What a great time we had and how well we were looked after at Miller & Carter, Coventry. They waited until everyone arrived before starting to cook our food which meant it was fresh and very tasty. Of course, this set us back a little as a few had had travel difficulties, and by the time all the speeches were made and the prizes were awarded it was late afternoon. We met old friends, made new ones and realised such coincidences as people finding they lived only a few hundred feet away from each other.
The speeches were all informative and entertaining; Alan Goddard told us that after a bit of a downward turn when the new team were getting on board, all our efforts including those of our clue setters, grid designers and most importantly, our solvers, are now bearing fruit and sales of our calendar are improving year by year.
Alan George Chamberlain, the Crossword Editor, told us how thankful he is for everything which other people do, while he enjoys the setting and the fruits of other people’s labours. He is modest but this role requires a huge and time-consuming amount of effort: liaising with clue setters and reviewers, and organising proofreaders and test solvers, to give an idea of just some of the work he does. If there are any of you out there who would like to become more involved in some of these aspects, please do contact us.
Alan said how good it was to have with us Ashley aka Boatman, Victoria aka Carpathian and Kevin who writes 3D crossword reviews for the newsletter. In particular Alan told us about Jos Tait who is never able to come to these functions as she lives in Australia. Her expertise ensures that Newsletters, Hints & Tips, crossword submission forms and much more are all running smoothly. Most importantly, she designs and produces our yearly calendars, which I’m sure you will agree are an art form. He also mentioned Abby Braunsdorf, 2nd place in the World Championship, and who writes the other half of our monthly reviews. Abby lives in the USA. So you see, we really are a global group of crossworders.
Then it was over to Eric Westbrook, who demonstrated with the aid of netting, a balloon and some tubing how crossword grids can be adapted into different shapes (you had to be there!) We already have quite a few different grid designs in use and are always happy when new ones are created. Outside the box thinking is more than welcome, so why not have a go at the end of the year when we run our grid collecting competitions, i.e. the World Championship and RPM Trophy.
We then moved on to the prize-giving with Eric first of all presenting the Oberto Solver of the Year puzzle to Joe Gage. Joe and Ellen very nicely helped the average age of the gathering to plummet.
An innovation followed. Garry Stripling (aka GIN) was unable to come over from Paris for the lunch. Taking advantage of his wife Caroline’s IT skills, we presented his RPM trophy via Zoom and it was great to have him with us over the ether, as it were. Garry was also with us in spirit, having sent a fun grid for us to complete during the gathering, which was much enjoyed. Do download the puzzle and have a go yourselves.
Here I digress from prize-giving to mention that Nick Inglis, our Hints & Tips man, had brought a fiendish picture puzzle. He was heading off afterwards with Sarah for a Tiddlywinks weekend – he is a World Champion in that sport as well as a previous 3D World Championship winner. His and Garry’s puzzles were very entertaining and helped break the ice nicely.
Back to Eric, who awarded Max Jackson his World Championship 3rd place certificate, and then the World Championship trophy to the winners. The 2024 competition was tremendously closely fought and the winners were Heather Knowles and Chris Cooper, with a grid you are going to absolutely love. They are great supporters of our cause and very worthy winners.
And that was more or less that. A couple of people had to leave before the end for other commitments, but for most there was time for a little more socialising.
I must thank all attending for their kind comments and generous donations, and am so pleased that they enjoyed the event as much as I did.
Nora Boswell / Bozzy
1st May 2025
Many thanks to Nora for organising the event so that the attendees had really nothing hard to do and could just turn up and enjoy it.
See below for photos of the event.
Roll of honour:
World Championship 2024
⭐ 1st: Heather Knowles and Chris Cooper (Calluna)
⭐ 2nd: Abby Braunsdorf (Absolution)
⭐ 3rd: Max Jackson (Xam)
RPM Trophy 2024
⭐ Winner: Garry Stripling (Gin)
Oberto Solver of the Year 2024
⭐ Joe Gage
(See the full results posted on 5th March)
Image gallery
Here are photos of the event, with thanks to Lynn Goddard.
Thanks to GIN for the extra puzzle which I am enjoying, and which has led to an unusual experience! Not able to detect the precise link between the thematic items (although I thought they must be sporting heroes, not my strongest field – possibly all ‘world champions’?), I just put a random list of them into Google: best burns foreman formby by michael patton. Google didn’t provide the key directly, but the seventh link provided was to the pdf of this puzzle – and the short section visible before I even clicked on the link gave the game away. It wasn’t really an intentional cheat, honest!
Eek, thanks for giving the game away Google! I’ve requested that the snippet be cleared. How long that will take I don’t know. I think the snippet generated was a result of your particular search terms, i.e. you searched for the answers and it gave you the answers. There is a clue to the theme on p2 of the PDF, if you hadn’t noticed. That should be enough to save you Googling the connection.