![]() ![]() His first puzzle was published in the Radio Times in 1963, the year he left the Navy, and under the initials RFS he began contributing a weekly crossword to the Birmingham Post. “Then when we flew off to join our carrier at sea, without newspapers, I started compiling.” As a member of the Magic Circle I was banned, so I started solving up to 12 puzzles a day in the wardroom newspapers. His compiling career also began at this time: “When we were stationed in Cornwall at RN Air Station Culdrose, winter Cornish weather often disrupted flying and to fill the time, aircrew used to play cards for money. One of Squires’s pseudonyms as a crossword-setter, Icarus, served as a reminder of how lucky he had been to survive.Īs well as representing the Royal Navy and Fleet Air Arm at football and cricket, Squires taught himself magic tricks, qualifying for membership of the Magic Circle. Luckily a helicopter was waiting to rescue me.” His pilot lost his life in the accident. By then I was 60ft under, and I popped up like a cork, covered in oil. I hung on to a bar above my head with my hands and kicked at the door,” he recalled. Promoted to lieutenant in 1952, he flew as an observer from carriers for 10 years, becoming a member of the “Goldfish Club” after surviving a ditching off Ceylon in March 1961 when his Gannet AEW aircraft plunged into the Indian Ocean.Īs the aircraft sank, Squires became trapped inside as the cockpit escape-hatch jammed with the pressure of water. My father won the prize with ‘Wife, whiff and wuff’ (Spouse, cigarette and dog).”įrom Wolverhampton Grammar School, Roger joined the Royal Navy aged 15 as a Boy Seaman and, aged 20, was selected for a new Upper Yardman course for men wanting to fly in the Fleet Air Arm. Roger Squires was born in Tettenhall, Wolverhampton on Februand reckoned he had inherited an aptitude for wordplay from his father who sometimes won prizes in John Bull magazine competitions: “I remember one in which readers were asked to provide words to indicate ‘contentment’. His puzzles had appeared in 592 outlets in more than 30 countries. Writing in The Daily Telegraph in 2010, Christopher Howse observed of Squires’s output: “If you tackled all the crossword clues that he has set, and solved one a minute, it would take you more than three years and nine months to solve them all, working day and night without a break.”īy the time Squires’s last grid for the Telegraph was published in December 2017, he had compiled more than 1,400 crosswords for the newspaper, more than 70,000 crosswords in all and getting on for 2.5 million individual clues. One has to be magnanimous in victory,” Squires declared, although he could not resist composing a clue to celebrate: “Submit to pressure and return to base (9)”7. But, according to a report in The Guardian, the paper changed tack, “telephoned compilers to relay the good news and grovelled heroically”. In 1998 he was one of the “Telegraph Six”, a cohort of puzzle compilers who saw off an attempt by the bean counters to give a large chunk of their work to a computer which could build grids and lock words into them. Squires’s time with the newspaper was not entirely without incident and controversy. “I like to be entertaining, rather than just challenging,” he explained. His own favourite was “Bar of soap (3,6,6)”6. He also held the record for the longest published solution – to which his clue was : “Giggling troll follows Clancy, Larry, Billy and Peggy who howl, wrongly disturbing a place in Wales (58)”2.Īlthough, as in this case, he did set anagrams, Squires’s speciality was straight cryptic clues such as: “What the poor man has and the rich man wants (7)” 3 “Roman marbles missing? (3,6,6)”4 or “Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8)”5. His millionth clue, since he began compiling in 1963, appeared in 1989 and his two millionth – “Two girls, one on each knee (7)”1 – in 2007 (both were in the Telegraph). Squires, who also worked at various times as a magician, a Butlins entertainment manager and a small-part television actor, began compiling for The Daily Telegraph in 1986. Roger Squires, who has died aged 91, was a former Fleet Air Arm officer acknowledged for more than 20 years as “The World’s Most Prolific Crossword Compiler” by Guinness World Records although his crosswords featured in several national newspapers, he became known to Daily Telegraph readers as the paper’s Monday compiler. ![]()
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