It appears that this is Elgin’s eleventh Listener crossword.
Here and in Crossword and the Magpie, we frequently meet literature, classics and films in Elgin’s compilations so we know what we might be looking for in two sets of ‘friends’ (surely not Julian, Dick, George and Anne again?)
These are generous and very fair clues and soon we have an almost full grid with just that south-west corner to complete (and, of course, the cell in the centre). I am ashamed to say that I have never heard of SCHAD ‘Objective German painter[alive] in South African nation’ and guessed at DIETED ‘Council benefit claimant [had] limited food (6). We have removed a word from twenty clues and those clues’ initials ‘are arranged to form a five-word message in four unclued entries’. I get as far as CODE USES ?????? OR?AS? and am thinking “Surely we are not having to work out some Playfair Code with an obscure keyword; Chambers only gives me ORGASM and that truly wouldn’t be acceptable, would it?
I have the letters L T M I D D L E and light dawns (CODE USES MIDDLE OR LAST). we are going to use the ‘middle’ or ‘last’ letters of those twenty extra words to produce a ‘different encoding’ after we have initially replaced each letter of that message with the ‘first letter of the corresponding clue’s extra word.
Here goes: ANGELA, JANE, SAPHIR, and ELLA fill those ‘unclued’ lights and we have four Lady friends – but who are they? As usual, it takes co-solver Google to explain that they appear in Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Patience’.
The different set of four friends? The diagonals now come to my rescue and LAND OF OZ and DOROTHY appear (yet again, like Timmy last week, her dog is missing!) so I am sure I am going to find the SCARECROW, TIN MAN and the LION in those middle and last letters – and there they are. Quite a compilation! I don’t know what Dorothy has to do with Patience (‘linked to the source of the Lady friends’) but I am sure someone will explain.
And happily, the other half of the Dash blogging team did!
Dorothy and her companions turn out to be an enormous red herring. The real solution all depends on those cleverly chosen extra words whose first letters and middle or last letters (picking sometimes one and sometimes another) each spell out a different group of friends. The familiarity of OZ and the obvious position of DOROTHY lure us to the Wizard of Oz solution but it breaks down because the central letter has then to be U or Z. Then we see that the letters not used to make the Oz characters spell out the friends of Job (patience-related!) ELPHAZ BILDAR ZOPHAR and the left over middle/end letter is U or T – and UZ is where Job is set. The Land of Uz/Land of Oz twin must have been the genesis of the puzzle I think!
Wow!
And the oenophiles? We find a clue that earns a smile,’Bread and drinks with last of the departing friends in Neighbours (7)’ That E has to ‘depart’ from the BEERS to give us more of the titular ‘friends’, Aussie COBBERS this time. “Cheers, Elgin!”
As a keen G&S enthusiast, you can imagine my surprise as I realised the source of the Lady friends from working out SAPHIR. It’s a great show – more people should know it.
Whilst I was sure the Wizard of Oz was a red herring, I was also distracted by the fact that from the middle and last letters you could also get TULIP OSCAR before it all broke down – tulips and Oscar Wilde being connected to the aesthetic movement parodied in Patience, the libretto mentioning the former, and the latter being used by D’Oyly Carte to promote the show in the USA. That took up a good portion of the day!
I filled the grid, and left the next step for a short while. During that time I noticed a newly-released recording of Judith Weir’s In the Land of Uz, and sort of sidestepped the whole trick. Other than thinking at a fairly shallow level that the Oz option must be some sort of red herring, of course.
Whenever I see Job and his three friends I’m reminded of a relative of mine whose father, William, was of short stature. He acquired the label Bildad the Shuhite.