Times 25987 – 60s Retro

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
The first Monday of the new year and very much a typical Monday, straightforward as long as you lived through the 1960s, have watched Austin Powers or know your short-service British PMs. And the setter was even good enough to make the tricky vowel of the bird a checked letter to prevent any ‘Beatons’ and spoil the pleasure of the non-twitching solving community. 20 minutes.

ACROSS

1. AT A PINCH – A TAP-IN + CH[eck]; sadly, the big Yeovil lad missed his yesterday, conjuring memories of the greatest misser-of-tap-ins of them all, Roger Davies .
5. CHASTE – H in CASTE.
10. ALEC DOUGLAS-HOME – smart ALEC with a HOME in DOUGLAS (capital of the Isle of Man) for the chap who succeeded Macmillan and was swiftly consigned to the history books by Harold Wilson.
11. HIGH AND DRY
13. STUN – S + TUN[a]
15. TRAMCAR – MART reversed + CAR[e].
17. NEITHER – anagram* of In THERE.
18. OROTUND – gOlfers + ROTUND (round); I thought this meant ‘fat’, but no, of voice it means ‘resonant’, and of writing, style, or expression it means ‘pompous’; from the Latin ore rotundo (‘with rounded mouth’). But will I remember all this?
19. EGOTIST – TIES* around GOT (‘caught’).
21. FIRE – F + IRE; Collins has for ‘trigger’: ‘to fire or set in motion by or as by pulling a trigger’; me, I can’t think of a like for like substitution, but that just may be me. Can one ‘fire a mechanism’, I wonder? It sounds ugly but do those engineers care?
22. SHEARWATER – WHEAT EARS + R[iver]; is it because I have them living on cliffs that I always want to spell them ‘sheerwaters’?
25. CAUGHT RED-HANDED – CAUGHT (sounds like ‘court’) + RED HAND (‘socialist worker’) + E[mbarrasse]D; ‘bang to rights’ is one of those phrases I never know quite what they mean. Another Americanism ‘no brainer’ occupied that category for quite a while till I finally ‘sussed’ which way it pointed.
27. RESORT– double (loosish) definition, where the first is verbal (‘resort’ and repair’ both mean ‘go’ in restricted contexts) and the second nominal (‘resort’ and ‘centre’ both being places people go to for a particular purpose).
28. GENEROUS – GEN + EROS around U; free as in generous with one’s time. It may really be Anteros, but everyone calls it Eros, which is good enough for me.

DOWN

1. A BAD HAT – titfer is Cockney Rhyming Slang for ‘hat’ via ‘tit for tat’; a bad hat is given in the US dictionary Merriam-Webster as British slang for ‘a disreputable dissolute person’, while most British dictionaries seem to ignore it. Well, I’d never heard of it, and who needs it when you have the perfectly good ‘bad egg’?
2. AXE
3. INDIAN CLUB – bottle-shaped clubs used by chaps with waxed moustaches.
4. CO[U]LD
6. H+ASH – what you must do to the potatoes and onions to make them ‘hash browns’.
7. SHORT SHRIFT – SHORT + R[egina] in SHIFT for ‘curt treatment’.
8. ELEANOR – [romanc]E in A LONER*; did the Beatles song sound the death-knell for this Christian name?
9. CLARENCE – I like to think I’m pretty good on carriages with my reading of Walter Scott and George MacDonald but maybe this one never got north of the border; ‘a closed horse-drawn carriage with four wheels, seating four inside and two outside next to the coachman’, named after the Duke of Clarence, later William IV.
12. GLAMOUR PUSS – usually wearing hot pants and appearing in the Daily Express (in the 60s); a slightly odd clue referencing, I think, the Batman franchise. Not so odd, actually, when one thinks of Michelle Pfeiffer beleathered in Batman Returns…
14. PILOT WHALE – PILOT (captain) + W[eight] + HALE (healthy).
16. REDSHIRT – my last in and a very nice clue; H in STIRRED* gives ‘supporter of revolutionary’.
18. OFF[IC]ER
20. T[I]RADES
23. A[DD]LE – is the setter running out of steam, or is it just me?
24. CHAR – triple definition.
26. D[U]O

65 comments on “Times 25987 – 60s Retro”

  1. First up on the comments, for a change, the implication being that this was toward the very easy end of the spectrum. Monday indeed. I didn’t know orotund, either, (nor, actually shearwater, and A D-H was at the edge of memory), but the cluing and crosses made them gettable. Thanks, Ulaca
  2. Only 22 minutes for this one making 3 consecutive sub-30s for weekday puzzles, probably my best run ever. However I put this down to easier puzzles rather than a sudden improvement in my solving skills, and in any case the weekend puzzles put paid to any thoughts I might have had in that direction. No doubt we’ll be in for a stinker tomorrow when I’m on blogging duty.

    I also never heard of A BAD HAT but it’s in Brewer’s. I had resolved not to mention the misnamed London statue today but when it comes to it I can’t let it pass.

    Those who aren’t familiar with the British Prime Minister might like to know that his surname is pronounced “Hume”. Private Eye always refers to him as Baillie Vass, a running joke that started in 1964 and continues to this day on the rare occasions he comes up.

    Edited at 2015-01-05 02:05 am (UTC)

    1. That affected pronounciation of “Home” as “Hume” helped to finish the guy. One joke I particularly remember was David Frost in TW3

      Home caught a cold and the Evening News placards said “Home in bed with flu”. Frost read it out as “Hume in bed with flu” and then added “or should I say home in bed with Flo?”

      1. Thanks for reminding me of that Frost joke on TW3, Jimbo. I think I’m right in saying that the Private Eye nickname for Sir Alec D-H , mentioned by Jack, was adopted some time in 1964 after a Scottish newspaper, The Aberdeen Evening Express, accidentally used a picture of Home to illustrate a story about a Scottish baillie called Vass.
        1. I seem to recall that when Home was Foreign Secretary, Private Eye printed a picture of two rather large African statesmen with a speech bubble from one of them saying “I wonder if we’ll get Home for dinner.”
          1. Even better! And gloriously politically incorrect. I wonder if even Private Eye would nowadays risk suggesting that all African statesmen are cannibals!
            1. Attributed to Noel Coward, who denies ever saying it, is the comment about the generously proportioned Queen Salote of Tonga, riding in a carriage in the rain at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, with a very small man beside her. Asked who the fellow was, Coward is reputed to have replied, ‘Her lunch.’
  3. Monday though it be, and it do be, alas, this went in awfully fast, and without any post hoc parsing aside from 25ac, and 1d: I ‘knew’ titfer–in the sense that I’d come across it here once some time ago–but had to rely on the checkers to solve. Ditto for CLARENCE: I’m like Ulaca carriage-wise. Ulaca, for what it’s worth your glossing of 17ac should be IN THERE (all caps).

    Edited at 2015-01-05 02:54 am (UTC)

  4. Nothing unknown here, but as ulaca notes this had a distinctly 60’s feel which I have to admit I liked (which dates me pretty well).

    I did actually write HUME at 10ac from the pronunciation and reflected briefly that a question mark was unsatisfactory as a homophone indicator before the penny dropped.

    In response to ulaca’s question at 8dn, my youngest daughter is ELEANOR, but it’s probably less common than it once was.

    1. Yes, everyone will probably chime in now to tell me of all the people they know called Eleanor. I think I’m still on one: Bron.
      1. I’m not sure that “Eleanor Rigby” would have much affected the use of the name – I think it’s more likely that (like many others) it has just gone out of fashion.

        We drew on family names for all my children, but I resisted naming my son after a distant but very distinguished French relative called Adolphe – now there’s a name that really has been killed!

        1. I started teaching in 1975 and had a first year class of 34, evenly split girls and boys (11 year olds) in which there were no less than 7 Michelles; so the Fab Four did have an effect on some parents in the 60s!
          1. Yes, my point, which hitherto remained cryptic, was that Eleanor Rigby is a dark song. Michelle of course is fluff!
        2. The 2012 French film ‘Le Prénom’ centres around a father-to-be who pretends he wants to call his future son “Adolphe”.
          I saw it in France and therefore in French, but apparently there’s an English version called “What’s in a name?”
          http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2179121/

          It was extremely funny, but also thought-provoking. The quality of the dialogue and the fact that it all takes place in the sitting room of a Parisian apartment suggest that the script was originally a stage-play.

      2. My youngest is an Eleanor as well. When she was 2 or 3 if we ever tried to shorten it to Ellie she’d always respond with a very cross “I not Ellie, I Eleanor!”. Now that she’s 14, whilst we still call her Eleanor, she insists that everyone else calls her Ellie.
  5. But still enjoyable. Had forgotten the CLARENCE and never heard of the BAD HAT. The clue for NEITHER was probably the best of the lot.
  6. 6:33 here, so about as easy as it gets. I knew everything, including BAD HAT, which helped. I also put in HUME initially but fortunately 7dn was obvious enough for me to correct it. ELEANOR is actually quite popular again now as far as I can tell. There are quite a few of them in my daughter’s year group (she’s 11) although they all seem to go by something else like Ellie or Nelly.
  7. My two pet hates in crosswords are random proper names and carriages (there are just so many of the latter and they are so obscure)and here we have both in one clue!
    Needless to say 9d was my LOI. When you say it has a “’60s feel”, does you mean the 1860s?
    Incidentally I think that ELEANOR is a really charming name. I’m glad that it’s making a comeback. Unlike CLARENCE.

    Edited at 2015-01-05 08:45 am (UTC)

  8. 9:25 .. put my name down for the No to Carriages campaign (maybe we could occupy something). I initially entered this one as Clarance but thought better of it (I think the male name can be spelt with two ‘A’s).

    Otherwise, a very Monday puzzle, with NEITHER standing out.

        1. I think we should take a lead from the breastfeeding activists and do something outside Claridges.
          1. I’d be willing to Occupy Claridges. No sacrifice too great for the cause. Might draw the line at Garages, though. Food’s terrible.
    2. Read a bit of Georgette Heyer Sarah, that will soon sort you out.. I like the carriage references, if only because you can usually guess them if you aren’t sure
  10. An early solve for me and my fastest all correct for months – coincidence I should think – at 15.04. Had no problem with the sixties feel – my formative years in being too young for the drugs and sex but old enough for most of it to be still memorable. Defined by remembering without hestitation all of the FA Cup finals in that decade, teams, scores and players!
    Thanks for blog, Ulaca. Wouldn’t ‘George Best triggered/fired his enthusiasm for soccer’ meet the substitution test?
    1. Don’t they have slightly different meanings in that example? George Best could trigger an enthusiasm that didn’t previously exist, or fire one that did.
      For what it’s worth I agree with ulaca that these two aren’t synonymous (you don’t trigger a gun) but they’re sufficiently adjacent that it doesn’t bother me.
      1. For ‘trigger’ The New Shorter Oxford has ‘v.t. Release the trigger of a mechanism; esp. fire (a gun etc.) by pressure on the trigger;’, which suggests that one does trigger a gun. An example given is ‘Devices that fire…pieces of metal and are triggered by anyone going near them’. A little ambiguous, I know but it’s clear enough that the devices are triggered, or fired.
        terencep
        1. In plain(ish)English, it seems to translate as ‘a device, having been triggered, fires (or is fired)’.

          The acid test would be to find an attested native-speaker utterance in which ‘x triggered the gun’ meaning ‘x fired the gun’ occurred.

        2. When you fire a gun, you pull the trigger. You might say that this triggers an explosion in the bullet, but I’d be very surprised if you could find an example of someone saying or writing ‘he triggered the gun’ or something similar.
            1. But I don’t think you would say ‘devices are fired by anyone going near them.’ You might say ‘set off’ or ‘tripped’, but that is not quite the same thing. They all imply one specific action leading to a specific reaction on the part of the device in question, which ‘fired’ doesn’t. ‘Fired’ also implies agency, which ‘triggered’ doesn’t.
              I’m not really articulating this very well, am I? And I’m not sure why I care, considering the definition didn’t bother me!

              Edited at 2015-01-05 08:24 pm (UTC)

              1. I’m generally with you, keriothe: not an exact synonym, but not off by enough to whine about either. On the other hand, as an American, and taking Jerrywh’s comment, above, regarding the ability to verify any noun to heart…
                1. I for one don’t have a problem with verbifying nouns or anything else: it’s been happening forever and Americans certainly haven’t exclusived the practice.
                  Reflecting further on the fire/trigger thing (which I shouldn’t really), I suspect it’s a more accurate reflection of the way language actually works just to say that we associate the word ‘fire’ with some things (guns, mostly) and ‘trigger’ with others. We certainly don’t reflect on the finer meanings every time we use the words. What is interesting to me is that there doesn’t appear to be any overlap in usage when you might expect it for words with such close meanings.
                  1. No, all of us English speakers do out little bit to mangle the language, don’t we.
                    I see what you mean about the trigger/fire non-overlap being just a little unique. We, here, quibble with some of the definitions sometimes (usually, I suspect, due to having been fooled by a clue), but someone can usually suggest at least one abstruse useage that is a like for like replacement. Not really this time, (triggering imagination probably comes closest, no?), but I think we’d still consider it a fair clue.
                    1. Having recently seen a trip flare in a military museum, I wonder if you couldn’t walk into the wire and fire the flare as easily as you could walk into the wire and trigger the flare?

                      Don Petter (regular lurker)

  11. Everything went in quickly with this but it was still good fun. Difficult to forget Home pronounced Hume and Eleanor is my wife’s middle name so no problem there, with the name I mean. A BAD HAT was good, CHASTE was better and LOI was RESORT, which I thought in need of repair.
    terencep
  12. 10:40 for me, which I thought was pretty good going until I saw keriothe’s and sotira’s times! Never heard of A BAD HAT so that went in on trust, ditto for CLARENCE the carriage, but the rest was all pretty straightforward.

  13. All very quick (25mins or so), until I got to my last one… and, having confidently put in ‘elitist’ (‘lit’ kind of works for catch, doesn’t it, when talking about fire?) at 19ac, I was never going to find a -I-I- WHALE.

    Ho hum.

  14. 15 minute stroll throgh a very 50-60s offering. Even the London trams stopped in the early 1950s

    Neither BAD HAT nor “bad egg” feature in my vocabulary, both striking me as drawing room rather than street corner phrases – rather like the whole puzzle

  15. 8.46, which is about as fast as I can type in the answers. I’m sure “a bad hat” is a Woosterish sort of expression, though a search of the internet is rather overwhelmed by references to Bad Hat Harry Productions. BHHP do “House” House stars Hugh Laurie. Laurie is (for my money) the best of the Bertie Woosters. What a wonderful world we do live in.
    CLARENCE was the cross-eyed lion in Daktari, for those who want further evidence that this is a sixties period piece. And there’s more. ALEC DOUGLAS HOME was clearly based on Giles’ skeletal schoolmaster Chalkie, as this 1963 cartoon demonstrates.
    REDSHIRTs may be communist supporters but they’re also the first crewmen to die in any of the 60’s incarnation of Star Trek (the original and best)
    ELEANOR Bron’s first appearance as a GLAMOUR PUSS was surely in HELP! (1965) allegedly inspiring Paul to write Eleanor Rigby, though only the name matches. She was also the quintessential glamour puss in Bedazzled.
    Quoting Grestyman, clearly I spent “my formative years in being too young for the drugs and sex but old enough for most of it to be still memorable.”
      1. My point was rather the opposite way of saying the same thing -if you can remember it you were too young to be a part of it!
    2. Did you know that the name of Bad Hat Harry Productions comes from a line in Jaws? The line being, unsurprisingly, ‘that’s some bad hat, Harry.’
  16. About as easy as it gets for me, well under 10 minutes. Which probably says something about my age. Wasn’t the 1960s a *great* decade?
    I always think of Douglas-Home as our last truly honourable Prime Minister, who did the job because he felt he ought to rather than because he wanted power. Shame he wasn’t much better at it; but if you are going to lead a den of thieves it helps to be one yourself, I suppose
  17. 9 mins. A BAD HAT was my LOI because I hadn’t come across the expression before and I wanted to be sure I couldn’t think of an alternative. I had been held up slightly by the GLAMOUR PUSS/RESORT crossers and I needed the former before I saw the latter.
  18. I found this too easy. I don’t often get into the sub-twenty minute bracket, but I finished this in 15 minutes without even trying for a fast time. If I hadn’t been writing in the answers between sips of a drink I’d have finished in even less time. Very few clues needed more than a few seconds thought.
  19. Almost a PB for me, 13 minutes, helped by having lived (well, existed) in the Isle of Man for 20 years (as in Manx Shearwater and the skeletal PM) and being a regular user of the superb trams in Bordeaux. Only the carriage was a guess-from-checkers. I agree with Deezzaa, carriages should be banned from crosswords.
  21. 9 minute PB – woo hoo! Probably helped that I solved on paper today as I never think I’ll be as quick electronically. I did have to swap pens part way through but luckily another was close to hand.

    As a counterpoint to Eleanor Rigby how about Elenore by The Turtles? Granted their spelling was off, but it’s a very cheery number.

  22. A double Magoo at 6:06 – a nice straightforward crossword for the first day back at work – probably helped by being of a ‘certain’ age 😉
  23. 8:30 for a nice gentle Monday puzzle.

    Clarence and bad hat unknown, glamour puss, resort and orotund last in.

    Having spent part of yesterday on the North-east coast I’ll throw Lindisfarne’s Lady Eleanor into the ring, along with Eleanor Put Your Boots On by Franz Ferdinand.

    Well done to Pootle on the PB.

  24. Surely one of the easiest Monday puzzles for some time, though it helped to be of the vintage for whom the GK references and slang were all familiar. Took me somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes, which must be close to a PB and not so many more minutes than I needed for today’s Quickie.
  25. About as fast as I ever get. I even knew ‘a bad hat’ somehow. Talking of CRS, I last week found out the meaning of ‘berk’ as in ‘you silly berk’. I’ve been using the expression for years, with no idea that it was quite so rude.
  26. Now that everyone’s returned from their holidays, it’s back to the normal routine at work: a bunch of us doing the crossword together over lunch.

    We numbered 3/4 today. I missed the start, but I reckon we were all done within 15 minutes. None of us had heard of a bad hat though…

  27. I do just about remember Sir Alec, mainly because of the way he spoke without moving his lips rather like a ventriloquist. My cousins and I called him “shalleck douglash-hoom”. I can just imagine him referring to Harold Wilson, in that faultless U accent, as a “bed het”, as in 1d. I clocked in at 9.29 which is about as fast as I can manage. Magoo was 3.3, no further comment needed.
  28. Nothing to add which hasn’t been explored. Even after clocking my fastest time for many a month (6:05), I still wondered to myself if that would be good enough to beat my target of 2(Magoo), and it appears it was – by a whole second…
  29. Yep, the easy side of the spectrum. Not much else to say, except, unsurprisingly, that I’ve never heard of ‘bad hat’ either. And over here we usually say ‘in a pinch’, so thanks to the setter for clear wordplay. Regards.

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