Prolific cruciverbalist set thousands of crosswords over her 70-year career
Nuala Considine, who has died aged 90, was the world’s most prolific professional crossword setter, intriguing and exasperating a loyal following of cruciverbalists around the globe for 72 years.
Aisling Fionnuala (Nuala) Maire Considine (nee Kiernan) was the second daughter of Irish ballad singer Delia Murphy and diplomat Thomas J Kiernan, who became Ireland’s minister plenipotentiary to Australia in 1946 after occupying the same posting to the Vatican during World War II. Considine and her brother Colm completed their schooling in Rome, becoming fluent speakers of
Italian, French and Spanish, with Considine later studying piano at the
Accademia di Santa Cecilia and operatic singing with Maestro Mario Ranucci.
However, as her family settled into Australian life at the Irish embassy in Canberra with the accession of her father as the first Irish ambassador to Australia, she made the decision to stay in London rather than migrate to the antipodes.
Her father, perhaps as a way of acknowledging his daughter’s absence in Australia, founded The Aisling Society in Melbourne, a cultural association that to this day celebrates the Irish diaspora and the shared history of the two countries.
The family remained close despite the distance, and in 1945 Considine took a job as a flight attendant with Aer Lingus, where she met Brian, an ex-fighter pilot who had flown Hurricanes during the Battle of Britain. They married in 1948.
Considine’s first crossword appeared in The Irish Times when she was just 18, having submitted it as a speculator to the editor. For the next seven decades, her puzzles would appear in countless publications across Europe and the United States, including the Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, the Financial Times, the Washington Post and New Scientist. She set five puzzles a week for a decade in the Daily Express, a Friday crossword for the Evening Standard and a giant crossword every weekend for the Daily Mail for a quarter of a century. She is thought to have compiled more newspaper crosswords than anyone in history.
Her speciality was the cryptic, of which she set almost 1000 for the Telegraph over a
30-year period, with her particular form of torture known as ‘‘The Toughie’’. Her clues were notoriously droll and concise. Take, for example, this from her 25th anniversary Toughie: Why did the Japanese go to the bar? Give up? (7) [* see answer at end].
This type of deceptive brevity became her trademark, with a long-running series of her puzzles in the Daily Mail aptly named ‘‘The Stinker’’. One crossword-solving group was so stymied by her clues that they asked for a photograph of The Stinker’s setter so they could throw darts at it. The request was politely refused on the grounds the setter was a lady. For almost 50 years, Considine compiled crosswords with Brian as her constant companion. With his passing in 1996, Considine who was then almost 70, responded by taking on a workload that astonished even her editors.
At the time of her death, she still had 18 giant crosswords for Daily Mail awaiting publication. It was only when diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer that she slowed her pace, having just returned from her ritual trip to San Diego, which she took every year to avoid the English winter. She admitted to her editor in the last weeks that she was still writing crossword clues in her head as she fell asleep, despite having given up work.
It was her wish to be returned to her native Ireland and, as always, there was a tremendous wit that permeated even these darkest thoughts. She wrote to a friend: ‘‘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’.’’
Considine’s legacy of inquiry and intellectual rigour continues in the immediate family she leaves in Australia, including nieces Carol Kiernan, founder of the Australian Missing Persons Unit and co-founder of the Honour a Woman campaign for equal representation in Australian honours; Margaret Hamilton, professor of mathematics at RMIT; and nephew Matthew Kiernan, Bushell chair of neurology at the University of Sydney and president of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Neurologists. She also leaves extended family scattered throughout Ireland, England and the US. – By Clare Caldwell/Fairfax
* Answer: forsake/for sake