CHESTER ARTHUR CROSSING THE BORDER LINE

I think we have all seen his photo, but I doubt if many of you have seriously gazed into the chubby self satisfied face of President Chester A. Arthur and wondered what made him such a clothes horse? You ought to. “Elegant Arthur” was a vain, shallow, mutton chopped political hack who owned 80 pairs of trousers, and who rarely wore the same pair twice. “Chet”, as his friends liked to call the 6 foot 2 inch dandy raconteur, spent more on hats annually than most Americans earned in a year. Chester was a product of the spoils system. In six years as the Collector of the Port of New York, with a salary of $6,500 a year, Chester amassed a fortune of $3 million. And yet it was not his sticky fingers which endangers his reputation to this day . It was his massive ego, which inspired him to tell one little white lie . He fibbed about how old he was.

Chester had never held elected office before joining the Republican national ticket in 1880. He was the choice of Senator Roscoe Conkling, boss of the Stalwarts, the renamed Tammany Hall graft machine. In exchange for a promise to get-out-the-vote in New York “Lord Roscoe” had forced James Garfield to accept Chester Arthur as his Vice President. The Republicans needed the help. During the campaign Democrats spread the rumor that Chester had actually been born in Canada, and thus was not eligible to serve as Vice President. Chester refused to even dignify the charge with a response, even tho at least one Republican politician wondered why Chester didn't just “say where he was born, and put an end to all this mystery.”

It might have made a difference. Out of 4 million votes cast that Tuesday, 8 November, 1880, Garfield and Chester Arthur received just 1,898 more votes than Civil War hero Winfield Scott Hancock and Indiana banker William English, running for the Democrats. The close defeat was a bitter pill for Democrats to swallow, and they stayed bitter. In mid-December, the New York Times noted that a Democratic operative had arrived in St. Albans, Vermont, investigating Chester's ancestry. The Democrats had tried this tract before, claiming Chester had been born in Ireland. That smear fell apart quickly, but evidently they were were not willing to let it go. If Chester noticed that small item in the paper, and I bet he did, it must have made him more than a little nervous.

According to the Times, the operative's name was Arthur P. Hinman. Shortly after the 1880 election members of the Democratic National committee had walked into Hinman's offices at 14 Wall Street, offering to pay his expenses to investigate the persistent rumors that Vice President-elect Chester Arthur was not “a native born citizen” as required by the Constitution. They had picked their man well. Besides being a loyal Democrat, Hinman had written a poem recently published in Harper’s Magazine. It began, "My back is to the wall, My face is to my foes, That surge and gather around me, Like waves that winter blows”.  And it was this combative and contentious bull dog who traveled to the town of St. Albans, 15 miles south of the Canadian border, and further, to the little villages beyond, on both sides of the political line.

Interviewed by the Times in the American Hotel at the corner of Main and Lake Streets, in St. Albans, Himman claimed his investigation had uncovered that Chester A. Arthur was actually, “born in Canada....that he was 50 years old in July instead of October...and generally that he is an alien and ineligible to the office of Vice-President.” It was hard to disprove the allegation. Vermont did not begin recording and issuing birth certificates until 1857 - 28 years and a month after Arthur's birth. Yet, the tiny article, printed under the headline “Material For a Democratic Lie”, caused barely a hiccup back in Washington. After all Chester was just the vice president. He did not matter.

Still, it was just one more reason why, after taking the oath in March of 1881, President Garfield had bared Chester from even entering the White House. Garfield had decided on civil service reform, doing away with the profitable spoils system, and that meant figuratively castrating Senator Conkling and freezing his “Stalwarts”, like Chester Arthur, out of the government. Then, 2  July , President Garfield was shot in a Washington, D.C. train station. As the deranged assassin was arrested he shouted, "I am a Stalwart, and Arthur will be President!”. In September, 88 days later, Garfield died of blood poisoning, and abruptly, the charming but vapid Chester A. Arthur was President, and the assassin had publicly tied the new POTUS to the murder.

And what happened next did not improve the trouser snake's public image. Chester refused to occupy the executive mansion until Lewis Comfort Tiffany had spent two months and lots of public money redecorating it, with pomegranate plush drapes and a floor to ceiling ornate wood and glass screen (above) jammed into the main entrance hall. To complete the grotesque gilded age transformation of a national monument, 24 wagon loads of historical paintings, furniture and furnishings accumulated by Presidents John Adams through Ulysses Grant were sold at auction. It was just one more reason why a journalist would later write, “No man ever entered the Presidency so profoundly and widely distrusted as Chester Alan Arthur.”

The Democrats saw a quick opening, but Hinman rushed his shot and he missed. His new conspiracy theory presented in the fall and winter of 1881, was a repeat of what he had told the Times, with a few more details. But again the story fell apart. This time there was the testimony of Chester Abell, the doctor who delivered the future President. The boy was even named after him. Dr. Abel insisted Chester had been born in Fairfield, Vermont, about half way between St Albans and the Canadian border. And although the father, William Arthur, had not become a naturalized American citizen until 1843, there was no doubt that he married Chester's mother Malvina in 1821, and she was blatantly American born. Her grandfather had even fought in the American Revolutionary Army, for crying out loud. So when Chester Arthur was born in October of 1830, he was automatically an American citizen, like his mother, no matter what his father's status. And once President Chester Arthur began to crusade for the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, his public image improved and most people forgot the Democratic smear. In fact the public began to notice that Chester was just so...likeable. It even began to look as if he might even run for re-election. And that meant that Arthur Hinman would be back.

Lawyer Hineman's third theory still insisted that Chester had been born in Canada. Malvina's parents had lived in Dunham, Quebec for years, just 8 miles north of the border. William and Malvina had met and eloped in Dunham. It would have been natural, in the fall of 1830, for Malvina to seek her mother's help in minding her four older children when it came time to deliver Chester. And as for Dr. Abel's testimony, well, the old man was just confused. See, Chester Alan Arthur had been born in Dunham, Quebec, but in 1828. Then there had been another son, named Chester Abel Arthur, born in 1830 in Fairfield, Vermont. That was the baby Dr. Abel had remembered. But, said Hinman's research, Chester Abel had died before his first birth day. And years later, when applying to Union College in Schenectady New York, Chester Alan Arthur had appropriated his dead brother's birth date and location, making him an American citizen and qualifying him for student aid. It was such a good story that Hinman put it all down in a book, “How A British Subject Became President of the United States”, and in the summer of 1884, with another Presidential election looming, summarized it in an article he wrote for the Brooklyn Eagle Newspaper.

It might have caught on. It might have become a majestic conspiracy theory, like the rabbit Alice followed, or a million other myths created by political hacks.  And the Democratic party might have fallen down that rabbit hole in the election of 1884. The American people have always been drawn to conspiracy theories, be it FDR sacrificing Pearl Harbor in 1941, or  Lee Harvey Oswald's claim he was a patsy in November of 1963, or the black helicopters hiding in National Parks in the 1990's, or even President Obama being born in Africa.  But reality intervened in 1884 when President Chester Arthur fell ill and decided not to run for re-election. And as quickly as that, Arthur Hinman lost his livelihood. He had become irrelevant, the Jeb Bush of his age, leaving behind a brown smudge as his only contribution to the historical record.

Chester Alan Arthur left the White House in March of 1885 a very sick man. On 16 November, 1886 he ordered his son to burn all his personal papers, reducing to ashes all the shady deals he had cut while a loyal Stalwart for Senator Conkling.  And then on 18 November, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and died. Mark Twain, the man who had invented the title “Gilded Age”, offered a powerful obituary; “It would hard indeed to better President Arthur's administration”

After his work as a hatched man dried up, Arthur Hinman suffered the roller coaster life of a political flunky, in with one administration, out with the next. His law business fell off and his was forced to move his office to cheaper space at 644 Hancock street in Brooklyn. But then the worm turned again and by 1901 he was back at 375 Fulton Street, just blocks from City Hall in Manhattan.   But he never lost his pugnaciousness. In October of 1904, the now aging lawyer got into a fist fight with an undertaker, a Mr. Joseph P. Pouch. Hinman had represented Pouch's  wife in their divorce case, and when the judge awarded her custody of their 7 year old child, Arthur Hinman offered to effect the transfer, to avoid a confrontation. With any other lawyer that might have worked. But Hinman was never one to suffer an insult. He belted Joe in the eye, and Joe pounded Himman in the face and head. Poor Joe got arrested for contempt of court, and Mrs. Pouch got her child. And Arthur Hinman got the fight he always relished. It was straight out of  the final stanza of his poem, where Arthur recalls his “life of combat”; "I stand, poor speck of dust, Defiant, self reliant, To die – if die I must.” Well, hell, we all must.

And the mystery of Chester Alan Arthur's birth would not be finally be answered until 1949 when Chester A. Arthur's great-grandson donated the family bible to the New York Public Library. And there, recorded in William Arthur's own handwriting are listed in order, the births of all nine of his children. The name of the first male and fifth child is indeed Chester Alan Arthur. But the birth date is October 5, 1829. It was the same year William Arthur was elected to the school board in Fairfield, Vermont. And all the great mystery and drama compounded by politicians over the birth place of President Chester Alan Arthur, boiled down to a  vain man's vanity about his age. He want to appear a year younger than he actually was.  Simple, and foolish. But human.

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THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF YURI

I don’t know the truth of what happened to Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, and it is unlikely I ever will. And if it seems strange that someone so famous could die so mysteriously, you must remember that he was a hero of the Soviet Union, a place and at a time where truth and lies were so intermingled as to make reality as thin as tissue paper.  

On 27 March, 1968, so the story goes, Yui died in a training crash, and not even his widow Valentina, and daughters Yelena and Galina, will ever know with certainty what really happened to him. In the Soviet Union, rumors were part of the disguise. It was a very different world, then.

In 1961 the average yearly income in America was $5,315.00 and gallon of gas cost 27 cents. The city of Seattle completed the tallest structure west of the Mississippi river, the Space Needle. The 200th McDonald’s restaurant had opened in Southern California. The hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls produced electricity for the first time. An X-15 rocket plane reached the edge of space at 31 miles high, and President John Kennedy asked Congress for $531 million to “…put a man on the moon in this decade.” And on 12 April, 1961, the Soviet Union launched the first man into space.

His call sign was “Cedar”. The 5’ 2” cosmonaut was a typical fighter jockey, self confident and cocky, described as “virtually unflappable” by his instructors.  He was launched from the desert steppes of Tjuratam, Kazakhstan, just after 9AM (Moscow time) and he whistled a tune during his 90 minute orbital flight. “The Motherland hears, the Motherland knows, Where her son flies in the sky.” 

But unlike the American astronauts who landed at sea, Yuri had to eject from his Vostok 1 spacecraft at over 15,000 feet. And instead of an aircraft carrier crew....

  ...on landing Yuri was greeted by an old woman, her granddaughter and her cow - hinting that he landed off course.  But once the Soviet leadership was certain he had survived, he became a prop in the propaganda wars. And like Alan Shepherd, America’s fist man in space, Yuri longed to fly again, this time to the moon. He was trying to get there, when he died.

The Soviet leadership showered him with medals and awards. He was made a deputy to the Supreme Soviet, the rubber stamp legislature. But all the glittering medals soon grew dull and he was allowed to return to Star City, the home of all Cosmonauts, in the Moscow suburbs. But he was not allowed another space mission. He worked on spacecraft design, and was eventually promoted to the rank of a full Colonel. He became deputy training director for the cosmonaut corps, and in 1968 he began the process to re-qualify as a fighter pilot, perhaps as his first step back to flight status.

On 10 January, 1968 the U.S. lost its 10,000th military airplane over Vietnam. The average income in the U.S. was up to $7,850 a year, and gasoline was up to 34 cents a gallon. On 23 January, North Korean naval boats captured the Intelligence gathering ship, the USS Pueblo, and its 83 man crew. On 31 January, 70,000 North Vietnamese troops launched the Tet offensives by briefly capturing the U.S. embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, and during just the second week of February the United States suffered 543 dead and 2,547 wounded in Vietnam; for that week alone. And on 27 March,  at 10:17 AM Moscow time, Yuri Gagarin climbed into the front cockpit of a MIG-15UTI trainer with Colonel Vladimir Seryogin in the back seat. On takeoff  Serogiin pushed the throttles to 9,000 rpm’s and headed for Kirzhach, 30 miles to the Northwest of Moscow.

The weather was horrible, and a heavily overcast quickly enveloped the Korean War era fighter/trainer. The Mig 15 was small by modern standards, just 33 feet long, with a 35 ft. swept back wing span.  It was capable of well over 600 mph and had a ceiling of over 50,000 feet.  

But the “Babouskha” (grandmother) also had a tenancy to stall and go into a tight spin at anything under 160 mph. In fact, according to one pilot who recently flew a similar two seat Mig 15UTI trainer, “Turning at that speed could be a delicate exercise, and inadvisable at low altitude. The Mig didn’t seem to care for doing anything under 250 knots.”

Minutes after take off , Seryogin requested permission to alter course. It was granted. But those were the last words heard from the aircraft. Fellow Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov was flying a helicopter in the area and he heard two loud booms. An investigation reported that a Sukhoi 11 (above) was also in the area, also in the overcast, and had gone supersonic. That would have accounted for the first boom Leonov heard. The second was probably Gagarin’s Mig slamming into the ground. So great was the impact that no human remains could be positively identified. The plane’s clock was stopped at 10.31 AM. Yuri Gagarin was only 34 years old. He left behind a widow and twin daughters.

Two hundred officers and technicians conducted a thorough investigation. But because of the Soviet obsession with secrecy the report on the crash was never released to the public. And so rumors filled the void. Rumor said the pilots must have been drunk, the plane must have been sabotaged by a jealous superior, the parachute cords were cut and the ejection seats were disconnected, the plane had hit a weather balloon or a bird or someone had forgotten to close a vent or the Mig had been caught the turbulence of that Sukhov 11.  There are a hundred theories, and you can argue that, like all conspiracy theories, an open investigation would never have refuted them all. And given the provable conspiracies that governed the Soviet Union for most of the 20th century, that would likely never be possible, We will never be able to say with absolute certainty why Yuri Gagarin died. But there does seem to be a most likely sequence of events.

The SU-11 had been intended as an all weather interceptor, and was capable of almost twice the speed of sound. But the Soviet design bureau considered it a failure, and it was no longer in production. The most likely assumption is that the Sukhoi pilot was disoriented by the dense overcast and was lower than he thought when he lit his afterburners. The ground radar system that was supposed to provide altitude information to all pilots in the area was out of order for the day. And Soviet fighter aircraft of that era had no cockpit radar.  So the SU-11 might have roared past within 2-300 feet of Gagarin and Seryogin’s jet, maybe even closer and basically, sucked the air out from under their wings. 

To put it another way, the turbulence produced by the SU-11 would have robbed the wings on the smaller Mig-15 of their lift, particularly if it was flying slower than 160 mph. That would have  dropped it into a flat spin. In the overcast, whoever was piloting the Mig would have unable to orient himself before impact in the trees. If either plane had taken off a minute sooner or later they would have never come close to each other. So the death of Yuri Gagarin was most likely a combination of unlikely events; a bad day for a radar system to be down, a bad day to fly, a nasty combination of flight characteristics and some very bad luck. Combat pilots like Yuri would call such combinations of unlikely events the normal risks of flying so high and so fast. Which is what he loved to do.

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CROSS WORDS And the D-Day Invasion

I would say that never have so many labored so hard to obscure what was so obvious to so many as during the spring of 1944. Every school child in Europe knew that sooner or later the allies were going to hurl themselves against the Nazi held Atlantic coast of France. 

And there were only two places with beaches close enough for unlimited air support from Britain and wide enough for major military operations - the Pa de Calais, just 20 miles across the channel, and 75 miles away, in Normandy. But it was vital the 400,000 German defenders not know which of these two spots was the eventual target, or exactly when the invasion would occur. The planned date and location of the invasion was maybe the second biggest secret of the 20^th century.

It would take 1 ½ million military personnel, and probably another 2 million civilians to prepare and launch the invasion. And 4 million people can not keep a secret. So the invasion was divided into pieces, each given a code name to disguise how it fit into all the others. 

The over all plan was code named “Overlord”. 

Misinformation fed to confuse the Germans was code named “Bodyguard”.  Bombing to isolate the beaches was code named “Point Blank”. 

Naval operations were code named “Neptune”. Operation “Tonga” was the code name for the British parachute and glider attacks designed to be launched before dawn behind the beaches. 

The British beaches were “Gold” and “Sword”, the Canadian beach “Juno”, and the American beaches “Utah” and “Omaha”. 

Architectural drawings for the two floating harbors built in England and towed across the channel were code named “Mulberry”.

And the flexible gasoline pipeline rolled out and laid down under the channel after the invasion was named “Pluto”.

Out of the millions of documents generated for “Overlord” - the 9^th Air Force's plan for the airborne troops parachute  drop alone was 1,376 pages and weighed 10 pounds - ranged from shipping bills of lading to company rosters. Only a few thousand of these referred to the actual time and place of the invasion. But almost all of them hinted at one or both. 

Besides being stamped with “Top Secret” and "Eyes Only", the most sensitive documents also had the word “Bigot” stamped on them. Only a few thousand people with an absolute “need to know” were allowed to handle or read “Bigot” papers. These people were given special security clearances, and were described as “Bigots or “Bigoted”.

There were, of course, slip ups. In March a U.S.sergeant accidental used “Bigot” papers as packing for a present sent to his sister. When the package broke open in transit, workers in the Chicago Post Office were put under FBI surveillance. Some wind and an open window forced British staffers to spend two hours recovering 12 copies of a “Bigot” memo from a Whitehall street.  An abandoned briefcase containing “Bigot” papers left on a train in Southern England was turned in to the station master.  And several officers were reduced in rank and relieved for talking too much at a cocktail party . But the British domestic Military Intelligence Service - MI 5 - thought all these leaks had been plugged.  At least until they picked up a copy of the Daily Telegraph on 2 May, 1944.

The Daily Telegraph - “The Largest, Best, and Cheapest Newspaper in the World” - started out as a penny tabloid in the 1850's.  By the 1930's it had built a circulation of almost 1 million readers by assuming its audience was intelligent, middle class and progressively conservative.  The Telegraph helped make Winston Churchill Prime Minister in May of 1940., and in late 1941 the paper printed an offer to donate £100 to charity for each person who could solve the paper's crossword puzzle in less than 12 minutes. Winners were then ordered to report as code breakers to Beletchley Park, home to the Twentieth Century's ultimate secret, the breaking of Germany's top secret code machines. 

On that Tuesday, 2 May, 1944, a “Bigoted” officer was solving the Telegraph crossword and stumbled over the clue for 17 across - “One of the U.S. (4 letters)” 

The next day the paper published the solution -  “Utah” - one of the intended American invasion beaches (above).

It was most likely  a coincidence. Right? Well, paranoia being an occupation hazard for intelligence officers, this hyper vigilant Bigot decided to look closer.  And ominously,  a review of solutions to April's crosswords turned up more invasion beaches - “Gold”, “Sword” and “Juno” 

Well,  gold and sword were common crossword words, and even if Juno was unusual it was decided an investigation might draw too much attention  And for ten days the Telegraph crosswords were clueless, as least as far as military intelligence was concerned. 

And then on Monday, 22 May, 1944, the clue for 3 down - “Red Indian on the Missouri (5 letters) – led to the obvious solution published on Tuesday, “Omaha”. -  the other intended American invasion beach (above). And now that their suspicions had been aroused, in the same puzzle the word “dives” appeared, which might refer to the Normandy river named Dives, at the eastern edge of the invasion target area. And also in the puzzle there was the name “Dover” which did not have any special importance to the invasion, but which, at this point just sounded suspicious. MI 5 decided to assign two agents to investigate.

It didn't seem the newspaper itself could be responsible. The owner and editor-in-chief, William Berry, was so trusted he had briefly served as the Minister of Information. But agents learned the crosswords were written ahead of time not by a staffer, but by a 54 year old freelance “compiler”, a legendary amateur football player and “stern disciplinarian” headmaster of the Strand School for boys, Mr. Leonard Sydney Dawe (above). And the agents had questioned Dawe once before about his crosswords and a security breach.

On Sunday, 17 August, 1942, a puzzle composed by Mr Dawe contained the clue “French Port (5 letters), with the answered confirmed on Monday, 18 August, by the word “Dieppe”. At 5:30 in the morning of Wednesday 19 August, 1942 (one day later) , 5,000 men from the 2nd Canadian infantry Division, 1,000 British Commandos and 500 U.S. Army Rangers landed on the stone beaches of the French harbor of “Dieppe” (above). Their objective was to seize and hold the port for 24 hours.

But the Nazis were waiting as if they had been forewarned. Less than 6 hours after landing the Canadians had suffered 50% causalities (above) and the surviving men had to be withdrawn. MI 5 had interrogated Dawe for several hours then, and come to the conclusion that the word “Dieppe” had been “a coincidence”. But as they say in the intelligence game, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice and you are in BIG trouble.

The puzzle published on Saturday, 27 May, 1944 was the final straw. Almost as if Dawe were taunting officials one of the clues to that day's puzzle was “...some bigwig like this...”(8 letters)”, which led to the solution on Sunday, 28 May of “Overlord” - code name for the entire invasion! .Leonard Dawe was arrested at the school's temporary home in Effing and brought in for questioning. As he had two years earlier, Dawe denied having any inside knowledge, and kept denying it  “They turned me inside out,” he said later. “But they eventually decided not to shoot me after all.”

Meanwhile Dawe's crosswords kept indicting him. Tuesday, 30 May the clue was “This bush is the center of nursery revolutions”. The answer, printed on Wednesday 31 May  was “Mulberry” - the name for the floating artificial  harbors. And then on Thursday, 1 June the clue for 15 down was “Britannia and he hold the same thing.” The solution published on 2 June was “Neptune” - code name for the naval operations within Overlord. It seemed to some that disaster was certain. But shortly after that the Daily Telegraph crossword didn't matter anymore.

Just fifteen minutes into Tuesday, 6 June, 1944 the first paratroops landed on French soil. At 5:45 in the morning the Operation Neptune bombardment began. And at 6:30 troops began landing on the American beaches of Omaha (above) and Utah . An hour later the British and Canadians followed. 

By 3:00 that afternoon the first sections of a Mulberry harbor breakwater were sunk off the beaches. By nightfall, the allies had landed 156,000 men along 50 miles of Normandy coast, and penetrated up to 6 miles inland. The invasion was a success, so far..

On Wednesday, 7 June, Leonard Dawes was released by MI 5, and after reporting to the schools managing board - who were close to firing him - the first person he wanted to see was a 14 year old student named Ronald French.  Having called the boy into his office, Dawe immediately, “...asked me point blank where I had got the words from. "I told him all I knew...” And what young Mr. French knew would have sent the spooks from MI 5 into a faint.

According to Roland, the school's temporary home was surrounded by Canadian and American military camps, filled with young soldiers, most no more than four or five years older than Roland, all in training for the invasion.  ”I was totally obsessed about the whole thing. I would play truant from school to visit the camp. I used to spend evenings with them and even whole weekends...I became a sort of dogsbody about the place, running errands and even, once, driving a tank.” 

He explained that the soldiers talked freely in front of him... "because I was obviously not a German spy. Hundreds of kids must have known what I knew.". Bryan Belfont, another  student recalled, “The soldiers were obviously lonely...they more or less adopted us. We’d sit and chat and they’d give us chocolate.” But just how much did these children know?

“Everyone knew the outline of the invasion plan and they knew the code words”, said Roland. “Omaha and Utah were the beaches, and these men knew the names but not the locations. We all knew the nickname for the operation was Overlord....Hundreds of kids must have known what I knew.” As proof Roland showed Dawes the composition books he had filled with diary like notes. According to Roland, Mr. Dawe “was horrified and said the books must be burned at once.” And while  the book burned, Dawes lectured the boy on national security, and war time censorship. “He made me swear on the Bible I would tell no one about it.” Roland was so traumatized he stopped doing all crossword puzzles.

So there was the great leak, the hole in the allied security net. Thousand of young soldiers talking to other young soldiers, overheard by boys.  It was to be expected.  It was even allowed for. Knowing the code words would tell the Germans almost nothing essential. But after 6 June 1944 the invasion was no longer a great secret. Why did Leonard Dawe insist the boy swear never to reveal the details? The answer was that Dawes was protecting  his own “Butt” (1 down, 3 letters) . Because Leonard Dawes was a bit of an “ass” (1 across, 3 letters).

Dawes had created more than 5,000 crosswords for the Telegraph since 1925, and over the following decade had stumbled upon the easiest working method. He would lay out the crossword grid on a sheet of paper pinned to his wall. There were no letters in the grid, just empty squares with some blacked out for random aesthetics. And he would then invite his students to fill in the blocks, telling them it was a to improve their “mental discipline”.  In truth it was to improve his income. Dawes would then write clues to match the words provided by his 14 and 15 year old wordsmiths. In their naivety they considered him “...a man of extremely high principle.” But if the truth had come out the newspaper would have fired him for plagiary, and the school for lying.

Leonard Sydney Dawe died in January of 1963.. But Roland French, like the other adolescent wordsmiths, kept his school master's secret for another two decades, finally revealing the truth in an interview in 1984. And only then did Roland French feel he could start enjoying solving crossword puzzles again.

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