Britain Holds Out
The crossword took eight years to cross the Atlantic properly, and the country that produced its inventor was among the last to take it seriously.
The timeline
February 1922 - Pearson's Magazine prints a crossword on page 184 under the title "A Number of Things". On the evidence available this is the first crossword published in Britain, and it appears in a magazine rather than a newspaper.
2 November 1924 - the Sunday Express runs what is generally held to be the first crossword in a British newspaper: an Arthur Wynne puzzle, adapted for British solvers. Some accounts assign the same date to the Daily Express; 2 November 1924 fell on a Sunday.
30 July 1925 - the Daily Telegraph prints its first crossword. It's often misreported as the first cryptic, which it was not.
5 January 1929 - the Manchester Guardian begins, Saturdays only, going daily on 1 January 1930.
1 February 1930 - The Times, last of all, and grudgingly.
The paper that called it a menace
The Times had spent the mania years being magnificently rude about the whole business. It ran a piece headed "An Enslaved America" describing the crossword as "almost a national menace… making devastating inroads on the working hours of every rank of society," and reckoned it had "dealt the final blow to the art of conversation." Elsewhere it observed that "everywhere, at any hour of the day, people can be seen quite shamelessly poring over the checkerboard diagrams, cudgelling their brains for a word meaning idler, or whatnot."
It asked, in 1925: "Was any age ever given over to such stultifying pastimes or labeled with signs of such mental degradation?"
Five years later it printed one.
The Times did not put its first crossword on the leader page. It put it on the sports page.
On the sports page
The first Times crossword ran on Saturday 1 February 1930, set by Adrian Bell.
And here's the detail that tells you everything about how the paper felt: it didn't appear anywhere near the leader columns. It was printed on the sports page - filed with the results and the racing, among the things a serious reader might glance at on the way to something else. It didn't move to the back page until 1947.
That placement is the whole of British newspaper snobbery about puzzles in a single act of layout. The paper had lost the argument, published the crossword, and put it where it could still pretend not to have.
Why the resistance mattered
The delay was not merely embarrassing. It shaped the puzzle.
Because Britain came late, it arrived at a form that was already established elsewhere and immediately began doing something else with it. By the time The Times capitulated in 1930, British setters had spent four years developing a kind of clue that the American tradition had never wanted, and the two crosswords had begun to diverge into what are now, effectively, two different games played on similar-looking grids.
The snobbery that kept the crossword off the leader page is also, plausibly, what produced the cryptic. A form that broadsheet editors found faintly beneath them had an obvious route to respectability: make it harder. Not harder in the sense of more obscure facts - harder in the sense of requiring a different kind of thinking altogether.
Which is the next part of the story.