Times 25,366 The Anniversary Waltz

Author   dorsetjimboPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time 20 minutes

As you now know 2013 sees the centenary of the invention of the crossword in 1913 so I thought we might highlight one or two less important events in that monumental year.

Luckily for me in solving this the setter was only able to find a few literary references and the occassional other obscurity

Across
1 TURN,TAIL – (ultra thin minus “h”-heroin)*; what Emily Davidson didn’t do in 1913;
5 POWELL – PO-WELL; reference Enoch Powell MP and his speech of April 1968 dubbed the “rivers of blood speech” in which he foretold of racial violence following uncontrolled immigration;
10 MAJORITY,VERDICT – (JAM reversed)-(to city driver)*; by which the Lords rejected Home Rule for Ireland in 1913;
11 ESCRITOIRE – (rectories + I)*; used by our very literary setter no doubt;
13 DYER – RE(Y)D all reversed; Titian is a type of red favoured by said painter so a DBE;
15 TANKARD – T-ANKAR(a)-D; TD=Teachta Dala (member of the Dail); perhaps made from stainless steel invented in 1913;
17 TAMARIN – TAMARIN(d); departs=D (timetables); a tamarind is a tree nearly as well known as the TAMARIN monkey;
18 SHE-BEAR – S(HEBE)AR(i); the first woman magistrate perhaps, appointed in 1913;
19 PARTNER – PART(N)ER; note=n;
21 EATS – E(zr)A-TS(Eliot); two poets in one clue – wow!;
22 ASSESSMENT – ASSE(SS-MEN)T; introduced in 1913 as part of the new unemployment benefit;
25 THE,GLOVES,ARE,OFF – (lear vs goethe)*-OFF; two poets in one clue again! Bloody Sunday in Dublin 1913 no doubt;
27 CATERS – CAT(ER)S;
28 DEBONAIR – DEB-ON-AIR; when attending the first Chelsea Flower Show in 1913;
 
Down
1 TEMPEST – T(E-MP)EST; an opportunity for a literary reference missed!;
2 RAJ – JAR reversed; pot=15A;
3 TERMINATED – TERM(TAN-I reversed)ED; uncencensored films when British Board of Film Censors authorised in 1913;
4 INTRO – hidden (mounta)IN-TRO(oops);
6 OGRE – OG-RE; OG=own goal; RE=Royal Engineers;
7 EMILY,BRONTE – EMIL(byron + t=time)*E; two authors and a poet in one clue – it just gets better and better;
8 LATERAN – LATER-A-N; n=note again; middle-ages Catholic synod;
9 OVERSTEP – OVER-STEP; deliveries=OVER (cricket); to OVERSTEP the crease whilst bowling is an offence (more cricket);
12 CONTENTMENT – CONTE-NT-sounds like “meant”; what Henry Ford felt after introducing the first moving assembly line in 1913;
14 IMPRESARIO – I-(is mr opera)*; Hugh Pickett, Canadian impresario was born in 1913;
16 DERISIVE – D(unstabl)E-RIS(IV)E; IV=4=latin cardinal (number); first maternity benefits that came into being in 1913;
18 SCEPTIC – S(C)EPTIC; Biblical reference “doubting Thomas”; most scientists when age of earth estimated at 1.6 billion years in 1913 (they thought it was less – turned out to be 4.55 billion);
20 ROTIFER – oasrsman=rower then replace w=wife by FIT reversed; as you all know a wheel-animalcule found in a pond near you;
23 ELSIE – ELS(I)E; I=current (physics); obvious reference to the well known book Elsie – Adventures of an Arizona Schoolteacher 1913-1916;
24 SLUR – S(L)UR;
26 OVA – sounds like “over”;

51 comments on “Times 25,366 The Anniversary Waltz”

  1. 45 minutes with 20 and 3 causing considerable delay as the last two in. DK ROTIFER or LATERAN. Didn’t fully understand DERISIVE until coming here, so thanks for that, Jim. A very lively puzzle that was a pleasure to solve. I imagine 5ac will be the cause of some head-scratching overseas.
  2. Thanks for a very entertaining and informative blog, Jimbo. Just the thing for a rather dismal Tuesday morning so early in the year.
    27m. I found this quite tricky, but didn’t help myself by putting in SECRETOIRE at 11ac. Another word for ESCRITOIRE is SECRETAIRE, of course (of course!), so perhaps these two words had fused in my memory. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. What do you mean it doesn’t even fit the anagram fodder? LA LA LA I’M NOT LISTENING.
    Anyway, I sorted that out eventually. My last ones in were elsewhere: POWELL and then LATERAN, highly doubtful on both. I knew about the “rivers of blood” speech of course, but I didn’t know the blood was foaming. Bit hot under the collar old Enoch, what?
    1. Powell was a classic example of somebody who had a not unreasonable message to deliver but had no real idea how to go about it. He became more and more extreme and thereby ensured that his thoughts could be ridiculed. All very sad in some ways.

      I agree with Jack, this may all cause some problems for overseas and also younger solvers

    2. I believe it’s a quote from Virgil’s Aeneid. “The River Tiber foaming with much blood” I remember it from school. Enoch Powell was a classicist. Ann
  3. At 12dn you need CONTE (story), NT (books), Jim.
    (More lit. I’m afraid.)

    Liked this for all its obscurity. But didn’t think much of the double use of N (note) in both 8dn and 19ac.

    As L. Carroll didn’t say “For the ROTIFER was a BDELLOID, you see!”

  4. 47 minutes, with a lot of time spent post-solve to work out all the clueing, ending with a penny drop moment at EATS. Super clue, but just inched out as COD by POWELL, where I had ORWELL as a holder on the basis that the River Or must exist somewhere.

    CS Lewis was no great fan of Eliot and Pound’s work, even though he struck up a friendship with the former when working on a revision of the Psalter. Here he is in fine fulminating mode form in a letter to an American correspondent of 1953. He is comparing notes on Stephen Vincent Benét’s poem ‘Western Star’:

    ‘Certainly more interesting and of more real value (so far as any comparison is possible) than any of the “modern” poetry produced on this side of the Atlantic. I wish your bad poets weren’t so exportable! You sent us Eliot in the flesh and Pound in the spirit!’

    1. CS Lewis dabbled with Irish republicanism and socialism as a youth and once wrote in his diary, as an undergraduate aged 24, that he was ‘inclined to favour’ fascism, but that’s the sum of it. He was no fan of the welfare state, strongly believed that parents should be able to choose how their children should be educated, supported capital punishment and was anti-pacifism, but I think ‘right-wing’ (in the Jacobus Enochus Powell sense) is a bit of a stretch. (‘Fascist’ I would put more in the ‘nonsense’ category.) He was throughout his life more conservationist than Conservative, as much iconoclast and critical controversialist as conservative.

      There – I bit!

      1. I bite back:

        “Lewis’s mere Christianity masked many of the political prejudices of an old-fashioned Ulster Protestant, a native of middle-class Belfast for whom British withdrawal from Northern Ireland even in the 1950s and 1960s was unthinkable”.
        (The Wik entry for Lewis)

        Where would you place that on the political spectrum?

        1. On the other hand, his wife Joy Gresham was “an American writer of Jewish background, a former Communist, and a convert from atheism to Christianity.” Might have made political conversations across the dinner table rather interesting. I rather think Lewis defied political pigeon-holing.
      2. (Almost)saves me biting: it’s certainly a grouping of “right wing” thinkers that wouldn’t readily spring to mind. But then I guess we have to allow Ezra Pound.
  6. Like yesterday, finished the puzzle with a long bout of staring at 2 crossing clues that didn’t want to yield – in this case TAMARIN/LATERAN. Hadn’t heard of LATERAN but I did like the clue for TAMARIN for its brevity.
  7. 13 minutes,with CONTENTMENT not fully understood and ROTIFER entered on a wheel and a prayer – I don’t think I’ve ever come across the word, at least in any situation where I needed to know what it was. “Wheel carrier” seems an unlikely denizen of the deep.
    CoD to Lear vs Goethe: “There once was a man who wrote Faust…”
  8. Some belters here, with the Rivers of Blood and the Lear/ Goethe clues showing ahead in a fine field. For me the abundant literary references seemed to be a ruse, with most of it turning out to be parts of clues, but you lot are so funny! The Times used to be full of ’em for REAL!

    Great puzzle, many thanks setter and blogger.

    Chris Gregory.

  9. Enjoyed the puzzle very much, though it took me a good deal longer than most people here.

    POWELL. I’m sorry that Enoch Powell is remembered these days only for the 1968 Birmingham speech: he really should have left the allusion to Virgil in Latin, as was his original intention.

    If hyperlinks didn’t cause problems, I should link you to his 1959 speech on the Hola Camp Massacre, his 1961 “Water Towers” speech on the treatment of the mentally ill, and his 1968 speech at Chippenham on the causes of inflation. In social policy, he voted for the decriminalization of homosexuality and was strongly in favour of the abolition of corporal and capital punishment.

    A recent book, “Enoch at 100”, is certainly no hagiography and deserves to be read widely.

    1. John, thanks for giving more details on Enoch Powell. I didn’t have time earlier

      He was a very strange man. He reputedly spoke 12 languages including Urdu which he learned in case he was ever appointed Viceroy of India! Also from 1968 me thinks was the Morecambe Budget about halving income tax and slashing public expenditure. However, he also said some rather odd things – I recall he blamed the CIA for the murder of Airey Neave MP

      1. I still have on my bookshelves, Jim, a yellowing and dog-eared copy of a 1970 book by Enoch Powell about his Morecambe Budget: “Income Tax at 4/3 in the £”.

        For those who don’t know about this “Budget”, some of Powell’s proposals, such as the privatization of the utilities, were implemented nearly two decades later under Mrs. Thatcher; others, such as ending foreign aid, are still the subjects of intense discussion.

        He was, I think I’m right in saying, a monetarist long before Milton Friedman became fashionable. And the basic rate of income tax is now, unthinkable at the time, 4/- in the £.

    2. Yes, thanks for that John: I’ll look them up. The only thing I knew about Enoch Powell was “rivers of blood”. It’s perhaps a shame that he is only remembered for that one speech, but then it was a pretty foul speech.
      I’m sure Jo O’Meara is sympathetic.
    3. Bravo, John. What happened to Powell probably explains why today’s politicians are so reluctant to say anything much at all. Even as a very lefty student I couldn’t understand why everyone seemed intent on being so utterly, even proudly, ill-informed about the man. My comrades would routinely cite ‘that speech’ but not one of them had ever read it. And any mention of his views on homosexuality or mental health (now pretty standard but then revolutionary) was waved aside. Hey ho.

      Edited at 2013-01-08 02:49 pm (UTC)

      1. I hadn’t read the speech until today, but I have now and I do think it’s pretty foul. However as Jimbo points out above quite a lot of his message was perfectly sensible, and indeed prophetic in some ways.
        On John’s recommendation I’ve also read the “Water Towers” speech and it’s quite extraordinary. Real visionary stuff.
  10. Struggled with this one – 21 minutes with MAJORITY VERDICT and JAR the last in. didn’t see the wordplay for DERISIVE and only got POWELL and ROTIFER from wordplay.
  11. 17 minutes – mostly enjoyable although I did have to think a bit about TERMINATED and ROTIFER. I particularly liked 25a.
  12. Many thanks to Jimbo for adding a bit of levity in the face of a terribly dry puzzle.

    I got becalmed after about 20 minutes with a good handful of clues unsolved and decided to give up as I wasn’t enjoying this at all. Poetry, politics, religion… bring on the dancing girls I say, pants n all.

  13. 26:11 .. a similar time to yesterday but more enjoyment.

    I was too slow to see the 1s, which made for heavy weather in the NW and allowed me, like keriothe, to find a novel way to spell the wrong answer ‘secretoire’ (I knew it was something like that).

    Thank you, jimbo, for a highly entertaining, educative and provocative blog.

    1. Ha! We must occasionally be on the same wavelength. I’m another who originally had “secretoire”.
  14. I enjoyed this very much, though it wasn’t a particularly fast solve. (35 minutes) The various literary allusions suited me. LOI ROTIFER which I had only vaguely heard of. Btw, it always amuses me to think that I was taught the little I know about Ezra Pound by Kingley Amis, during his stint at Swansea in the 60s. (I remember there were only 5 of us in the group so I couldn’t slack off as much as usual!)

    Edited at 2013-01-08 02:13 pm (UTC)

    1. Tutorials with Kingsley Amis? I like how you slipped that in.

      Anyone else get taught by the famous (or better yet, the infamous)?

      1. I was taught by John Carey. OK, “famous” may be stretching it a bit but he’s been on the telly.
      2. My chemistry teacher “invented” the Cadbury’s Bar Six bar and my French & German teacher was once voted Mr. Sunshine in Health & Efficiency magazine. Boy, was that ever a scandal when it came out (if you’ll pardon the expression).

        Edited at 2013-01-08 03:58 pm (UTC)

        1. Harrison Birtwistle sometimes directed our school orchestra rehearsals. I was on timpani where the main thing you have to do is count bars so you don’t crash in at the wrong place (or the entire ensemble turns and glares at you with loathing). He was absolutely terrifying. The only thing he ever said to me was – oh just hit it girl.
          1. A fellow timpanist! Trust me, I know the feeling well – “oh, bugger, is that 148 bars or 149”? And the glares … our conductor in the county youth orchestra was rather less illustrious but he could still turn you to stone with a look.

            Penfold – frankly, I doubt anything’s going to beat Mr.Sunshine. I’m just surprised you haven’t mentioned it before.

      4. I was taught English by the poet R.F. Langley. He was just out of university, so not much older than his pupils, but I remember his meticulous marking of our work and the interest he inspired in poetry. We irreverently used to refer to him as “Beatnik Bill”.

        Whenever someone claims a tenuous link with fame, I always think of that delightful paragraph in Saki’s “The Seventh Pullet”:

        Opposite him sat Stevenham, who had attained to a recognised brevet of importance through the fact of an uncle having dropped dead in the act of voting at a Parliamentary election. That had happened three years ago, but Stevenham was still deferred to on all questions of home and foreign politics.

        What a stylist!

      5. I once sat on the next table to Peter Ustinov at a Van Mildert College dinner. He was chancellor of Durham University at the time, and there is now a college named after him.
  15. 42 minutes, with LATERAN a bit of a guess, and no idea of the wordplay for DERISIVE (thanks blogger).

    Hate to be picky, but surely 1913 saw the invention of the crossword, not the centenary of its invention?

  16. Not my kind of puzzle I’m afraid although I can see that the experienced solvers need something to get their teeth into. The verbose/lliterary allusion type of clue seems to leave too much of the clue unnecessary. Why associate foaming with rivers? To have ‘there will be trouble’ for ‘else’ seems just too thin to be fun. Thanks to the blogger for enlightenment.
  17. A painfully slow solve for me today. Just could not get going. Picked away at it since 7 o’clock this morning and finished fifteen minutes ago with Terminated. FOI Intro. Got totally stuck midway through and thought I’d have to admit defeat with a woeful 16 of 30 clues solved. After a lunchtime jog in the rain I came back and immediately got Sceptic then Caters, Lateran, Powell, Tamarin, Overstep, Partner and Rotifer. I feel very pleased with myself now everything’s complete!

    Excellent blog Jimbo.

  18. A friend of my sister, who once worked in the House of Commons library, remarked that Enoch Powell was one of only two M.P.s who never assumed that the staff would know who they were. The other was Anthony Wedgewood Benn.
  19. A slow 55 minutes, coming in after a tough day’s teaching. An interesting crossword outshone by a classic blog-and-discussion. I too could throw the furniture around about TSE, EP, JEP and CSL but coming in at the end of the party am happy to sit back. I’d have given a lot to have been taught by any of the first three. It’s a hard choice which. I guess…and it hurts to reject the poets…JEP.

    Edited at 2013-01-08 05:52 pm (UTC)

  20. 47.30 today and I needed aids for 17a and 20d as well as being a member of the SECRITOIRE club. I did enjoy many of these clues with 21a taking my COD. I have just read Matthew Hollis’s book on Edward Thomas. The Dymock poets and Edward and his good pal Robert Frost didn’t have much time for young and pushy Ezra! I was pleased personally as I’ve always found his poems inaccessible not to say impenetrable. I suspect young Zimmerman said much the same things in a way I could understand on Blood on the Tracks. Thanks ,Jimbo ,for an enlightening and entertaining blog!
  21. 47.30 today and I needed aids for 17a and 20d as well as being a member of the SECRITOIRE club. I did enjoy many of these clues with 21a taking my COD. I have just read Matthew Hollis’s book on Edward Thomas. The Dymock poets and Edward and his good pal Robert Frost didn’t have much time for young and pushy Ezra! I was pleased personally as I’ve always found his poems inaccessible not to say impenetrable. I suspect young Zimmerman said much the same things in a way I could understand on Blood on the Tracks. Thanks ,Jimbo ,for an enlightening and entertaining blog! Grestyman.
  23. This took a while, about 40 minutes, but happily I got through it. Didn’t know of Mr. POWELL, of course, wordplay only for him, ditto the ROTIFER. I also started with the SECRETOIRE, so there needed some revision up that way. Regards to all, and thanks to Jimbo for for the history lessons.
  24. 12:49 for me – never really finding the setter’s wavelength, and so probably not enjoying this puzzle quite as much as others did.

    If I was going to pick an IMPRESARIO associated with 1913, I’d definitely go for Diaghilev, since 1913 marks the centenary of The Rite of Spring.

  25. I once came across an orchestral part for a triangle. At the end the the score read ‘198 bars, tacet al fine’. Above this someone had written ‘difficult and boring’. Geoffrey
  27. DNF with POWELL OGRE and LATERAN undone in the NE. Struggled with a lot of the rest. Laughed out loud at Jimbo’s blog. Great stuff. 18 months ago, before visiting this blog, I’d have got nowhere.

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