This is the puzzle I found first and it took me quite a while to get used to the style, though I didn’t find it as difficult as the one from 1941 that was republished last year.
Across
1. (BA) + (VIN) = BAVIN, a bundle of brushwood, or faggot. I cannot believe that the surface reading refers to a male homosexual, it probably means “old woman” used derogatively.
4. TOP-LINERS: the latest Chambers defines topliner as a star, presumably one who tops the bill, so a winner(?) The winners of the Blue Ribband(sic) were also “top liners”.
9. VERSATILE: (Valet, Sire)* with “very adaptable” serving both as definition and anagram indicator.
10. “The furrow oft the stubborn GLEBE has broke” from Thomas Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard. Any schoolboy of the time who had been beaten about the head with a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury would have been able to quote extensively from this poem.
11. ROUGH takes age to make roughage, something for good digestion
12. ITINERANT = “journeyman”; more of a pun than a cryptic definition.
13. GENERAL: another pun, not a particularly good one.
15. ENGROSS: here to write in legal form, write words for legal documents.
18. SPLASHY: the allusion is to this nursery rhyme:
Dr. Foster went to Gloucester
In a shower of rain.
He stepped in a puddle
Right up to his middle
And never went there again.
20. CHASSED: this must be a long-forgotten colloquialism for dismissed, and also alludes to chassé in dancing.
21. CAMPHORIC : (A MP) in CHORIC. Solvers of the time will certainly have recalled the smell of camphorated oil, rubbed on the chest to alleviate coughs.
23. DEGAS: a simple definition of the painter remembered for his paintings and sculptures of ballerinas, as well as some amply proportioned ladies at their toilet.
25. ON TOP: (not)* in (op).
26. ALLEMANDE: (Made Allen)* with dance serving as the definition and the anagram indicator.
27. PART-TIMER: REMIT sent back after PART.
28. NOSES: to nose is to recognize, and noses are also informers among the common folk. (The term seems to have been superseded by “grass”, though it did appear in a puzzle last year, I recall.)
Down
1. BEVERAGES: (Grave bees)*.
2. VIRTU + (o so) → virtuoso, someone who is o so skilled ….. hmmm.
3. (NEAT)(HERDS) Ho! Ho! Actually, I quite liked that one.
4. (TRI)+(VIAL) = no matter.
5. “Is too PRECISE in every part”. From a delightful poem by Robert Herrick (1591-1674), also found in Palgrave
6. This is an interesting clue. It might simply be a pun on Burns, an INGLE being a fireplace, but in Robert Burns’s poem The Cotter’s Saturday Night we find the lines The cheerfu’ supper done, wi’ serious face, They, round the ingle, form a circle wide; Coincidentally, Burns’s epigraph to The Cotter’s Saturday Night is a quotation from Gray’s Elegy, mentioned above.
7.ELEVATORS: A Times 2– type definition.
8. S(C)ENT: no definition here, presumably to throw you off it.
14. A NILOMETER is, according to Chambers, “a gauge for measuring the height of the River Nile”. It might also suggest a meter reading zero (nil) and, even more outlandishly, a milometer on a taxi in Luxor that has no reading on it. If you can come up with a better explanation, I shall be delighted to hear it.
16. This clue is alluding to the Brigade of Guards, so GUARDSMAN.
17. S(IDES=appointed day)TEPS
19. YARD(stick)+A+RM, which is itself a stick.
20. This refers to the story of the sacred geese that saved Rome from the Gauls in 390 B.C. by cackling and waking Marcus Manlius. CACKLERS are also people who engage in silly chatter.
21. CROUP: part of horse behind the saddle, and a nasty cough.
22. HOP IT: definitely out of a Christmas cracker.
24. GONGS as in medals and (say) dinner gongs.
This comes from only a few years (five, I think) before I started doing the Times on a regular basis, and (though memory is obviously unreliable) I don’t remember the early ones I tackled being this vague in places (is the term non-Ximenean?)
Once into the swing of it, looking for puns and devious, one word definitions, it took around 20 minutes to crack. CoD to NEATHERDS (chuckle).
The crosswords took me quite some time to solve. By way of excuse, they were yellow and rather mouse-nibbled; also, I had to break off now and then to drag an aspidistra stand and an Edwardian commode across the floor, giving the impression below that I was actually doing some sorting-out in the attic.
I wonder if the Times Crossword Editor would consider looking into the archives and re-publishing one of these old puzzles once a month, say.
My thanks again to John for dredging up another entertaining puzzle. (Interestingly it used exactly the same grid as the immediately preceding one. I don’t think that happens very often – if at all – these days.)