Crosswords and Crossed Wires

Photo: Craig Sunter

Commuters today are more likely to be seen on their phones playing Candy Crush Saga or Flappy Bird than they are to be caught tutting over 8 Down in a crossword. But in May 1944 crosswords were the morning’s pastime for millions of Britons. Which is why MI5 became particularly concerned when their top-secret codenames kept on appearing in the Telegraph’s daily puzzle.

It started innocently enough, with a few words appearing over several months’ worth of crosswords. ‘Juno’. ‘Gold’. ‘Sword’. Though it was likely noticed that the answers were also codenames for several of the beaches earmarked for the following month’s D-day landings, it seems little heed was paid. After all, back in 1942 the town of Dieppe had appeared in the same puzzle just two days before the failed raid on the region and that occurrence had been judged an unhappy coincidence.

When, a few days later, another beach was mentioned in the crossword (‘One of the U.S. (four)’ – you can work that one out) eyebrows were raised. Four more clues followed in the days leading up to D-Day. The first was another beach, two were the codenames of the operations themselves – Overlord and Neptune, and one seemingly referred to the ‘mulberry’ harbours that the Allies planned to erect upon landing on the Normandy coast.

MI5 were dispatched to investigate, and Leonard Dawe, who set the crosswords (and was also a headteacher and a former amateur footballer who had spent the 1912 Olympics on the bench for the national team) was arrested. Despite in-depth interrogations, it was decided that Dawe had not been aware of the significance of the words he chose, and that the Daily Telegraph’s crossword probably wasn’t being used as a tool for international espionage.

It was only forty years later that the truth came out for everyone to see when Ronald French, a former pupil of Dawe’s, came clean. French told of how his school, headed by Dawe, had been evacuated to Surrey during World War Two, and placed besides a large military camp. At the same time as the young schoolboys were picking up the various code-words soldiers in the camp were using, Dawe was encouraging the boys to fill in blank crossword puzzles as a school activity. A pollution of Dawe’s own crosswords, once examined with such context, seems inevitable.

The story of Leonard Dawe's suspicious crosswords features in both André Deutsch's new collector's edition of 'The Longest Day', and John Halpern's fascinating book 'The Centenary of the Crossword'. You can buy them both at the links above.