The Great Spectator Treasure Hunt Set by Christopher Booker T he

'Great Spectator Treasure Hunt' took the form of twelve sets of clues published in the Spectator between 9 October and Christmas. The clues are reprinted below with answers.

First Clue Answer: ONE

1) You have to get to this square to begin — and eventually back here again to finish!

The reference was simply to board games beginn- ing on square one, coupled with a hint as to how clues should be read when the trail was complete.

2) To a computer two of these would make three. In binary 11= 3.

3) A Heinkel, the Australians' unlucky number and Beethoven's last sonata were all three of them.

Heinkel 1 l 1 was a German World War Two bomber; t 11 is reputedly the score at which Australian cricketers fear they will lose a wicket or a match (though see report); Beethoven's piano sonata No.32 in C Minor was Opus M.

4) Prince Charles often refers to himself as this. Self-explanatory.

5) What the Three Musketeers were all for. Motto of Dumas's Three Musketeers was 'All for one and one for alt'.

6) If you add Paris to Prague and Linz and take away London, what are you left with? Reference to numbers of symphonies: Mozart's Paris Symphony (No.31) added to Prague (38) and Linz (36) makes 105. Take away the number of Haydn's London Symphony (104).

Second Clue Answer: CANTERBURY 1) They came here in their thousands, at rather less than a gallop — hence the name. `To canter' supposedly comes from the gait at which mediaeval pilgrims rode to Canterbury.

2) Michael, William, Donald and Geoffrey sat here — but Thomas fell.

All Archbishops of Canterbury — Ramsey, Tem- ple, Coggan, Fisher — and Thomas a. Becket who was murdered.

3) Long after Uriah had been outwitted here, David returned to claim his bride.

Reference to characters and episodes in David Copperfield.

Third Clue Answer: WORCESTER

1) One English King lies here, struck down by the fruit of a tree — but the fruit of a second tree is worn to commemorate the fact that another king escaped (was that 'the crowning mercy?). King John is buried in Worcester Cathedral, hav- ing died of 'a surfeit of peaches' (or poisoned pears). Oak apples (not strictly the 'fruit', as one competitor pointed out) are traditionally worn on 29 May, the day of Charles ll's birthday and restoration, to commemorate his escape and flight up the Boscobel Oak after the Battle of Worcester, 1651, the victory referred to by Cromwell as 'the crowning mercy'.

2) 'Aqui esici encerrada el alma de ' 9 Not exactly, although his memorial service was held here, on 2 March 1934.

The Spanish (from Gil Blas) was Elgar's epigraph to his Violin Concerto (` here is enshrin- ed the soul of ') Elgar's Memorial Service was held in Worcester Cathedral, but he was buried nearby at Little Malvern.

3) The Don' failed here with 107 — after 236, 206 and 258.

Reference to Donald Bradman's sequence of scores in the opening matches of the Australian cricket tours of 1930, 1934, 1938 and 1948, against Worcestershire.

Fourth Clue Answer: TEWKESBURY

1) 'We are advertis'd by our loving friends That they do hold their course towards we, having now the best at Barnet field, will thither straight, for willingness ride way'. Lines from Henry VI Pt.III, Act 5, Sc.iii, miss- ing word 'Tewkesbury'.

2) Thoroughly pickled no doubt in the notorious barrel of wine from Monemvasia, he ended i* here.

George, Duke of Clarence, is supposedly buried in Tewkesbury Abbey, having been 'drowned' in 1478 in the butt of Malmsey (corruption of Monemvasia in E. Peloponnese, where wine originally came from).

3) 'Over it and dominating it rose the huge square tower of the Abbey; the finest Norman tower, some say, in the world. The abbey itself, bigger than many cathedrals, loomed vastly out of its churchyard chestnuts and yews. But there was none of that 'odour of sanctity' which usual- ly belongs to cathedral closes, about the neighbourhood of Elmbury's great church.' From opening chapter of Portrait of Elmbury by John Moore, a fictional account of Moore's home town of Tewkesbury.

Fifth Clue: Answer: SALISBURY

1) A household word — along with Exeter, Gloucester and Warwick.

Reference to `S.Crispin's Day' speech at Agin- court, Henry V Act 4 Sc.iii.

2) Associated with a hay cart, Hampstead Heath and 'a nasty green thing'.

Reference to subjects of paintings by John Con- stable, who also frequently painted Salisbury. The 'nasty green thing' was Constable's 'Water Meadows near Salisbury', submitted anony- mously to the Royal Academy in 1830 when the hanging committee made adverse comments later summed up by Constable in these words.

3) It stood first in Europe until 1307, when another English city stood first in the world. By 1315 it was only third in England — although after 1572 it again stood first in Europe until in the nineteenth century it was beaten by Rouen, Hamburg, Cologne and Ulm.

Reference to height of Salisbury's cathedral spire, successively exceeded by Lincoln, St Paul's London and Beauvais (which fell April 1573). But see report.

Sixth Clue: Answer: YORK

I) Here succeeded the founder of the capital of the greatest empire the world had ever known. The Roman Emperor Constantine, founder of Constantinople, was proclaimed emperor in York in 306.

2) To Bernard its Minster would be French. Reference is not to St Bernard of Clairvaux (see report) but to Spectator's 'Low Life' correspon- dent Jeffrey Bernard, habitue of the York Minster, a well-known Soho hostelry, commonly called 'the French Pub', 'the French House' or. just 'the French' from its erstwhile French land- lords and clientele.

3) He looks down on the Foreign Office in par- ticular and Westminster in general — but it wasn't up here he led his men.

Frederick Duke of York (1763-1827), subject of well-known but libellous nursery rhyme, whose column at the bottom of Waterloo Place looks down over the Mall to the places named.

Seventh Clue: Answer: TWICKENHAM

1) Kabuli Papam.

Twickenham 'had A.Pope' through the residence there of Alexander Pope from 1710 to 1744.

2) Eroica (anag)! You here revealed all — well nearly!

'0 Erica!' Roe, the young lady who toplessly enlivened an England v Australia Rugby interna- tional at Twickenham on 2 January 1982.

3) Where the homicidal Baptist gang came from. Reference to W.H.Auden's later uncanonical poem 'Get There If You Can And See The Land ' which includes the lines:

'Lawrence was brought down by smuthountis Blake went dotty as he sang But Homer Lane was killed in action by the Twickenham Baptist Gang'.

(See report.)

Eighth Clue: Answer: HASTINGS

1) Seems as if it was one in the eye here when the, First Bill came in.

Reference is to the (now disputed) shooting in the eye of King Harold at the Battle of Hastings when William I invaded in 1066. 'Seems' from way incident is portrayed in Bayeux Tapestry.

2) The real author of the letter which Miss Neville pretended included the line 'the gentlemen of the Shake-bag club has cut the gentlemen of Goose-green quite out of feather'. Letter was written by George Hastings, friend of Marlow, in Act 4 of Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer.

3) He was first to leave the racecourse and head for the pub.

Max Hastings, reporter on the Falklands War, who left 2 Para on Port Stanley racecourse on the day of the surrender and headed through the Argentine lines for The Upland Goose pub.

Ninth Clue: Answer: GLASGOW

1) Adam Smith was magisterially informed that it was not as beautiful as Brentford.

By Dr Johnson, who interrupted Adam Smith's expatiation on the beauties of Glasgow (Boswell, 1783) with the remark 'Pray, Sir, have you ever seen Brent ford?'

2) Belonged to Will -- on one night of the week at least.

Will Fyffe's song 'I Belong to Glasgow' stated that on Saturday night 'Glasgie belongs tae me' (or words to that effect).

3) Its arms include: 'the tree that never grew the bird that never flew the fish that never swam the bell that never rang'.

Traditional Glasgow jingle referring to the city's arms and legendary incidents in the life of its founder St Mungo (or Kentigern).

Tenth Clue: Answers ULLAPOOL UPTON- ON-SEVERN, UTTOXETER (all beginning with 'U').

1) On the way to see Foinaven and Arkle you

might spend a night here — by the sweep of the Broom.

Foinaven (sic) and Arkle Are both mountains north of Ullapool in N.W.Scotland, by Loch Broom — on the estate of Anne, Duchess of Westminster, owner of two famous steeplechasers given these names (with slight emendation to Foinavon).

2) Here Sophia might have caught up with Tom had he not been in bed with the woman he later took to be his mother — and had her father not caught up with her.

Anyone wishing to disentangle this complicated situation fully is referred to relevant chapters of Fielding's Tom Jones.

3) 'Once indeed I was disobedient. I refused to attend my father in market .. . a few years ago I desired to atone for this fault. I went to — in very bad weather, and stood for a considerable time bareheaded in the rain, on the spot where my father's stall used to stand. In contrition I stood, and I hope the penance was expiatory'. Dr Johnson's father had a bookstall in Uttoxeter market. Johnson confessed his story to a young clergyman named White in 1784 (cf. Boswell).

Eleventh Clue: Answer: OXFORD 1) When they made old Josef a doctor here, he dug out something suitable for the occasion his ninety-second attempt to be precise. When Oxford University made Josef Haydn an honorary Doctor of Music in 1791 he presented a new symphony' to commemorate the occasion, probably written a year or two earlier, but hence- forth known as the `Oxford Symphony', his 92nd in G.

2) Young Fawley knew it under another name, You can't often see it in weather like this", the tiler told him. "The time I've noticed it is when the sun is going down in a blaze of flame and it looks like — I don't know what". "The heavenly Jerusalem", suggested young Fawley. "Ay — though I should never 'a thought of it myself'

In Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Jude Fawley knew Oxford as Christminster. Quotation from Pt.l, Chapter 3.

3) To CBS it was 'a very nice sort of place . . for People who like that sort of place'; for the historian of the Roman empire it was where he spent The most idle and unprofitable' fourteen months of his whole life; while to Sir Max it was the place which made him 'insufferable'.

All references to Oxford, from Shaw's Man and Superman; Edward Gibbon's Autobiography; and Max Beerbohm in `Going Back to School'.

Twelfth Clue: Answer: DUBLIN

1) They once had a bit of trouble at the Post Office here.

Over Easter in 1916, when the main Dublin Post Office was occupied by the rebels under Pearse and Connolly.

2) Molly lived at 7 Eccles Street. Molly Bloom's address in Joyce's Ulysses.

3) 'I did think I did see all Heaven before me and the great God Himself' said the exultant com- Poser — before coming here for the world premiere of his most famous work.

George Frederick Handel, whose Messiah was first sung in Dublin on 13 April 1742.

The concluding piece of doggerel, including the line 'Take my first and backward run' was in- tended to hint that the first letters of all the clues, in reverse order, spelled out the words 'Doughty Street, WC1'. 'Add Red Herrings' was a reference to Dorothy Sayers's detective novel, The Five Red Herrings, and with 'a six' gave the street number 56 — the end of the trail and the hiding place of the treasure.

Christopher Booker reports:

When we launched the Great Spectator Treasure Hunt on an unsuspecting world last October I had absolutely no idea of how our readers would respond whether it would prove too difficult or too easy, whether we would receive five entries, 500 or 5,000. The clues to the treasure trail were deliberately designed to begin fairly gently. Two or three difficult clues around the halfway mark were put in to separate the sheep from the goats — and then the final stretch, as consolation for those who had got so far, was designed to be rather easier again.

In the event the response could scarcely have left me more gratified and amazed. I was gratified because we received 434 en- tries, which was an almost ideal number — neither embarrassingly low, nor un- manageable. Only 27 were entirely correct, although the vast majority got within two or three of a complete set of answers.

What amazed me was the extent to which I had misjudged which questions would prove difficult or easy. The toughest ques- tion of all, I had thought, was Clue 8, No.2, with its reference to 'the gentlemen of Goose-green' being 'cut quite out of feather'. In the event almost everyone seems to have tracked this down to She Stoops to Conquer without difficulty. On the other hand, one or two questions I thought ridiculously easy caught out a sur- prising number of competitors. Even the reference to Henry V's St Crispin's Day speech (5,1) foxed some — one competitor ingeniously suggested that 'Salisbury, War- wick and Exeter' were 'all members of the peerage' and that they were `household words' because 'in Timothy White's you can buy pots and pans in the "Peerage" range'. The quotation from John Moore's Portrait of Elmbury (4,3) was variously at- tributed to Trollope, Elizabeth Goudge and (by several entries) to Mrs Craik's John Halifax Gentleman. Not a few failed to spot Max Hastings as the man who 'was first to leave the racecourse and head for the pub' (8,3), alternatively suggesting that the Hastings in question must have been 'the Watson to Hercule Poirot', 'Mr William Hastings-Bass the racehorse trainer', or even 'the 4th Marquess of Hastings, a member of the Jockey Club and a heavy drinker'.

But two questions proved to be way ahead of all the others as stumbling blocks. I had expected most readers of the Spec- tator to spot immediately that the 'Bernard' to whom York Minster would be 'French' (6,2) was a reference to our 'Low Life' cor- respondent and one of his most faithfully reported haunts in Soho. Perhaps not en- tirely gratifyingly to Jeffrey Bernard, however, a mighty phalanx of readers in- sisted on confusing him with Bernard of Clairvaux, whose 12th-century connections with York's episcopal politics were trotted out repeatedly, most knowledgeably, but alas vainly. Bernard of Cluny was another suggestion, while several readers put for-

ward Bernard Fielden, the architect in charge of the Minster's recent restoration.

An even more colourful range of sugges- tions was drawn by the quotation from Auden about the 'homicidal Baptist gang' from Twickenham (7,3). One fairly popular alternative was that this must be a reference to the Fifth Monarchy men or anabaptists led by Venner in the 1650s. Two readers suggested that it must refer to the character named Baptist in Little Dorrit, another sug- gested 'the gang in The Ladykillers' . Still more desperate was the theory, seemingly made up from all of these, that it must be 'a group of criminals led by a man called Bap- tist who lived in Twickenham, who were found guilty of a murder committed during a. burglary in the late 1950s'. Still others suggested G. K. Chesterton, an unpublish- ed Sherlock Holmes story, or 'the place of origin of a religious sect led by the Revd Jones, who were all killed in Venezuela'. One lady even tried vainly to track down the gang by making inquiries of the Twickenham police, though another couple struck luckier by addressing their question to the Twickenham Public Library.

All this is, of course, mere preamble to the real purpose of my report which is to announce the names of the winners.

From the moment it was opened there was never really any doubt as to which entry laid prior claim to the chief 'treasure', the painting by Lavery. Remembering the rule that preference would be given to 'the most complete set of answers both to clues and individual questions', the winner has to be Mr David Pugh of St Austell, Cornwall, who submitted thirteen closely-typed pages, complete with additional supporting evidence by way of photostats, maps etc. To each of the forty questions, Mr Pugh's answers were a model, covering every im- aginable point, including most tactfully cor- recting me on the historical stages of the building of Salisbury Cathedral. In his answer on 'the French Pub', he even gave the landlord's name and telephone number, while his essay on the background to Auden's couplet about Homer Lane and the Baptist gang could stand reprinting as a scholarly note. As if this was not enough, in his answer to the question about Con- stable's paintings (Salisbury, Hampstead Heath etc.) he finessed me with the delicacy of a true master, first showing that he knew the answer I was after, then providing alter- native answers including an entry from Who Was Who for the painter Frank Salisbury who lived on Hampstead Heath.

Mr Farquharson of Sidcup took second place, not least because 1 liked his jokes (e.g. Max Hastings 'naturally headed straight for the local hostelry, The Upland Goose Hotel, to terrorise the inhabitants'), while Mr Tyler of Sevenoaks took third place by a whisker from three others. The remaining all-correct entries, I'm afraid, have to take lesser prizes, although I have to add that one or two other com- petitors (such as Dr Murray of Hampstead) produced entries of a standard which would certainly have put them in the running for one of the three main prizes, had they not made just one minor slip.

Most of the other runners-up also failed on just one question, although the quality of their answers was not necessarily quite so high, and I have also recommended a hand- ful of other competitors for prizes, by vir- tue of the wit or qher excellence with which they presented a near-miss.

Exactly a third of the prizewinners (33) come from London, another 25 from the Home Counties (including 9 from Surrey and 8 from Kent, although two of these were main prizewinners). Perhaps surpris- ingly Oxford and Cambridge only produced one apiece, Scotland two, while the only winner abroad was Mr Peter Jenkins in Washington.

May I just say in conclusion, both to prizewinners and other entrants, how much I have enjoyed reading through your replies to questions which were couched in all in- nocence of how many thousands of man- and woman-hours the task of answering them would entail. The Spectator can be proud of its readers. Finally I am grateful to all those competitors who were kind enough to add a note saying that they had derived pleasure from their task. I can only apologise to those who, after such labours, did not win anything, but add that the final prize is being reserved for the anonymous correspondent from Darlington who spot- ted the hiding place of the treasure after only three weeks. Will he please write to me at the same address, this time giving his own.