Stumped by the crossword? Blame my brilliant friend!
MY COLLEAGUE NUALA
IF YOU find yourself scratching your head over the Giant Crossword on page 62 of today’s Mail, i hope you’ll spare a thought for Nuala. For the past 25 years she has been compiling that puzzle every Saturday, a run that will only come to an end in December when the final one, her 1,248th, which she completed before her death at the age of 90 last month, will be published.
it all started 72 years ago. Shortly after the war, Nuala was working as an air hostess when she met Brian Considine, a pilot from limerick who had been wounded in the Battle of Britain. Brian introduced her to cryptic crosswords and they subsequently compiled one together. To their joy and surprise, it was published by the irish News when Nuala was still just 18.
in the more than seven decades since, she is thought to have compiled more crosswords than anyone else in history.
She was born aisling Fionnuala Maire Kiernan on October 10, 1927, in london, the second of four children of Delia Kiernan, a noted irish folk singer, and Dr Thomas J. Kiernan, a diplomat and later ireland’s ambassador to West Germany and the U.S.
She married Brian in 1948 and joined the press and puzzles agency Morley adams ltd (now part of the Press association) in Fleet Street in 1955, where she worked for the rest of her life.
in that time she compiled crosswords for a range of newspapers including the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and Daily express (for some years setting all their daily cryptics single-handed).
Once, when she was compiling a crossword called ‘The Stinker’ for the Weekend Mail, a group of people who used to try to tackle it together became so frustrated that they wrote to the paper asking for a photograph of the setter to put on their dartboard. The request was politely refused.
She and Brian never had children and after his death in 1996 she carried on compiling, notably shunning the use of computers — she preferred instead to design grids by hand to go alongside the neat, witty clues that were her hallmark.
i will remember her as a kind woman, ready with encouraging words and helpful advice, who loved splitting her time between Britain and her second home in San Diego.
even in her 80s she remained fit and active, showing amazing speed in providing a cup of tea and a slice of cake for guests, zipping up and down her stairs with ease.
To hear that she had been diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer was an enormous shock, but Nuala accepted it with great dignity.
Her funeral in london on Friday, July 27, was attended by many family members and friends, from crosswords and beyond, who couldn’t resist swapping stories in the pub afterwards.
all i can say is that if her story has inspired you to try her crossword, please do! You won’t find a better one.
NUALA CONSIDINE, born October 10, 1927, died July 24, 2018, aged 90.