48. 'Incicly Pedaary', Boarding School and a Demon of Arabian Mythology.

Afrit

My father was ordained at Wells Cathedral in 1948 and became a curate at St Philip's Church, Odd Down, Bath. In the Michaelmas Term of 1949 I became a boarder at Wells Cathedral Junior School. I was nine years old.

I was in the church choir at St Philip's so was entered for a choral scholarship to go to the cathedral school. There were sixteen applicants for one place apparently. I remember little of the process other than choosing to sing a hymn Hark the Herald Angels Sing. I wasn't much of a singer, it was a hopelessly inappropriate piece to choose and I couldn't read music. I remember being very nervous and singing very loudly.

According to my mother's memoirs I was very disappointed not to be offered the scholarship. We had met the Head of the Junior School and had a look around and it seems I was keen to go there, so Mum and Dad scratched the money together to pay the fees.

That's 1949 me cross-legged in the middle.

Supervised writing home was a regular feature of weekend school life and my mother kept all the letters I wrote in that Michaelmas Term. The first of them is reproduced here.

Ruth is my younger sister who, in September 1949, would have been seven months old. Lynette was a family friend and Ruth's godmother.

Compared with most of my subsequent letters this was quite a long one. Gradually a quick run down on football or cricket matches and the latest cub activities were the dominant commentary on my boarding school life.

Here are some snippets from other letters sent home that term. 

The School Headmaster at that time was Prebendary A.F. Ritchie (centre of photo below). It was only in my sixties that I discovered that as Afrit he was an important figure in the development of cryptic crosswords.

The extract below is from the article 'Afric's cryptic history' by Hugh Stephenson that appeared in the Guardian on 6th July 2009.

Those interested in the history of the cryptic crossword may like to know that Derek Harrison, who runs the admirable free crossword site http://www.crossword.org.uk/, has organised the reprinting of Prebendary AF Ritchie's Armchair Crosswords, first published 60 years ago and long since out of print. His daytime job was headmaster of Wells Cathedral School but he was more widely known as a setter of the fiendishly difficult weekly Listener puzzles under his nom de plume, Afrit - a powerful demon of Arabian mythology, which happened to be hidden in his initials and surname. Afrit was the first of three classics teachers centrally involved in the process of codifying the 'rules' of the modern cryptic crossword clue. (The other two were Derrick Macnutt, head of classics at Christ's Hospital in Sussex and Torquemada in the Observer, and Alec Robins, a Mancunian who taught classics at Chorlton Grammar School for boys and subsequently at Stand Grammar School for girls. He also set as Custos for the Guardian and for many other publications besides. Afrit's 1949 introduction to his collection of puzzles set out (in bold type) for the first time what became the golden rule of cryptic cluing: I need not mean what I say, but I must say what I mean. This key injunction to crossword setters was a play on the exchange in Alice in Wonderland where the March Hare says, 'Then you should say what you mean.' Alice replies, 'I do, at least - at least I mean what I say - that's the same thing, you know.'