Tom Johnson

Allan Scott, who died in mid-May, was one of the country’s pre-eminent crossword compilers and will be remembered by some of our Spectator solvers as Ascot. Allan was born in Southport in Lancashire in 1946. He married his first wife, Hilda, in 1967 and they had two children, David and Carol. He worked in insurance in London until his retirement in 2000. Soon afterwards he moved from Essex to Llandudno with his partner, Christina, whom he married earlier this year. His first crossword had been published in the Listener back in 1977 and in the mid-1980s, while working in Manchester, he had collaborated with Harold Massingham (Mass in The Spectator) on four collections of cryptic crosswords for Marks & Spencer.

Christopher Brougham has been a Spectator crossword setter for well over 25 years and his puzzle in this week’s issue is his final regular compilation for our series. After a serious illness, he has retired from the Bar as a KC and feels it is time to take things more easily. Chris began solving crosswords in the Evening Standard, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph as a teenager. While studying law at Oxford in the 1960s, he mastered the Times crossword and later participated in the first Times crossword championships. In 1980 he discovered the Azed clue-writing competition in the Observer and has competed in these monthly challenges ever since. In 1988 he was made a QC and in the following year his first cryptic puzzle was published in the Crossword Club magazine.