Bert Danher

Albert Edward Danher, horn player, teacher, and crossword setter and editor: born Liverpool 24 April 1926; twice married (one son, one daughter); died Upton, Merseyside 5 March 2002.

Albert Edward Danher, horn player, teacher, and crossword setter and editor: born Liverpool 24 April 1926; twice married (one son, one daughter); died Upton, Merseyside 5 March 2002.

Under the pseudonym Aquila, Bert Danher was the founder of the Independent Crossword.

Already established as a regular setter of cryptic crosswords in each of the four existing national broadsheets, The Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, The Guardian and The Times, Danher became the first crossword editor of The Independent on the launch of the paper in October 1986. Contributing as he did to all these titles (a feat rarely matched), Danher was well-placed to assemble a first-class team of crossword professionals.

He chose as his own crossword pseudonym the Latin word for the eagle emblem on the new paper's masthead, and gathered a group of experienced and new crossword setters as his regular contributors. The first Aquila crosswords appeared in October 1986, and his last puzzle was published on Monday 4 March 2002, the day before he died. In between, he produced more than 700 Independent cryptic crosswords and almost 500 of the concise type. Danher was responsible for starting the convention in Independent concise crosswords, continued to the present time, that the first two answers should comprise a pun (as e.g. Gnus, Eland).

Although Danher had relinquished the editorship of the Independent Crossword in 1987, partly because of the difficulties of fulfilling the role from his home in Merseyside, he never ceased to produce his beautifully crafted crosswords, even when illness occasionally reduced the frequency of his appearances. He was a master of the wittily deceptive definition, requiring the solver to think laterally to arrive at the answer, as in An alarming blood count (7) (Dracula), or Young man who found himself winning on the pools (9) (Narcissus). No less impressive was his proficiency in generating clever anagrams, such as Saw three pigs turning aside (5,7), in which the first three words are rearranged as "Stage whisper", and the last word turns out to be a noun, not an adverb, and provides the definition.

Bert Danher was a man of unusually diverse talents. He was an accomplished musician, playing that most demanding of instruments, the French horn, in the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. After an early career as an insurance inspector with Guardian Royal Exchange, he worked as a peripatetic music teacher, and in 1970 founded the Merseyside Concert Orchestra, which gave an early conducting opportunity to the Liverpool-born Simon Rattle, then in his teens.

Danher's first published crosswords appeared in The Guardian in 1974. His musical interests (mostly of the classical variety, although he was, incidentally, a cousin of Paul McCartney) were often reflected in items chosen for inclusion in his crosswords, with frequent references to composers and to opera titles or characters.

As a setter of questions for the television quiz University Challenge, in the days of Bamber Gascoigne, Danher was able to find scope for the wide-ranging general knowledge which later deeply impressed subsequent crossword editors on this paper, one of whom, Louise Levene, had appeared in the Somerville College team on the same programme.

Michael Macdonald-Cooper