Trendsetters: how we led the way with the toughest puzzles of all

When Rosamund Crowther Mathers went through her husband’s papers after he died in 1939, she found mementoes of couples who had met through his crossword puzzles.

- Caitlin O'Kane Puzzles Editor

Edward Powys Mathers, better known to readers of The Observer as Torquemada, had treasured them.

He hadn't just invented the cryptic crossword. He'd built something bigger: a community that stretched from Alaska to India, solving his puzzles in snowbound cabins and sweltering flop houses, posting solutions back to London in their thousands.

John Finnemore, the comedian and crossword compiler, once said The Observer's three setters formed “a sort of Socrates-Plato-Aristotle of cryptic crosswords. Torquemada essentially invents the form, Ximenes codifies it and Azed perfects it.”

Torquemada was already working for