Notes & Queries, 15th November, 2013 - Was there ever an MI1?

 

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On the 14^th of August, 2013, a man calling himself Peter Koller wrote cryptically in the birthdays section of The Telegraph: “Pavimenti is 125 years old and living proof that the secret of preserving mental acuity in old age lies in a handful of loosely connected words, alluded to in anger.”

Pavimenti is not, as is implied by Koller, the oldest surviving person in Great Britain. They are a composite, created during the late 1880s by the seven men who compiled the midweek Highgate Tree Puzzle for the Whitehall Clarion.

The newspaper, which still exists, has a solid reputation for foreign correspondence. It was distributed nationally up until 1945. The end of the Second World War marked the beginning of a gradual withdrawal from provincial newsagents. Despite its shrinking footprint, it has adhered to a publishing schedule of six daily issues (there is no Saturday edition). It is now sold exclusively for £2 from a single kiosk, located at the halfway point along Whitehall Gardens, in London. Figures from 2012 suggest a circulation of around 3000 – certainly not enough to make the paper a financially viable enterprise, though that was never the aim of its founders. For most of its life, The Clarion has been supported by a substantial private income reaped from the letting of numerous central London properties, which are managed by the Stout estate.

The tree puzzle was a forerunner of the crossword, with the boxes for letters superimposed over a sketch of a bare tree, in this case a venerable oak that once stood on Westwood Green in Highgate (papers published in other areas of the UK used drawings of local trees as the basis for similar puzzles – a practice dating back to Tudor times). In addition to sharing common letters, the connected words in a tree puzzle are also linked via contextual relationships that are not immediately obvious. When complete, the puzzle imparts a vague concept which the successful problem-solver is supposed to meditate upon. The letters page in The Clarion used to include a sidebar specifically for musings inspired by the most recent puzzle. In 1914, the paper briefly dropped the Highgate Tree in favour of a relatively straight-forward crossword, but soon reinstated it following outcry by its readers.

Pavimenti's midweek puzzle carries a hefty prize of £1000, in real terms slightly less than in 1888 when the prize was £10 – the equivalent of around £1100 in today’s money. The late Malcolm Ivey (MI as he was prone to signing his name) was one of the original members of Pavementi - a role that he occupied until his death in 1930. A gifted dilettante, while studying poetry at Rowson's College, Cambridge, he composed an original piece of verse titled In Osseus. The poem was constructed from 360 syllables grouped together in a way that describes the movement of the 360 joints in the human skeleton. The poem is still used today by medical students as a mnemonic device. Ivey had written it over the course of a Sunday afternoon to help a friend who was studying human anatomy.

When creating the tree puzzle, Ivey took a calculated pleasure in fashioning clues that went beyond general knowledge and were based upon a familiarity with particular regions of the UK. It was maybe because of this that he also took a keen interest in the residential locations of the winners. He would often write to them requesting insight into their thought processes and sending additional puzzles by way of recompense.

In 1895, Ivey began to suspect that one of his fellow collaborators on the tree puzzle was secretly entering the competition and manipulating the results, with the intention of enriching themselves. There is no record of the seven puzzle-makers ever convening in one room. They seem to have communicated primarily via the clues they had written for other puzzles that were published in various daily and weekly journals, effectively using these publications as a slow-paced, deeply-esoteric version of Twitter or Facebook. Ivey's secretary – Edith Harley – recalls him, late in life, reading the crosswords he had been sent by friends as though they were letters, and then replying in kind.

Ivey immediately set about publishing a series of puzzles whose clues were designed to weed out the traitor in the group's midst by a surgical process of logical deduction. The culprit turned out to be fellow Cambridge graduate, Andrew Sears. When confronted by Ivey and Marcus Doe, Sears confessed that he had been using the money to fund an anarchist group, who had carried out a succession of bombings in London and Birmingham. He was summarily expelled from Pavimenti and there was talk of him being arrested. A startling addition to the outline of the tree puzzle that appeared the following Wednesday, was the noose dangling from one of the upper branches. The column of boxes descending vertically along the length of the rope was sufficient enough in number to accommodate the word: Sears. Unusually the puzzle was credited to MI. Underneath these initials were five Xs. On Thursday morning, Sears' body was discovered hanging from a tree on Hampstead Heath. All six of the puzzle-makers had alibis and the death was ruled to have been suicide.

Ivey's relentlessly methodical approach to uncovering information made him highly sought after in certain circles. In 1900, the Diggory Education Board (who provided examination papers and invigilation services to most of the public schools in England) noticing an unusually high pass-rate, along with an increase in the number of generic responses to questions, called upon Ivey to investigate. He uncovered a network of former pupils who had infiltrated the exam board and were passing on answers to their alma maters while, at the same time, attempting to sabotage the similar efforts made on behalf of rival schools.

Ivey was recruited by the Secret Service in 1914, around the same time that it was renamed Military Intelligence. There is some debate as to whether the identical initials (MI) was a happy coincidence, or an acknowledgement of the role his coldly logical investigative techniques played in the acquisition and analysis of information.

* The Clarion was well-known for its use of staff pseudonyms, with multiple writers and editors being grouped together behind a single identity. This was done to create an air of stability and reliability.

The first three editors were collectively known as Julius Stout, while David Shorely – the paper's Middle Eastern correspondent – was around twenty different people. “We went through rather a lot of Davids,” recalls Donald Runnymede, who was himself known as Mark Howitt. Later he reminisced: “It caused me a lot problems, and probably cost me a knighthood, when another writer using the same name said some unflattering things about King George.”

Lady Margaret Singer, who wrote on women's matters, was another invention, although curiously her name does appear in the record of honours. It is thought that her fictional identity was used as a cover by female agents during World War II.

Pavimenti's secretive existence has been satirised by Private Eye as part of a Hello! Magazine-style expose, in which the enigmatic puzzler was photographed buying milk from a petrol station while dressed in an “unflattering tracksuit.” Editor, Ian Hislop, once remarked: “We were fairly confident that we could print what we wanted about Pavimenti and he would never sue us. He does occasionally insult me in crossword clues and seems to harbour a particular dislike of my choice in ties.”