Why Her Maj loves a crossword with her kippers By Alan Connor â€˜One of those fads that people will tire of in six months,â€™ people said when crosswords were invented 100 years ago. A huge misjudgment, of course. The first newspaper crossword appeared in December 1913 â€" devised by Liverpudlian Arthur Wynne for the Christmas edition of the New York World. Wynne told his bosses to patent the idea; they declined. Here, ALAN CONNOR reveals some fascinating facts about this popular pastimeâ€‰.â€‰.â€‰. Colin Dexter, creator of Inspector Morse, named the Oxford-based detective, his sergeant, Lewis, and many of the suspects they investigated after people who kept beating him in crossword competitions. In 1941, solvers of the Telegraph crossword were invited to enter a competition. Those who were successful were asked to join the codebreakers at Bletchley Park. The last thing George VI did before he died in his sleep in 1952 was to complete a late-evening crossword. Skill: Crosswords were at first dismissed as a useless pastime, but some of the people who cracked the German Enigma code during the Second World War (pictured) were there through a crossword contest One of Britainâ€™s first cryptic setters was Adrian Bell, father of the ex-BBC war reporter and former MP Martin Bell. He is remembered for gems including â€˜This cylinder is jammed (5, 4) â€™ for SWISS ROLL and â€˜Die of cold (3,4) â€™ for ICE CUBE. His puzzles proved popular with politicians, who wrote to the papers with their solving times. â€˜It made you wonder what they did in their Cabinet meetings, to tell you the truth,â€™ remarked Bell. As Provost of Eton College, ghost story writer M.R. James was said to cook his breakfast egg for as long as it took him to complete the cryptic crossword. He did not like a hard-boiled egg. One Across: The Queen is said to begin her day with a crossword at breakfast Crosswords were so popular among U.S. commuters in the 1920s that the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad provided dictionaries for passengers. In 1944, MI5 noticed the Telegraph crossword contained answers including OMAHA, MULBERRY, NEPTUNE and OVERLORD â€" all top-secret codewords for the impending D-Day invasion. They interrogated the setter, a teacher, and concluded it was a coincidence. The Queenâ€™s working day, according to Vanity Fair magazine, starts at 8am with kippers or kidneys with toast â€" and a crossword puzzle before the Bagpiper to the Sovereign begins to play. Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein took longer than planned to complete the musical West Side Story because every Thursday they downed pens to solve fiendishly difficult crosswords from the BBC magazine The Listener. The crossword editor of Country Life magazine suspected a hoax when the signature of a winning entry was that of Princess Margaret. One call to Buckingham Palace uncovered the truth, and the three guinea prize was duly dispatched. The word â€˜clueâ€™ originally meant a ball of wool. Because balls of wool were helpful for finding your way out of a maze, the word came to mean anything that gives a helpful hint. When crosswords appeared in Britain, The Times insisted the puzzle was â€˜making devastating inroads on the working hours of every rank of societyâ€™, before deciding to print its own. When Stephen Fry was sent to prison for credit-card fraud as a teenager, his mother would visit him and pass him crosswords, cut from newspapers, under the glass. Poet W.H. Auden complained about the low standards of U.S. puzzles. â€˜The clues in British crosswords may be more complicated,â€™ he insisted, â€˜but they are always fair.â€™ Brain: When Stephen Fry was jailed as a teenager, his mother passed crosswords to him in prison John Sykes, a champion crossword solver, used to start in the bottom right-hand corner of a crossword, on the basis that the setter may have written those clues last, in a more tired frame of mind. Castaways on Desert Island Discs who have asked for crosswords as their luxury include dancer Lionel Blair, footballer Trevor Brooking and actors Simon Russell Beale and John Gielgud. Gielgud amazed actors by the speed with which he could finish crosswords. A cast member looked at one completed grid and asked what the word DIDDYBUMS meant. â€˜No idea,â€™ replied Sir John. â€˜But it does fit awfully well.â€™ Frank Sinatra wrote a fan letter to the New York Times, giving his solving times, and remarking: â€˜What a wonderful way to pass the time and also learn new answers every day.â€™ Satirical magazine Private Eyeâ€™s crossword is legendarily smutty. One especially scatalogical puzzle, in 1972, was set by the notoriously debauched MP Tom Driberg. The Â£2 prize was won by Mrs Rosalind Runcie, whose husband was then the Bishop of St Albans and later the Archbishop of Canterbury. Two Girls, One On Each Knee: The Puzzling, Playful World Of The Crossword by Alan Connor (Particular Books, Â£12.99).