Vintage Olympic Crossword 10737 – originally October 10th 1964

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Other Crosswords
Took about half an hour, with a few going in on a wing and a prayer. Very loose by today’s standards, with loads of weak cryptic definitions and a couple of bits of Shakespeare (but nothing too obscure). None of the anagrams were indicated in wordplay either. Maybe three or four of the clues could have been used in today’s puzzles. I was just over a year old when this puzzle was first published.

You can see the clues by hovering the mouse pointer over the clue numbers.

Across
1 SWIFT – triple definition.
4 POP-SINGER – not sure about the old Saturday concert bit. Maybe something similar to this?
9 ULSTERMAN – an ulster is a type of overcoat, but I thought the man would be orange-handed rather than red!
10 ELLEN – E’EN (poetic even) around LL (fifties).
11 DREAD – ref. DREADNOUGHT, a type of warship.
12 EXACTIONS – cryptic definition, sort of.
13 UNIFIES – straight definition.
15 ENDGAME – the final moves in a game of chess, so this is another cryptic definition, I guess.
18 HUSTLES – (slut she)*, but without an anagram indicator.
20 TEMPEST – Miranda’s a character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Was there a well-known actress of that name back in the 60’s? I couldn’t find one.
21 CEASE-FIRE – got this from the definition, i.e. the last three words. The rest of it is the name of a 13th century song. What that’s got to do with it I have no idea.
23 TEMPE – add the answer to RATE to get a word meaning “equable in climate”.
25 PACER – not-very-cryptic definition.
26 PIZZICATO – cryptic definition.
27 SUSPENDER – yet another cryptic definition.
28 SAENS – i.e. the composer Camille Saint-Saëns.

Down
1 SOURDOUGH – cryptic definition.
2 ISSUE – 1S (one shilling) + SUE (go to law).
3 TREADMILL – cryptic definition + DBE.
4 PAMPERS – PA (father) + MP (getting into parliament?) + ERS (no wordplay).
5 PEN-NAME – cryptic definition, liked this one.
6 INERT – (Nitre)*, again no anagrind to speak of.
7 GALLOPADE – another cryptic definition.
8 RINGS – double definition.
14 INSTANCES – got this one from crossing letters. I can’t see either definition or wordplay to justify it though. ISSUANCES also fits the gap, so maybe that’s it.
16 DEMETRIUS – character in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I think Puck was supposed to give him a love potion, but gave it to Lysander instead by mistake. Not sure how that makes him a victim.
17 ENTRE-NOUS – (tureen, son)*, unindicated. French for “between ourselves”. No idea what the gumption to make a French dish, almost is for.
19 SKIPPED – double definition, sort of.
20 TWEEZER – cryptic definition.
21 COPES – double definition, if you accept COPES as the same thing as coping stones I suppose.
22 EYRIE – I inside EYRE (Jane).
24 MEARE – literally, as MEARE is a village in Somerset.

9 comments on “Vintage Olympic Crossword 10737 – originally October 10th 1964”

  2. Just under 17 minutes before I crossed my fingers and submitted what turned out to be an all correct version. A lot that I wasn’t sure of, but in terms of lacking what we demand as a fair challenge these days, I think this is far from the worst puzzle of its era that I’ve come across.

    I think I can add a little to the explanations:

    *Endgame was a Samuel Beckett play and, as I assumed must be the case, not his last one. Edit, beaten to it on that suggestion.
    *I think the actress must be Dame Marie Tempest. I’d never heard of her before Googling post-solve; she appears to be the female version of the dreaded Beerbohm Tree, massively famous in her day (and still known to some extent in 1964, presumably) but nearly forgotten now.
    *INSTANCES is another Shakespearian one – in the speech which begins “All the world’s a stage…”, the 5th age of man is The Justice, who is “full of wise saws and modern instances”. I’d love to say that I knew this off the top of my head, but it was another educated guess, subsequently confirmed by Google.

    I had nothing else to add with CEASE FIRE, PAMPERS or ENTRE NOUS, all of which went in on the basis that “they sort of work”, which is often the only way to go with puzzles of this vintage…

    Edited at 2012-12-26 08:08 pm (UTC)

    1. I’ve added her to the Wikipedia disambiguation page for Tempest, from which she was missing. I should have dug deeper than that. I’ve come across the Beckett play before, probably in the TLS crossword, but it didn’t occur to me today. Thanks for the INSTANCES quote – it didn’t occur to me that it might be another quote so I didn’t bother to Google for it.
  3. I’d just done the 2000 and 1988 puzzles when I tackled this one, so had played myself in but was perhaps starting to flag just a little. Nevertheless I wasn’t too unhappy with my 9:04, especially as I had to spend a minute or two at the end on the rather cheeky 26ac. I expect I solved this puzzle when it first appeared, as I’d been doing the Times crossword for nearly two years by then, but not surprisingly I don’t remember a thing about it.

    I bunged POP-SINGER straight in on the slightly dubious basis of the lyrics of A More Humane Mikado, which mentions “classical Monday Pops”. Perhaps there were “classical Saturday Pops” as well?

    9ac refers to the Red Hand of Ulster.

    Tim is quite right about Dame Marie Tempest, who used to appear regularly in the Times crossword in my younger days. This puzzle could actually have been the very first time I came across her, though I probably didn’t understand the clue then.

    In summer you no longer need to light a fire to keep warm. I think 21ac (CEASE-FIRE) is as simple as that.

    For 17dn (ENTRE-NOUS) the French dish is an ENTRÉE and NOUS = “gumption” (another straightforward one – you must have been flagging even worse than I was 😉

    The OED allows COPE = “coping”.

    I’m still unsure whether there’s anything more to PAMPERS though.

    1. Thanks for the explanations Tony. I should have got the red hand reference, as I pulled up the Ulster page on Wikipedia and failed to notice what was in the middle of the flag! As for ENTRE NOUS, I don’t think I was flagging but I was in a bit of a hurry with two to blog and about an hour to spare, and I just didn’t see it. In my defence, neither did Tim so it wasn’t all that straightforward for us young pretenders. However, I got PIZZICATO with just the P and O in place – finely tuned to cryptic definition tricks by then!
  4. This was my favourite of the 4 puzzles, if only for the sheer outrageousness of some of the clues – ULSTERMAN and ENTRE-NOUS were outstanding in this department!
    With the latter, interestingly, I spotted the “ENTREE NOUS” thing, but couldn’t work out what “TUREEN SON” was all about, partly no doubt as by that stage I’d already got the answer but also perhaps because, by analogy with the rest of the puzzle, I was expecting something even more devious!
  5. I thought this the most interesting one of the four, the most inventive, and the one I enjoyed the most although I was disappointed with how long it took me – just over an hour, in two sessions a day apart.
    I don’t have much to add to the clue-specific comments already made except that I agree with Tony that there must surely be more to 4dn than meets the eye. And, Meare seems an awfully small village to expect solvers to know!
    I am very grateful to you, Tony and Andy, for helping out with these blogs!
  6. two thoughts on pop singer; pop would be an old person and I guess ‘top of the pops’ was on a Saturday
    1. Nice idea, but although TOTP started in 1964 it was always on Thursdays… and I doubt if the Times would have acknowledged pop music as an art form back then either (certainly not in the crossword)!

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