Our author, AP Herbert, was a lot of things. An independent MP from 1935 to 1950; a head of various public bodies; a campaigner for reform of divorce laws. His blue plaque in Hammersmith, London, though, begins: “Author, humourist”.
Some of that humour takes place in the legal system, a world Herbert knew well, having studied jurisprudence and being the grandson of a lord justice of appeal. In his Misleading Cases series for Punch magazine, he offered accounts of fictional trials that became bestselling books in 1927 – and which remain funny almost a century later.
“People must not do things for fun,” pronounces Lord Light, lord chief justice in the case of Rex v Haddock. “We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any act of parliament.”
The case we’re interested in also involves the fictional litigant Albert Haddock: it is the bishop of Bowl, Earl Rubble, Evadne Lady Smail, John Lickspittle, General Glue and Others v Haddock.
Haddock has started setting crossword puzzles, a format he uses to libel the great and the good, including various nobles, a drama critic and the aged bishop of Bowl.
Much of the appeal come from Haddock’s unexplained campaign against the churchman: he has been clued, reports Sir Antony Dewlap KC, prosecuting:
… as ‘a prosy humbug’, as ‘an intolerably hearty and overpaid clergyman’, ‘the world’s worst golfer’, ‘canting Tommy’, ‘the sniffing parson’, and other vile expressions of the kind.
For those of us who love puzzles, though, it’s a treat to read something from a period when the judge can plausibly require an explanation of what a crossword is. If you haven’t yet read Sir Antony’s description and Mr Justice Snubb’s reply, I urge you to do so.
Herbert also offers a collection of the kind of words a crossword solver might be expected to know (he’s a whiz with a list):
… the names of mythical animals and biblical characters, prepositions, foreign towns, classical writers, obscure musical instruments, vegetables, little-known adjectives, and so forth.
Little may have changed on that front; the biggest difference between the puzzles of Haddock’s day and today is that present-day clues might well go out of their way to paint unflattering pictures of the great and the good, from Araucaria’s “Poetical scene with surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating (3, 3, 8, 12)” to the kind of thing I hope to see in the Financial Times’ new monthly puzzle.
One question, though. Sir Antony tells the judge that the bishop has further cause for offence:
… this unhappy victim of the defendant’s spite had not even the satisfaction of a principal (and horizontal) place in the puzzle, but was degraded to the position of a word in four letters, reading downward, an indignity intolerable, milord, to a man of his years and sensibility.
Setters and solvers: do you consider down clues to be in some way less prestigious? Even a little?
Our next book
Suggestions for future book club reading are very welcome. In the meantime, our next tale is Michael Gilbert’s whodunnit Close Quarters.
Past book club books
Find a collection of explainers, interviews and other helpful bits and bobs at alanconnor.com
The Shipping Forecast Puzzle Book by Alan Connor, which is partly but not predominantly cryptic, can be ordered from the Guardian Bookshop
