from 1965. It’s a bit like saying “Jeremy Paxman is on holiday this week, so in place of Newsnight, here’s the Black and White Minstrel Show”. But pay me no heed. Parts of my brain are still in another time zone, and I am deep in grumpth.

  22. I’m also glad we don’t get puzzles like this any more. I got PULLOVERS, EASEL, USED, GIUDo and DELIGHT before giving up and checking in to the blog to get some inspiration to carry on. I had SEASCAPES for 15a which didn’t help. Having looked up a few entries I carried on and worked out a few more for myself, but I only solved about 60% without looking up the answers, for which I’m profoundly grateful to Pip. Around 79 minutes with assistance(cheating), about which I had no compunction! The qualifier took me around 38 minutes.
  23. Aargh. I can never do these relic puzzles. I got about half a dozen before giving up. The actual qualifier didn’t present any real challenges, however. Regards.
  24. It’s now 9 p.m. — I started this one at 9 a.m. and I have now successfully and correctly filled in the grid. I gave it about 45 mins at breakfast time, abandoned it and then had another bash over dinner. This evening I used Google to find out: what Pretty Polly could possibly have to do with Paddington, whether there ever was a saint called Elmo (I had a vague idea about the ‘fire’), whether ‘orc’ could possibly be an archaic form of an orca whale, whether monolith had some obscure secondary meaning relating to ornaments, whether the letters ‘elemi’ constituted a known word, who David Balfour is/was, who his girlfriend was, whether there was ever a book called ‘Catriona’, a list of synonyms for ‘plume’ or ‘cockade’, if anyone called ‘Salting’ had ever made some large bequest, whether ‘Wellington’ might be the name of some place associated with the miltary, and so on and so on.

    The loose clueing had me floundering — there was no way of working it out mechanically: you just had to have the right GK and be on the wavelength.

    I feel like such a dunce.

    Edited at 2018-04-18 08:20 pm (UTC)

  25. Didn’t go near it. The past is a foreign country when it comes to crosswords. But thoroughly enjoyed the blog and comments. Well done, Pip; they certainly threw you a curveball there 🙂

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