Anne Bradford was stuck. The clue in her Sunday newspaper crossword, compiled by Ximenes, read: “An isolated pillar (India) (3).” It was 1957 and the frustrated mother-to-be “realised that it would be extremely useful to have a ‘reverse dictionary’, in which the headword and definition change places”, so she set about compiling one.
She approached several publishers, none of whom were interested, but pressed ahead regardless. Every crossword she completed was analysed with all the synonyms, cross-references, familiar adjectives and anagram indicators meticulously noted and entered into alphabetical files. She also worked her way through English dictionaries and other word books.
It was more than 20 years before she had sufficient material for a book, the first incarnation of which was Longman Crossword Solver’s Dictionary (1986). Despite containing more than 15,000 headwords and 175,000 entries, plus synonyms, associated puns and plays on words, it was just the start. “It’s feeble compared to now,” she said in 2011. Since then Bradford’s Crossword Solver’s Dictionary, as it is now known, has been through various editions and is published by HarperCollins, part of News Corp, which also owns The Times.
The first known crossword to be published was created by Arthur Wynne, a journalist from Liverpool who had emigrated to the US, and appeared in the New York World on December 21, 1913. The first Times crossword appeared on February 1, 1930, and quickly became such a hallowed institution that editors since then have changed its format at their peril. Bradford typically spent an hour a day completing crosswords while drinking black coffee. She reckoned on finishing the Times puzzle in “ten minutes on a good day — six on a very good day, more like 18 to 20 on a bad one”. In 2013 she was still solving 20 crosswords a week, finding new ideas for the latest edition of her dictionary. She had no specialist software or computer programme, only accepting a basic word processor with reluctance. “I’ve been working on it for more than 50 years but I don’t think it will ever be finished,” she said of the project.
The best clues, she added, were the witty ones, such as: “Information given to communist in return for sex” (solution: gender). “Information can be defined as gen; communist is almost always red, in return indicates ‘reversed’, leading to gen-der, a synonym for sex,” she said. However, her all-time favourite was “Pineapple rings in syrup”. She explained: “Pineapple is a grenade, which rings (goes around) in, giving you an answer of ‘grenadine’, which is a syrup. It’s just brilliant.”
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Anne Rae Freeman was born in Jesmond, Newcastle, in 1930, the daughter of John Freeman, a dentist, and his wife Decima (née Lion), who played bridge and enjoyed crosswords. Even as a child Anne was a lover of language. “My mother taught me to read when I was three,” she told The Lady in 2013. “Before long, I was very good at reading upside down, too, which is most useful if you’re playing Scrabble.” During the war she was evacuated to Alnwick, in Northumberland, where she thrived at school. As head girl she handed out punishments of copying pages from the dictionary.
She read social sciences at King’s College, Newcastle, then part of the University of Durham. She met Francis Bradford, a science student, and they were married in 1952. He worked in chemical sales for BP based in central London. They settled in the north of the city and enjoyed playing tennis together. Francis died in 2013 and their daughter, Amanda, died at the age of 20. Bradford is survived by their three other children, now retired: Gillian, a former landscape architect who has taken on the dictionary project; Joanne, who worked in administration at City University; and Adam, a former GP.
After leaving university Bradford worked at an employment agency, only starting on the dictionary when she stopped work to have her first child. For the next 18 years she worked from home, running the University Women’s Part-Time Employment Agency, a register of graduate women who were prevented from taking on full-time work because of family responsibilities but who wanted to use their qualifications in a part-time or temporary position.
As her children grew older she returned to the workplace, spending 21 years as part-time secretary at Holmewood prep school (later part of Woodside Park International School and now Dwight School) in north London, for which she produced a centenary history. She then trained as a volunteer tutor in adult numeracy, working two sessions a week at Barnet College until 2005.
She had won the national Scrabble championship in 1973 and was a finalist in The Times national crossword championship on at least six occasions, mostly in the 1990s, her best achievement being “only third”. However, she drew the line at compiling her own puzzles. “I was asked once by my friend, the illustrator Annie Tempest, to do a Leadergram [an early incarnation of The Ladygram, the magazine’s word puzzle] using a book that she had illustrated, called The Guest From Hell,” she recalled. “It took me absolutely ages. I was shuffling letters around and I thought I’d never finish. Never again.”
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A great collector, Bradford amassed pencil sharpeners, Christmas cake decorations and silk ornaments. She was particularly keen on the pictures of Harry Whittier Frees (1879-1953), an eccentric American who photographed animals dressed in costumes and in human poses. In 1997 she published Drawn by Friendship, a compilation of more than 600 illustrated postcards sent by the Rev John Thomas Wilson, a Victorian clergyman, to a friend in Preston.
In her eighties she helped in the book section of a hospice’s charity shop. “My colleagues had no idea that I was the author of the dictionary until someone donated one to the shop and a colleague spotted the name on the jacket.”
Faced with competition from other games, Bradford feared for the crossword’s future. “Number puzzles such as Su Doku are starting to take over from word puzzles, so the crossword won’t last for ever,” she said in 2013. “But they’ll be around for a good while yet, and I’ve still got a lot of work to do on my dictionary.”
As for that original 1957 clue, “An isolated pillar (India) (3)”, she eventually discovered that the answer was “lat”, the Urdu word for a stone pillar, which is found in “isoLATed”.
Anne Bradford, crossword solver’s dictionary compiler, was born on November 3, 1930. She died of heart failure on October 30, 2021, aged 90