Meet lady crossword
Every book, no matter how big, begins with a single word. And for Anne Bradford, author of the celebrated Bradford’s Crossword Solver’s Dictionary, that word was ‘Lat’.
The year was 1957 and ‘Lat’, a type of pillar in India, was the answer to a crossword clue that Anne had been struggling with in the Ximenes puzzle of a weekend newspaper. ‘I realised that it would be extremely useful to have a “reverse dictionary”, in which headword and definition change places,’ she explains when we meet beside the fire of a north London pub, one foggy Tuesday afternoon. ‘And so I set about compiling one.’
Indeed, that one word spawned a project that would turn into a Herculean labour. In fact, it would take more than two decades of hard work and relentless crossword solving before Anne had enough material for a dictionary, the first incarnation of which – Longman’s Crossword Solver’s Dictionary – was published in 1986.
It has since been through several publishers, but now in its ninth (25th anniversary) edition, Bradford’s Crossword Solver’s Dictionary is a quite phenomenal tome: drawing on more than 325,000 crossword clues, offering more than 270,00 solutions and now, quite rightly, bearing its author’s name. (‘Lat’, in case you’re interested, currently appears under the entry ‘Pillar(ed), Pillars’ on page 568.)
So who is the remarkable woman behind this book? Well, she is a ‘Geordie’ by birth, was an evacuee in the Second World War, during which she was sent to Alnwick, and is most definitely a lady: erudite, educated and immaculately mannered. She thrived at school, where she was in a class with pupils who were three years older than she was, and, between having children, worked for a petroleum company and ran an employment agency, before spending 20 years as the secretary of a prep school. She spends around an hour a day doing crosswords or adding to her dictionary – and drinks her coffee black.
CRYPTIC CROSSWORD! Click here to have a go at sovling some of Anne Bradford's cracking clues...
Given her penchant for cracking clues, the biggest surprise, perhaps, is that she never worked as a Bletchley Park code breaker, a suggestion that she laughs off.
Now in her 80s, Anne currently works three afternoons a week in the charity shop of the local hospice, where she looks after the books. ‘My colleagues had no idea that I was the author of the dictionary until someone donated one to the shop and a colleague spotted the name on the jacket,’ she laughs.
Of course, Anne has always been a great lover of language. ‘My mother taught me to read when I was three. Before long, I was very good at reading upside down, too, which is most useful if you’re playing Scrabble.’
She is also an avid researcher and collector, and is particularly keen on the rather eccentric, early-20thcentury pictures of Harry Whittier Frees (1879 to 1953), who photographed animals in costume. She has even self-published a book about him.
So with such an inquiring mind, and a staggering 20,000 completed crosswords under her belt – it now takes her an average of 10 minutes to solve The Times cryptic puzzle – does she ever compile her own?
‘I was asked once by my friend, the illustrator Annie Tempest, to do a Leadergram [the early incarnation of The Ladygram] using a book that she had illustrated, called The Guest From Hell. It took me absolutely ages. I was shuffling letters around and I thought I’d never finish. Never again!’
And what’s behind the best clues? ‘Well, they have to be witty and clever. My all-time favourite is “Pineapple rings in syrup”. Pineapple is a grenade, which rings (goes around) in, giving you an answer of “grenadine”, which is a syrup. It’s just brilliant.’
The crossword has been with us since 1913, when the American title New York World began publishing them. They then swept Britain a decade later, when The Sunday Times printed its first in 1925.
But what kind of future does the crossword face now? ‘Number puzzles such as Su Doku are starting to take over from word puzzles, so the crossword won’t last forever,’ says Anne. ‘But they’ll be around for a good while yet, and I’ve still got a lot of work to do on my dictionary.
‘I’ve now been working on it for more than 50 years, but I don’t think it will ever be finished.’ Some tasks, it seems, are just too big… even for the remarkable Mrs Bradford.
Bradford’s Crossword Solver’s Dictionary, by Anne R Bradford, is published by Collins, priced £20.
‘Cake-sandwiches-meat, at Uncle Sam’s party’ (solution: Clambake) Meat here is lamb, sandwiches is used as a verb, so we have C-lamb-ake, which is a kind of party in America. Uncle Sam or US is often used to indicate America.
‘Tin out East’ (solution: Sen) In this example, tin, implying ‘money’, requires its chemical symbol Sn to go out (side) East, or its abbreviation, E, the whole clue being a definition of a currency (sen) used in the East.
The year was 1957 and ‘Lat’, a type of pillar in India, was the answer to a crossword clue that Anne had been struggling with in the Ximenes puzzle of a weekend newspaper. ‘I realised that it would be extremely useful to have a “reverse dictionary”, in which headword and definition change places,’ she explains when we meet beside the fire of a north London pub, one foggy Tuesday afternoon. ‘And so I set about compiling one.’
Indeed, that one word spawned a project that would turn into a Herculean labour. In fact, it would take more than two decades of hard work and relentless crossword solving before Anne had enough material for a dictionary, the first incarnation of which – Longman’s Crossword Solver’s Dictionary – was published in 1986.
It has since been through several publishers, but now in its ninth (25th anniversary) edition, Bradford’s Crossword Solver’s Dictionary is a quite phenomenal tome: drawing on more than 325,000 crossword clues, offering more than 270,00 solutions and now, quite rightly, bearing its author’s name. (‘Lat’, in case you’re interested, currently appears under the entry ‘Pillar(ed), Pillars’ on page 568.)
So who is the remarkable woman behind this book? Well, she is a ‘Geordie’ by birth, was an evacuee in the Second World War, during which she was sent to Alnwick, and is most definitely a lady: erudite, educated and immaculately mannered. She thrived at school, where she was in a class with pupils who were three years older than she was, and, between having children, worked for a petroleum company and ran an employment agency, before spending 20 years as the secretary of a prep school. She spends around an hour a day doing crosswords or adding to her dictionary – and drinks her coffee black.
CRYPTIC CROSSWORD! Click here to have a go at sovling some of Anne Bradford's cracking clues...
Given her penchant for cracking clues, the biggest surprise, perhaps, is that she never worked as a Bletchley Park code breaker, a suggestion that she laughs off.
Now in her 80s, Anne currently works three afternoons a week in the charity shop of the local hospice, where she looks after the books. ‘My colleagues had no idea that I was the author of the dictionary until someone donated one to the shop and a colleague spotted the name on the jacket,’ she laughs.
Of course, Anne has always been a great lover of language. ‘My mother taught me to read when I was three. Before long, I was very good at reading upside down, too, which is most useful if you’re playing Scrabble.’
She is also an avid researcher and collector, and is particularly keen on the rather eccentric, early-20thcentury pictures of Harry Whittier Frees (1879 to 1953), who photographed animals in costume. She has even self-published a book about him.
So with such an inquiring mind, and a staggering 20,000 completed crosswords under her belt – it now takes her an average of 10 minutes to solve The Times cryptic puzzle – does she ever compile her own?
‘I was asked once by my friend, the illustrator Annie Tempest, to do a Leadergram [the early incarnation of The Ladygram] using a book that she had illustrated, called The Guest From Hell. It took me absolutely ages. I was shuffling letters around and I thought I’d never finish. Never again!’
And what’s behind the best clues? ‘Well, they have to be witty and clever. My all-time favourite is “Pineapple rings in syrup”. Pineapple is a grenade, which rings (goes around) in, giving you an answer of “grenadine”, which is a syrup. It’s just brilliant.’
The crossword has been with us since 1913, when the American title New York World began publishing them. They then swept Britain a decade later, when The Sunday Times printed its first in 1925.
But what kind of future does the crossword face now? ‘Number puzzles such as Su Doku are starting to take over from word puzzles, so the crossword won’t last forever,’ says Anne. ‘But they’ll be around for a good while yet, and I’ve still got a lot of work to do on my dictionary.
‘I’ve now been working on it for more than 50 years, but I don’t think it will ever be finished.’ Some tasks, it seems, are just too big… even for the remarkable Mrs Bradford.
Bradford’s Crossword Solver’s Dictionary, by Anne R Bradford, is published by Collins, priced £20.
Lady, ladies (as defined by Bradford’s)
Baroness, Bevy, Bountiful, Burd, Dame, Dark, Dinner, Don(n)a, Duenna, Female, First, Frau, Frow, Gemma, Godiva, Hen, Khanum, Lavatory, Leading, Loo, Luck, Maam, Madam(e), Martha, Memsahib, Muck, Nictine, Peeress, Powder room, Señ(h)ora, Shopping bag, Signora, Slate, Tea, WC, White, Windermere.A few of anne’s favourite clues
‘Information given to communist in return for sex’ (solution: Gender) Information can be defined as gen; communist is almost always red, in return indicates ‘reversed’, leading to gen-der, a synonym for sex.‘Cake-sandwiches-meat, at Uncle Sam’s party’ (solution: Clambake) Meat here is lamb, sandwiches is used as a verb, so we have C-lamb-ake, which is a kind of party in America. Uncle Sam or US is often used to indicate America.
‘Tin out East’ (solution: Sen) In this example, tin, implying ‘money’, requires its chemical symbol Sn to go out (side) East, or its abbreviation, E, the whole clue being a definition of a currency (sen) used in the East.