Richard Wells
By Mark Goodliffe
Sad news reaches us of the death of Richard Wells, a long-time subscriber recently turned published Magpie setter. Richard was an entertaining presence at our annual Magpie parties, where even though he would keep his coat on as though permanently ready to leave, he would stay and comment learnedly on the many topics in which his feedback had revealed his expertise. Clearly a polymath, he would correct us gently on matters linguistic, zoological, mathematic or geographic, and sternly if lowbrow or vulgar content, as he saw it, had crept into the magazine.
Richard was for a time the solver to beat in Magpie terms, even though he had only originally attempted the word puzzles because he found them sitting near his beloved numericals – no other mathematical solver has ever reported that he found he “could do the word puzzles as well without much difficulty”. He hosted a convivial trophy handover meeting at his club once, and he was generous in his praise of his many favourite compilers. As a setter, he left a gap of over ten years between his first two mathematical submissions (rejected) and his last two (accepted), and it is poignant that his posthumous puzzle will be called Adieu by Omega.
Richard died on the 24th of July.