Inquisitor 1851: National Treasures by Pointer

20 comments on “Inquisitor 1851: National Treasures by Pointer”

1. I thought the crossword was excellent, and reminiscent of other puzzles by this setter, but there was no endgame for me. I could see COB, but, as I saw no other horses except a couple (PONY for one) that could not easily form part of a string, I assumed COB was a red herring (so to speak) and considered two alternative three-word phrases in the verse, but I quickly dismissed those as well as I got nowhere.

   I have never heard of any of these racehorses, except (vaguely) CORBIERE, and I would therefore never have found this ‘string of horses’. I have no complaints about the theme, though, and I like the fact that the string is formed by moving along adjacent cells, with no diagonal moves.

   Thanks anyway to Pointer and kenmac.

2. I think 19a is [coll]APSES, coll being given in Chambers.
   The going was good until I fell at the last by failing to find the 1993 non-winner. Never mind. It was still very enjoyable. Thanks Pointer and kenmac.

3. APSES
   Coll. (Chambers)
   Colleague

   Sammy@2 beat me to it!

   Thanks both!

4. @2-3
   Thanks. I feel dumb now, I wrestled with that for ages and couldn’t see the wood for the trees

5. IMHO one of the 5 worst Inquisitors I have done over the past ~4 years.

   How it went for me:
   – Do standard cryptic crossword (pleasant enough but I can get that elsewhere)
   – Stare at the grid for a very long time with literally NO information or direction to go on
   – Eventually, somehow, find Betjeman and the poem
   – Figure out the string of horses are likely to be Grand National winners, but still take an hour to slot them all in given that there are 150 of them and Esha Ness technically isn’t on the list

   So I think this could have been a decent Inquisitor if only the initial cryptic solve had produced the usual set of hints via extra letters or similar – which of course would have also made the solve more interesting. Why this wasn’t done in this case is beyond me, as surely a basic version (such as adding superfluous words) wouldn’t have been very tricky to include.

6. I quite enjoyed the grid fill and my route to spotting BETJEMAN was similar to Kenmac’s. I was looking for a shorter route from C to S and could not see anything which linked to any of the three-word phrases later in the verse. At last, I looked again at the title and the penny dropped. I know nothing about horse racing so looked up the GN winners on Wiki-p. Unfortunately, this gave the 1993 entry as void, so I missed ESHA NESS. Instead, all I could find was a misspelling of SEAGRAM linking the already used S and M.
   A nice idea, well designed, but I did feel rather cheated by the use of the void winner.
   Thanks to Pointer and Ken

7. As with Sammy@2, my string of horses had a gap in the middle, between Party Politics and Anglo, since the Wikipedia list of Grand National winners does not include Esha Ness, reasonably enough, since the race was void because of starting line chaos, so there was no winner. I think that makes the puzzle simply illegitimate; if the theme is Grand National winners then Esha Ness doesn’t qualify. At the very least, surely a hint that something was odd or incomplete about one of the string entries would have been fairer to the unfortunate solver. Which is a pity, because the puzzle was nicely timed for the Grand National weekend, the clues were fine and I thought the preamble gave decent steers for the sort of poem, and therefore the sort of poet, we were seeking; it had to be written in numbered verses, and to use a repeated adjective, and was probably about horses, and the poet’s name would go diagonally across the grid. And I was tracing out my National winners very contentedly, until they stopped….. Thanks to Kenmac for the blog, but I fear that on this occasion Pointer, like Esha Ness, is disqualified (or perhaps more appositely, has imitated Devon Loch in the 1950s by falling over in the final straight with the winning post in clear view).

8. In my first comment I should have mentioned the first part of the endgame which I did enjoy, and that was finding the three entries to change and making BETJEMAN run through the altered letters. It was the ‘string’ I failed to find.

   Perhaps I should also qualify my remark about having ‘no complaints about the theme’. I meant the setter’s choice of subject for the theme, i.e. the Grand National. The theme had no clear indicator or pointer, though, against which to match anything one might find in the grid. (I tried three possibilities, the first, naturally, being ‘string of horses’.)

9. It seems to be a given that a straightforward grid-fill portends a difficult endgame, and so it was here (personally, I prefer a trickier entry and a simpler exit, such as the exploding whale). No poet leapt out at me after a couple of minutes of staring, nor did searching around poem and ‘breeches’ help, and I was fearful that the ‘change’ indicated might be more than simple letter substitution, so I called it a day. Thanks to Pointer and kenmac, and congratulations to those with more staying power.

10. I think the link between the horses is they were all trained at Lambourne. Sorry, if that’s already been said in the comments.

11. Esha Ness certainly added to the solving time for me too. I suppose Pointer’s defence might be, first, that he didn’t promise us a list of Grand National winners, and secondly that presumably if (unlike me) you know anything much about the race, Esha Ness must be one of the most famous/notorious incidents in its history. I was stuck with the same list as Sagittarius @7, and I can’t now remember how on earth I finally found EN. Perhaps I just googled every letter combination that would fit + “horse”. Not ideal.

    But I did enjoy most of it. I think Arnold @5 is a little unfair. The Betjeman/poem bit of the theme also needed Google, but was perfectly good Inquisitor fare, I thought.

12. @10 Really? That’s very clever if true and gives a nice extra dimension to the theme. I don’t think there was much risk of me discovering it though.

    I hope at least one die-hard racing fan did this, they’ll have loved it. I wonder what the Venn diagram is like for crosswords/horses.

13. As ever, Arnold @5 articulates my feelings on the puzzle perfectly, although he got further than me with the horse strings. If that is genuinely the endgame, it goes straight in at number one in the chart of ludicrous endgames

14. Thank you Serge@10. I’ve just confirmed that the Lambourn Wikipedia entry lists all the 5 horses in the puzzle as famous Grand National runners who trained there. I owe Pointer an apology; while the link is obviously more obscure than simple National winners, it’s perfectly clearly signalled by the title of the poem, and perfectly easy to verify if one asks the right question! The Devon Loch analogy applies to me, not to the setter.

15. @14
    That’s as maybe. But the preamble says it shows what could be referred to by a 3-word phrase in the poem. Ok. So STRING OF HORSES. But there is absolutely no indication that one then has to look for GN winners or indeed those trained at that location. To suggest otherwise is frankly using hindsight. Maybe if the preamble had given some indication that the location was relevant to the string of horses I would accept your point. But it doesn’t. You’re therefore left with guesswork.

16. Bingy@15. Obviously I can speak only for myself. But the puzzle is entitled National Treasures, and appeared on the weekend when the Grand National was run. That’s a pretty clear signal in my book that any string of horses will probably have a link to the big race. As to the Lambourn link, it’s a question of trusting the setter; “Grand National winners” is a broad category, and like kenmac in the blog I had had a nagging feeling that I was missing something. Following that instinct and digging deeper, using the indicators given, would have given me the full solution, and it’s not the setter’s fault that I missed it.

17. I actually thought the STRING OF HORSES was possibly manageable if it hadn’t been for the sneaky inclusion of ESHA NESS – although some sort of signpost to Grand National winners trained at Lambourne would have helped. (Indeed a solver friend of mine managed to get all 5 within 15 minutes.)

    For me it was the leap from grid to poem that was unreasonable, given no indication of what to look for.

18. @16

    It might be a “pretty clear signal” with the benefit of hindsight, but then most things are clear with hindsight

19. Thanks to Pointer and kenmac.

    Well, I finished, but am relieved to see that I (with a deep lack of interest in horsy affairs) wasn’t the only one to find this heavy going after a relatively gentle grid-fill. Looking for likely words that might change, I hit on BREACHES becoming BREECHES and did some brute-force searching that (with maybe undeserved luck) took me to the poem and author. The title plus “string of horses” eventually suggested what had to go in, and the first and last weren’t too bad, but after that it was a long slog. Never thought of the “trained at Lambourne” link, nor that it was the Grand National weekend!

20. Similar to David Langford @19, confirmation of BREECHES then some brute force led me to BETJEMAN and the poem. After some time pondering over “string of horses” I realised that it had been the weekend of the Grand National. The first two and last two horses weren’t too bad to find I suppose, but I found ESHA NESS impossible – not listed on Wikipedia – until it was suggested that I look at 1993. Felt a bit cheated …
    Thanks, blogger & setter.

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