The Twelve-Minute Test
Late in 1941 a reader wrote to the Daily Telegraph claiming he could finish the paper's prize cryptic in six minutes. This is the sort of letter every newspaper receives and almost every newspaper ignores.
The Telegraph did not ignore it.
A hundred pounds, and a bell
W. A. J. Gavin, a magazine proprietor and chairman of the Eccentric Club, put up £100 - to go to the war effort - and challenged the readership to prove it. The editor, Arthur Watson, invited entrants to send in their names. Gavin, who evidently had some sympathy for the competitors, extended the six minutes to a full twelve.
On 10 January 1942, twenty-five people gathered at the Telegraph offices in Fleet Street and were given a crossword and a bell.
First to put down his pen was Vere Chance of Orpington, who in his haste misspelt a word and was disqualified. The win went to F. H. W. Hawes of Dagenham, who came home in seven minutes and 57.5 seconds. Five finished inside the limit; four survived the disqualification. Mr Hawes received a cigarette lighter. The hundred pounds went to a service fund.
The puzzle was Telegraph crossword number 5,062, and it was printed for everyone else three days later.
The part everybody knows
Some weeks afterwards, according to the account we have, several competitors received letters marked Confidential, inviting them to present themselves on a matter of national importance. One of them was Stanley Sedgewick, a young accountancy clerk. He was told that chaps with twisted brains like his might be suitable for a particular kind of war work. He was sent to Bletchley Park, sat a second timed crossword on arrival, and spent the war in the Air Section working on German weather codes.
That's the story. It's told everywhere, and it's very likely true. It's also thinner than its fame suggests.
The Bletchley Park Trust's own account of how the codebreakers were recruited does not mention crosswords at all.
The part nobody mentions
The entire documented chain rests on one man's recollection, written down decades later. No War Office letter has been produced. No personnel file. No contemporary document of any kind linking the contest to the recruitment.
The Bletchley Park Trust's own account of how its codebreakers were found describes university contacts at Oxford and Cambridge, the women's services and the Civil Service. Crosswords are not in it. Search their site for the word and you get nothing. That's not a formal denial, but for a story this famous the silence is loud.
And the version that circulates most widely gets the causation backwards. It's routinely said that Bletchley Park planted the puzzle in the Telegraph as a covert recruitment advertisement. It did not. The contest was a stunt born of a reader's boast and a rich man's wager. Whatever the War Office made of it, it made of it afterwards.
The detail that redeems the whole thing
Here's the fact that almost nobody repeats.
Stanley Sedgewick did not finish in time. When the bell went he was one word short.
The man whose testimony is the sole documented link between that room and Bletchley Park was not the winner, was not on the podium, and did not beat the clock. Which means that if the War Office was fishing, it was not fishing for the five fastest solvers in England. It took the entrant list.
That's a more interesting story than the one usually told, and it's the one the evidence actually supports: not a secret test with a hidden prize, but a newspaper stunt that produced a list of names, and somebody in government who thought a list of people who enjoy untangling deliberately misleading language might be worth a letter.