University College Oxford Record 2020

1950:
JOHN DAVID BLAGDEN
(Eltham College) died in March 2020 aged 90.
He read History at Univ. On leaving Univ, he
worked with Power-Sames Accounting Machines
in Birmingham, and later became Information
Systems Director at Trafalgar House. His brother
Donald came up to Univ in 1955.
1951:
JOHN JOSEPH HOULT
(Eton and Stellenbosch University) died early in
2020 aged 90. He read Law at Univ, and then did
National Service in the RAF from September 1953.
THE REVD DAVID JOHN
READING MOSELEY
(Maidstone GS) died on 26 February
2020 aged 89. This obituary is based
on information from an obituary in
The Guardian, and from his son Paul
who came up to Univ in 1983:
In 1966 the crossword setter
known to Guardian solvers as Gordius
entered a Guardian puzzle-writing
competition. He was successful, but also received
a telling-off. “There are one or two things that
I would not normally let through,” chided the
crossword editor, John Perkin. “Booze is slang and
you use it twice.” The identities behind setters’
pseudonyms were usually unknown, and, given his
often irreverent clues, few guessed that Gordius
was a parish priest: the Reverend David Moseley.
Despite serving the church in the Conservative
constituency of Honiton, Devon, Moseley became
increasingly left of centre, and Gordius’s puzzles
incorporated wry references to capitalism and
politicians. “Transport unfortunately isn’t arriving,”
for example, was an anagram for Virgin Trains.
Brought up in Weavering, Kent, David
attended Maidstone Grammar School and found
his faith from the inspirational Tom Prichard, vicar
of the nearby village of Boxley. After National
Service he went up to University College in
1951, though he later recalled he would have
preferred to have read English or history rather
than mathematics. From there he trained at Wells
Theological College and following ordination in
1956 took a curacy in Lancashire. His first parish
was in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad where he and his
wife Philippa spent four happy years before
returning to the UK in 1963 to be Vicar of St
Paul’s, Bedminster, in Bristol.
When the Guardian announced its
competition for compilers, he used
the “slack days” following Christmas
to create a puzzle. His first clue –
“Experts say be prepared for traffic
delay in the west (6,6)” – is as good
as cryptics get: it reads completely
plausibly, but also asks the solver to
“prepare” the letters of “experts say be”
to arrive at “Exeter bypass”. He received
six guineas in prize money, plus the setter’s fee
of six guineas when the puzzle was used and
an invitation to send in more. Moseley became
Gordius in 1971, when Perkin asked setters to
assume noms de guerre.
The parish, of course, came first. In Bristol,
the Moseleys often took in needy people who
would stay in the vicarage. Meanwhile he became
heavily involved in the Bristol branch of The
Samaritans, becoming Director in 1972. In 1978
he moved to Kilmington, near Axminster to be
parish priest of several East Devon villages until
his retirement in 1995. Never ambitious for
advancement within the church, Moseley was not
afraid to advocate distinctly unfashionable causes
University College Record | October 2020 67