TWIN-TOWN TREASURE HUNT

Report:A severe drop in the number of entries — and a few letters of complaint — suggest that I made this one too difficult. All the more credit, then, to the 32 competitors who struggled through to the end; and many thanks to those who wrote to say that they'd nonetheless en- joyed themselves! The trouble is, I now know all too well the quality of my foremost opponents, whose names I recognised this year as old friends. I'd also become more aware of the large number of reference books that give short-cut lists of events connected with every town. To prevent you all working through these, I'd tried to give at least one incident with an easily checked location, to give the actual name of the town, and added one or two more tangential connections — which relied upon your recognis- ing the characters involved. I'd hoped this would mean that you could do 'research' for one or two of the clues for each town; but I'm afraid the effect was to make the answers impossibly elusive.

Not quite impossible, however. None of the clues went entirely unsolved; and, in fact, you all seemed to find different parts difficult, so that each was answered by a respectable number of people. Detective Inspector Weymouth posed some problems, and Owen Jenkins suggested that he was investigating The Case of the Strangled Competition Setter; but though Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford proved a rival attraction, quite a few of you seem to share my low taste for the wildly stilted improbabilities of Sax Rohmer. Many of those who did not recognise Lord Lambeth were able to guess his creator from the inimitable Jamesian style. Several, however, after reaching the final answer, were baffled as to why it had been chosen: bookbinders in SW6, a friend of Addi- son's, and a brand of photocopier were all adduced as the hard-pressed scribbler's cham- pion.

No one competitor got it all right this year, though several of you got close. The top four, all of whom were runners-up last year, ended up neck-and-neck. A. McLeod's exemplary ex- planations and references deserve a special mention — wonderfully neat,' succinct and full — but in the event, he was just nudged into third place. The two nudgers, however, were so close that the closest scrutiny cannot find anything to judge between them. Once again, therefore, I'm afraid we'll have to draw for first and second prizes at the award ceremony.

Here, then, are the results: Equal first: Jack Walton, 57 Castle Avenue, Ewell, Epsom, Surrey, and Angus Tarn, 10 Park Avenue, Carshal- ton, Surrey. The first prize is 2,000 units in Framlington Monthly Income Fund — at the current offer price of f118.2p, these are worth £2,364. The unit trust also offers a monthly income. The second prize is a weekend break in Madrid for two, courtesy of Mundi Color, the specialists in visits to Spain for discerning travellers.

Third prize of a case of 1979 Louis Roederer champagne, donated by El Vino Co Ltd, goes to Andrew McLeod, 47 Cowley Road, London Ell.

Admiration and the student prize of a choice of ten records or cassettes from the Editions EG catalogue go to Jonathan Sheldon, 196 Barker

Report by Caroline Moore

Drive, NW1, who came, in fact, seventh overall; and special commiserations to Ann Rossiter, 108a Orford Road, London E17, who was in the unhappy position of coming fourth (and only made one mistake last year too).

Runners-up were C.S. Miller, 11 Jeune Hall, Cowley Road, Oxford; Jean R. Elliott, 180 Ashley Gardens, SW1; J. Light and D. Haun- ton, 272 Gunnersbury Avenue, W4; Hugo Page, 20 Brechin Place, SW7; Margaret Jenkins, 23 Toley Avenue, Wembley; Owen Jenkins, 13 Devonshire House, Bath Terrace, SE1; P. T. Sheridan, 11 Rowan House, Alder Road, Sid- cup, Kent.

J. Jervois, Steward's Farm, Essex, J. W. Leonard, Cross Trees, Sutton Courtenay, Oxon, and Mrs Beverley Stoop, 28 Edith Grove, SW10, all did formidably but reached Fairgax.

My apologies, finally, to Mrs Beverley Stoop — who flung in the towel at the beginning, but returned because 'like a scab, it was there to be picked at' — for the large number of mentally unstable characters who peopled the comp. A sign, perhaps, that someone else should take over next year, before my dread of your ingenuity drives my allusiveness beyond all bounds.

First clue a) BEACONSFIELD. Benjamin Disraeli, first Earl of Beaconsfield, possessed the devoted wife whose fingers were crushed on the way to the Houses of Parliament (Disraeli preserved the carriage door as a memorial of her devotion). Sir Joshua Reynolds was the accident-prone artist: the damaged lip can be seen in his self-portraits. The son of a farm bailiff, seen while visiting Burke, provided the model for his 'Infant Hercules', bought by Catherine the Great of Russia. In J. L Garvin's Beaconsfield house, Brendan Bracken, who lied to the headmaster in order to get into Sedbergh School, met W. B. Yeats, nicknamed the Gland Old Man from his experiments with monkey-glands, who refused to disturb the Abbey Theatre cat because he thought its sleep was 'magical'.

b) TWICKENHAM. Admiral Puggy Booth was the name under which J. M. W. Turner lived his secret life with his Margate landlady. When `Cologne' was hung between two of Lawrence's works, Turner applied lampblack to dim its brilliant colours and spare the feelings of the President of the Academy. He was attracted to H. S. Trimmer's sister while living at Sandy- combe Lodge. John Donne: the quotation is from `Twicknam Gardens'. Alexander Pope, suffering from Pott's disease, entertained, among others, Lord Chesterfield, who gave this time-saving lavatorial advice in his Letters to his (illegitimate) son.

Second clue a) ESHER. Robert Clive, who ordered the forgery of Admiral Watson's signature on a fake treaty drawn up to dupe his intermediary, when negotiating with Mir Jaffir, lived at Claremont. John Vanbrugh started The Provok'd Wife in the Bastille: the malicious account of his courtship is supplied by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The Hon. Dorothy Brett, D. H. Lawrence's 'Nom' and daughter of Viscount Esher, put her hand into the pocket of the pervert `Loulou' Harcourt (details omitted from delicacy). The Christmas tree was put up to extort money from guests for her trip to London from Taos; and her dabblings in spiritualism, which began under the guidance of a woman calling herself 'Tiny Rimposche', ended with the delusion that she was instructed daily by the spirit 'Father Flaminorthius'.

b) ISLINGTON. Giuseppe Grimaldi was the morbid father of the famous clown Joey Grimal- di. Joey describes the death-bed charade in his memoirs; Byron played the somewhat boorish trick of recommending that he eat soy sauce with his apple tart. Walter Sickert came to Islington at the age of five to be cured of a fistula (though he liked to claim the operation had been a circumcision); the thigh boots are described by Denton Welch. Alfred Hitchcock began his career in Islington Studios; in The Lady Vanishes, made here, clues are given by Miss Froy's packet of Harriman's Herbal Tea (A Million Mexicans Prefer It) and the high heels worn by a bogus nun. Hitchcock's self-proposed epitaph was inspired by his memory of his famous childhood punishment in the police cells.

Third clue a) TUNBRIDGE WELLS. Handel was por- trayed as a hog playing the organ, surrounded by delicacies, by the enraged Joseph Goupy. Thackeray, whose broken nose inspired his pseudonym of Michael Angelo Titmarsh, terri- fied himself by reading Manfroni, or the One- Handed Monk during the school holidays. His unfortunate wife had gone insane, and never recovered. Palmerston intruded into the bed- room of Mrs Brand, a lady-in-waiting at Wind- sor, and Queen Victoria never forgave him. Lady Emily Cowper was his mistress, and later wife; her be-chokered mother was Lady Mel- bourne, whose moral sense extended to advising young brides to be sure to give their husbands one legitimate male heir!

b) BEDFORD. William Browne was loved by Edward Fitzgerald, whose marriage to Lucy Barton, unsurprisingly, lasted less than twelve months after these animadversions upon the blancmange. J. Desmond Bernal went to Bed- ford School, and was nicknamed 'Sage' at Cambridge for his omniscience. Worked with Pyke in the second world war upon the project to construct aircraft carriers from artificial icebergs reinforced with woodpulp, code-named `Habbakuk' (misspelt by a Canadian secretary). Mountbatten burst into the bathroom at Che- quers to float a sample of `pykrete' in Churchill's bath; and, at the Quebec conference of 1943, shot at a block of the stuff to demonstrate its properties. The bullet ricocheted dangerously. Benjamin West, the American painter, crucified the body of a Chelsea pensioner, James Legg, to provide studies for accurate portrayals of the Crucifixion. Thomas Banks was the collaborat- ing sculptor, who collapsed after discovering from parish records that he was older than he'd thought (Farington).

Fourth clue a) DEPTFORD. Christopher Marlowe, gradu- ate of Corpus Christi, was stabbed in Deptford in dubious circumstances: some suggest that the

ANSWERS AND WINNERS

1593 coroner's report was a cover-up. Percy `Boy' Staunton, in Robertson Davis's Deptford Trilogy, died with the piece of granite (which began the trilogy embedded in a snowball) clenched in his mouth. Ben Jonson passed on this gossip about Queen Elizabeth's refusal to use a looking-glass to William Drummond of Hawthornden. The Queen lost her garter at the ceremony to knight Drake at Deptford.

b) LICHFIELD. George Fox, founder of the Quakers, tells in his Journal how he was moved by the Lord to take off his shoes and make this announcement to the inhabitants of Lichfield. The Lichfield House Compact, struck in secret between the Whigs and the Irish Party in 1835. Daniel O'Connell, whose uncle was called Hunt- ing Cap, was challenged to a duel by d'Esterre, because he had called the Dublin Corporation `beggarly'. George Eliot visited her nieces at Miss Eborall's school; George Cross jumped from the balcony of their room into the Grand- Canal upon their wedding trip to Venice in 1880, though typhoid may have exacerbated the strains of being married to George Eliot.

Fifth clue a) LAMBETH. Charlie Chaplin spent time in Lambeth workhouse as a child. His last film was A Countess from Hong Kong, and his body was snatched by a Pole and a Bulgarian from the cemetery at Vevey in Switzerland. Cosmo Gor- don Lang believed he possessed the enviable power to curse architectural eyesores, such as the terracotta Hydro on an island in Scotland, and the ugly window of a South of England clergyman. J. Pierpont Morgan provided the earth for his garden in Lambeth Palace. Lord Lambeth is the English nobleman in Henry James's novella, An International Episode— the companion piece to Daisy Miller.

b) DUMFRIES. Thomas Carlyle was here when his wife died suddenly in her carriage, after her dog had been injured in an accident. The housemaid gave birth in the seven-foot- square china closet while he was entertaining Geraldine Jewksbury in Cheyne Walk: the baby was smuggled from the house in Jane Carlyle's best table napkins. Henry Brougham went on a tour of Scotland, called an 'apocalypse' by Disraeli, taking the Seal with him. In 1839, all the newspapers except the Times printed prema- ture obituaries after a hoax letter, which it was suspected that Brougham himself had perpe- trated. John Paul Jones, adventurer and Amer- ican naval hero, started life in Kirkbean, near Dumfries. As Kontradmiral Pavel Ivanovitch Jones in Catherine the Great's navy, he was accused of the rape — probably falsely. His bones were disinterred from a Paris cemetery and transferred with appropriate pomp to the US State Academy in Annapolis in 1905.

Sixth clue TAVISTOCK. John Pym, one of the five MPs who were impeached on the orders of Charles I. On 4 January 1642, Charles came to the House to enforce the order, but found 'the birds have flown'. The mob of peace-protesters attacked Pym in 1643. Jerome K. Jerome, `J' of Three Men in a Boat, shared lodgings in Tavistock Place with `George', George Wingrave, whose ominous parcel in the book turns out to be a banjo. Anthony Powell lived in 33 Tavistock Square, where his friend, the composer Con- stant Lambert, popped the question. The physical characteristics of the composer Hugh Moreland in A Dance to the Music of Time were taken from Lambert; the quotation was from Casanova's Chinese Restaurant.

b) DOVER. Chopin lodged in 48 Dover Street in 1848. George Sand took him to Majorca, where the rain brought on his consumption, and inspired the 'Raindrop' Prelude; and Sand published a thinly disguised portrait of their relationship in her execrable novel, Lucrezia Floriani. Blucher suffered from recurrent delu- sions of paehydermal pregnancy (in his later years he decided that the elephant must have been fathered on him by a French soldier). He joined the Swedish army in 1747, but went over to the Prussians when he was captured; his triumphal entry into Dover after Waterloo was the first of many enthusiastic receptions. (His whiskers and conversational powers were also much admired. At a grand dinner in London, he ate his food in silence before paying his next- door neighbour a compliment upon the white- ness of her hands, which she passed off as due to her calf-skin golves. 'Madam,' Bliicher gallantly replied through his interpreter, 'I wear calf-skin breeches, but they don't do a thing for my arse.') Oskar Kokoschka had an affair with Gustav Mahler's widow, Alma; and afterwards ordered the doll-maker Hermione Moos to make a life-size replica of his love. It wasn't as good as he hoped, though he painted it as 'The Woman in Blue', and it was discarded in a dustcart after a drunken farewell party. In 1926, landing in England, he 'felt a compulsion to paint a picture of Dover'; 'The Cliffs of Dover' is in the Kunstmuseum, Basle).

Seventh clue a) WEYMOUTH. Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury, took the surrender of Weymouth for the King in 1643 and became its governor. Clarendon nastily attributes his change to the side of Parliament to pique when he was deprived of the post. John Locke was his doctor, and inserted a tap into his side to drain a chronic abscess (the tap was a boon to contem- porary satirists). Mad Queen Joanna (Juana la Loca) was driven ashore in 1505. Her jealousy of her husband, Philip of Burgundy, turned to melancholia after his death, though the extent of her necrophiliac foot-fetishism is in doubt. Detective Inspector Weymouth was sent mad by the spores of a gigantic and mutant empusa, the fiendish invention of Fu Manchu (Sax Rohmer, The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu).

b) WIGAN. The Brookers owned the lodging house described by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, though he apparently had to move from perfectly decent lodgings to find his `typical' specimens. Sir Alfred Gilbert was the sculptor, commissioned by Mrs Eliza Macloghlin to cast a memorial of her husband. The bronze, completed 1909, was entitled Mors Janua Vitae. (Mrs Macloghlin became more and more of a liability as a patroness, and once wandered into the University College Hospital asking for her arm to be amputated because her finger had been bitten by a rhinoceros and was not re- sponding to the honey she had put upon it.) The peroration of W. E. Gladstone's speech at Wigan in 1868.

Final due a) CHELSEA. Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols murdered Nancy Spungen in room 100 of the Chelsea Hotel, New York. Charles Kingsley thought that the lichen marks looked like the footsteps of a little sweep, suggesting Tom's escape down Lewthwaite Crag in The Water Babies. His father was vicar of St Luke's, Chelsea, and died there in 1860. Thomas Shad- well, poet laureate and opium addict, described by Rochester, died in 1692.

b) Final solution: FAIRFAX. Each of the paired towns is 'Siamese', linked by a single letter. Hence,

f beaConsfieldr eSher

twiCkenham J ' iSlington J and so on, giving the seven letters C, S, D, F, M, V and W. Add the numerical values of CHELSEA to these, counting forward through the alphabet (and starting again at A if you cross Z), thus: C (3) + C (3) = F; S (19) + (8) = A; D (4) + E (5) = I; F (6) + L (12) = R; M (13) + S (19) = F; V (22) + E (5) = A; W (23) + A (1) = X: so, FAIRFAX.

Allusions in the rhyme: Clio was taken as a pseudonym by Addison, and articles in the original Spectator are signed by one of the four

letters of this word, signifying the place where they were written: CHELSEA, London, Islington, or Office. Thomas Fairfax is the 'Fairfax, whose name in armes through Europe rings' in the first line of Milton's sonnet, `On the Lord Gen. Fairfax at the siege of Colchester'; there are ten towns called Fairfax in the Times Atlas of the World; Jane Fairfax was given a pianoforte by Frank Churchill in Jane Austen's Emma; Gwendolen Fairfax never travelled without her diary because 'one should always have something sensational to read in the train' in Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest; Colonel Fairfax is in Gilbert and Sullivan's Yeomen of the Guard. But our chief hero is the owner of the Spectator, John Fairfax Ltd (chair- man James Oswald Fairfax), the Australian publishing company that foots the bills, and is hence entitled to the sycophantic respect of all Spectator hacks . . . .