Times 25987 – 60s Retro

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