Remembering Ireland's Nuala Considine — the world’s most prolific crossword compiler

She was compiling crosswords right up to six weeks before her death, thinking up clues that challenged, delighted, and frustrated readers of some of the world’s best-known publications in English. Here’s another one: Cheep Alarm Clock? (4,6)

At one point, members of a crossword-solving group were so stumped by her notoriously difficult crossword in the Daily Mail, that they requested a photograph of the setter so that they could throw darts at it. The newspaper, happily, did not oblige.

National Crossword Day on Thursday, December 21, marks the publication of the first crossword in the New York World as recently as 1913. That gives us the perfect excuse to remember the Irishwoman who could compile a cryptic crossword in an hour, if the deadline demanded it.

But there are other reasons to recall Nuala Considine. She lived in wartime Rome as a child when German bombs fell close to the family’s ambassadorial home where her father Dr Thomas Kiernan was appointed minister to the Holy See in 1941.

This column has already featured Nuala’s mother Delia Murphy Kiernan, the Irish singing star who helped prisoners of war escape during the German occupation of that city from late 1943 to June 1944. “I was in the thick of it,” she said after the death of her husband who was unaware of her activities.

Nuala Kiernan had her own memories of that time. As a 13-year-old, in 1941, she left Foynes, Co Limerick, in a seaplane that flew via Lisbon and Spain to get to Rome.

Her parents “kept something of a lively and bohemian legation in wartime Rome, helping refugees and displaced persons and offering memorable hospitality to all-comers”, Michael Kennedy writes in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.

After the war, the family moved to Australia where Nuala’s father became the country’s first Irish ambassador. Nuala and her brother Colm continued their studies in Rome. It meant both of them became excellent linguists, speaking fluent French, Italian, and Spanish. Nuala also studied piano and operatic singing.

When she returned to Dublin, she got a job as an air hostess at Aer Lingus, which was considered one of the most glamorous jobs of the time. While working there, she met pilot Brian Considine. Both of them had seen war at close quarters; Nuala while living in Rome and Brian as a former RAF Battle of Britain Hurricane pilot. But they had another vital thing in common — an interest in crosswords.

Together, they compiled a crossword and, almost as a joke, submitted it to the Irish Times in 1946. They were stunned when it was published. Two years later, the couple married, but it meant that Nuala had to leave her job at Aer Lingus. The marriage ban, which forced so many women out of the Irish workforce, saw to that.

Brian Considine resigned too—perhaps in solidarity—and the couple moved to London. In 1955, Nuala joined the Morley Adams press agency on Fleet Street where her crossword-setting prowess was quickly recognised. Soon she was writing puzzles for a variety of publications, while turning her hand to whatever else the job of freelance journalist demanded.

She provided this fascinating insight into her work in a letter written, many years later, to one of her editors, Peter Stirling: “For instance, I wrote a weekly horoscope. I told them I knew nothing about astrology, but was told to buy a few books about it [the money to be taken] from petty cash. I wrote theatre and film reviews. 

Once, I was asked to write a piece about a Buddhist monk, the next week I had to write about rearing pigs. Never a dull moment. [But] it was very hard work. Sometimes a 15 x 15 cryptic crossword had to be compiled in an hour, and [in the 1950s] there was no electronic help.

The list of publications that published her crosswords is breathtaking. She set puzzles for the Spectator, the Financial Times and the Washington Post. When the New Scientist expressed an interest in her work, she learned a set of new terms for the job.

She had a gift for cryptic clues which were “notoriously droll and concise”, as one of her obituary writers noted. Indeed, after her death, tributes were published right around the world, a testament to her reach and popularity with cruciverablists (being a quick-crossword woman myself, I had to look that up).

In the Telegraph, she was known as Excalibur and set ‘The Toughie’, a crossword that ran for some 30 years. The clue at the start of this piece was included in the 25th-anniversary edition. The answer? Forsake (for sake).

When the Sunday Telegraph marked the paper’s milestones since its first publication in 1961, it recalled Nuala’s crosswords which she compiled from 1992 to 2008. Her clues, it said, were “fair, solvable, and witty”.

In the Daily Mail, her puzzle was dubbed ‘The Stinker’ and delighted and infuriated fans in equal measure.

She was writing crosswords for some 50 years when her husband died in 1996. By then, she was nearly 70, but she “responded by taking on a workload that astonished even her editors”, Clare Caldwell’s obituary in The Sydney Morning Herald noted.

At the time she was living in England, spending summers in California to avoid the winter. When she was diagnosed with cancer, she expressed a wish to be buried in her native Ireland.

According to Caldwell, she wrote to a friend saying: “There is a family plot that houses my parents and sister. My plan is to be buried there but the undertaker said she wasn’t sure if another body would fit and wanted to know if I was fat. She wouldn’t take my word for it and wanted to inspect me, so I presented myself. 

"Like letting the hangman take a look at the prisoner before execution. She said, ‘Oh, you’ll be fine. There’s room. Take your time’. I said, ‘Thank you’.”

When she died in 2018, Nuala Considine was buried in that plot in Deansgrange cemetery in Dublin.

As for the cheep alarm clock? Dawn chorus (“But of course,” says yours truly, quick-crossword woman, fully aware that the answer may never have dawned on her).