The Echo would like to heartily thank the talented wordsmith, Stephen Clarke, for so generously offering his crosswords for us to publish over the last couple of years. We wish him all the best enjoying his freedom from the relentless task of feeding us a new puzzle every week.
Though we have lost our current crossword supplier, we won’t be leaving crossworders without satisfaction. Fortunately we have a large cache of treasures left to us by another distinguished local littérateur, Mungo MacCallum.
Mungo from the Bardo
Mungo MacCallum may have left this mortal coil in December 2020, however we at The Echo still feel his influence and hold his memory dear. Mungo’s talents are somewhat legendary around here. During his long tenure as an Echo columnist he not only elevated our pages with his heavyweight political insights, his love of language was infectious. Generations of Echo editors, journalists and columnists owe him much for his guidance and example. In The Echo’s early days, Mungo came up with rules for producing concise and elegant prose – devising a set of axioms condensed from George Orwell’s writings. Yellowed and wrinkled with time, Mungo’s hand-typed rules remain pinned up in the editor’s office as a handy guide to this day.
Cryptic wordplay provided Mungo a creative outlet for his love of language. After going through a lean patch as a semi-retired journalist, setting crosswords became a serious vocation for Mungo. Well known for his wit and for his political leanings, Mungo’s cryptics gained a strong following in various publications including a long run with The Saturday Paper.
His generous nature and love of his local paper means that Mungo secured syndication with The Echo and even went so far as to write quick clues for the benefit of The Echo’s more casual readership.
From this week we are going all the way back to the beginning, to the first of some 540 crosswords that Mungo left us. Crossworders can expect puzzles that reflect Mungo’s encyclopaedic knowledge of literature, politics, cricket, a deep general knowledge, and a biting wit. When solving them it’s worth bearing in mind that they were penned between 2008 and 2020.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
