*=anag, []=dropped, <=reversed, hom=homophone, CD=cryptic def, DD=double def, sp=spoonerism
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With no disrespect to Enigmatist, I was surprised to see him as the setter of this momentously-numbered puzzle: like others I was expecting an Araucaria special, or perhaps a Rufus in honour of his regular Monday slots. I usually find Enigmatist quite hard, but got through this one fairly quickly for me (less than 25 minutes). The sentence indicated in the “special instructions” was easy to spot after getting a couple of the answers, which then helped to fill up more of the grid. This was a very enjoyable puzzle with a lot of ingenious and sometimes complex clueing, but I was expecting rather more for this “anniversary”, so in a way it was a bit of a disappointment, especially as it happened to coincide with a Bank Holiday: a Bank Holiday that didn’t even exist when Puzzle number One was published! Does anyone know the date of that, by the way? It may be in Hugh Stephenson’s “Secrets of the Setters”, which I don’t have a copy of. By my rough calculations it would have been some time in April 1930.

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