How Americans celebrated the crossword—but the British were not so sure
In 1920s America, fads were quite the vogue. Flappers had the Charleston, the stock market had dangerous overspeculation, and it seemed that everyone had the crossword. The very look of a crossword grid was, for a while, chic: Black-and-white squares adorned earrings, dresses, and collar pins, and it was reported that checked patterns in general had never been in such demand.
The most opulent manifestation of the craze was a Broadway revue, Puzzles of 1925, which features a scene in a crossword puzzle sanatorium filled with those driven to madness by clueing fever. Its lyrics echoed the papers’ concern about home wrecking: “The house has gone to ruin / Since all that Mother’s doin’ / Is putting letters in the little squares.” At the same time, various songwriters used crosswords as romantic analogy: “Cross Words Between My Sweetie and Me” by the Little Ramblers and “Crossword Mama You’re Puzzling Me” by Papalia & His Orchestra, not to mention “Cross Word Papa (You Sure Puzzle Me)” by Josie Miles.
Crosswords began to appear in the most unlikely areas of public life: Puzzle competitions between Yale and Harvard were to be expected, perhaps less so those between New York’s fire brigade and police department before packed houses at Wanamaker’s Auditorium.
The church was not immune, as seen by witnesses of the celebrated incidence of the Reverend George McElveen of Pittsburgh, who rendered a sermon in the form of a puzzle and asked worshippers to solve the clues before the preaching began.
The British, too, caught on, though not without a fight from the nation’s moral guardians. The first crossword in a British publication appeared quietly in February 1922, in Pearson’s Magazine. More appeared over the next few years, but these tended to be found in books, not in newspapers. It was not just that the papers were slow to see the puzzle’s appeal; they were actively hostile to the very notion of the crossword.
They warned nervous citizens of the damage this scourge was already doing to American citizens. In December 1924 an editorial in the London Times had the chilling headline AN ENSLAVED AMERICA. The crossword, it explained, “has grown from the pastime of a few ingenious idlers into a national institution: a menace because it is making devastating inroads on the working hours of every rank of society.” Solvers could, it seemed, be seen “quite shamelessly” staring at their grids, morning, noon, and night . . .
...cudgeling their brains for a four-letter word meaning “molten rock” or a six-letter word meaning “idler,” or what not: in trains and trams, or omnibuses, in subways, in private offices and counting-rooms, in factories and homes, and even—although as yet rarely—with hymnals for camouflage, in church.
The choice of “idler” as an example of a clue is not, I suspect, an idle one. As with video games and recreational drugs, crosswords alarmed the self-appointed defenders of morality because people who are solving a crossword are simply enjoying themselves. Five million man-hours, warned the London Times’s New York correspondent, were being lost every day as workers forgot their duty to contribute to the gross national product, lost in the pure pleasure of finding synonyms.
And because of this, the Tamworth Herald reported in the same year, pernicious puzzles “have been known to break up homes.” This family wrecking comes about when husbands spend time solving a clue rather than earning a crust. The solution of one concerned policeman was to enforce on addicts a ration of three puzzles a day, with ten days’ imprisonment if a fourth was attempted.
In February 1925 the London Times announced that crosswords had, with “the speed of a meteorological depression,” crossed the Atlantic. “The nation still stands before the blast,” the paper thunders, “and no man can say it will stand erect again.” Prepare yourself for some mayhem.
“The damage caused to dictionaries in the library at Wimbledon by people doing cross-word puzzles,” we read later that year, “has been so great that the committee has withdrawn all the volumes.” Across the capital, in Willesden, it was the same sad story. Dulwich Library, meanwhile, started blacking out the white squares of crossword grids with a heavy pencil, “to prevent any one person from keeping a newspaper for more than a reasonable length of time.”
Those selfish paper-hogging solvers! Meanwhile, booksellers bemoaned falling sales of the novel—no longer itself considered a menace to society—in favor of “dictionaries, glossaries, dictionaries of synonyms, &c.” The Nottingham Evening Post went on:
The picture theaters are also complaining that cross-words keep people at home. They get immersed in a problem and forget all about Gloria Swanson, Lillian Gish, and the other stars of the film constellation.
And it gets worse. In another part of Nottingham—poor puzzle-blighted Nottingham—the zookeeper was swamped in correspondence. The reason? Crosswords, of course. He listed some of the inquiries that were keeping him from his animals:
What is a word of three letters meaning a female swan? What is a female kangaroo, or a fragile creature in six letters ending in TO?
(That would be PEN, DOE, and . . . I’m not sure. There’s a mackerel-like fish called the BONITO . . . ?) Meantime, across town at the theater, the stage was bare because one Mr. Matheson Lang, absorbed in a puzzle, had missed his entrance. “This caused him much chagrin,” reported the local press, “for he is extremely conscientious as regards his stage work.”
Who was safe from this funk? Surely the world of grocery was unblighted? Apparently not:
A girl asked a busy grocer to name the different brands of flour he kept. When he had done so, expecting a sale, she said she didn’t want to buy any. She just thought one of the names might fit into a cross-word puzzle she was doing.
Worrying stuff. Happily for society at large, the crossword was soon to find itself pursued by the law. Prizes had started appearing for puzzles—another symptom of the something-for-nothing culture, tutted the London Times—along with a new variant on the crossword that would seem very unfamiliar to the solver of today.
By the end of 1926 the News of the World, The People, the Daily Sketch, and the Sunday Graphic were among the papers to print prize crosswords, which were not only “pay-to-play” but had multiple clues for which there was more than one correct answer.
The grids contained far more black squares than normal grids—the reason for which became clear when you reached a clue such as “You look forward to getting this when you are in hospital.” Solvers who hoped that their choice between BETTER and LETTER would be decided by a B or an L in another clue found that there was no such other clue. The crucial squares stood alone. If you did manage to complete the grid correctly, a prize was offered—but those ambiguities ensured that the number of “correct” entries for each puzzle would be tiny.
The immense popularity of these puzzles made them very lucrative for the syndicates and newspapers that created them, and court summons were issued by the police, who insisted that the puzzles were not crosswords at all but thinly disguised lotteries. A lawyer for the police argued at London’s top magistrates’ court that “the words are ridiculously easy, and a child of 12 should have no difficulty in solving them.” At times it seemed that the crossword itself was on trial: Thanks to the Betting and Lotteries Bill, it became literally as well as morally criminal.
However, the genuine crossword benefited in invidious comparison: As the judges shut down the lotteries, the puzzle survived. Indeed, the crossword was on the way to becoming respectable. The London Telegraph had started publishing one on July 30, 1925, and by the end of the decade, the London Times had started to wonder if these puzzles weren’t so bad after all. Or, in the words of BBC correspondent Martin Bell, whose father was the London Times’s first constructor, the paper “was losing circulation hand-over-fist to the Telegraph because the Telegraph had the new-fangled American fashion, the crossword, so the Times had to get one pretty sharpish.”
The motivation might have been financial and the about-face a tad hypocritical after all the scaremongering, but the appearance on February 1, 1930, of a puzzle in the paper with the slogan “Top People take The Times” marked the crossword’s move to unambiguous respectability. Soon The Spectator and The Listener followed, and the British press began to rely on puzzles for a good, and indisputable, proportion of its newsstand sales, as some readers would buy a copy, have a bash at the crossword, then throw the paper away unread.
When that first constructor for the London Times, Adrian Bell, was told by his own father that he would be constructing puzzles, he replied, “But Father, I haven’t even solved a crossword puzzle,” only to be told, “Well, you’ve got just ten days to learn!” Bell learned fast and went on to write such well-loved clues as “Die of cold? (3,4)” and “Spoils of War (4).”
(Answers in the chapter FAIR. But first there is a whole new language to master . . .)