About Pitcherwits®…

Pitcherwits® are crossword puzzles where some of the clues are in pictures. Sound easy?

It’s not called “Pit-your-wits” for nothing!

The mixture of cryptic and picture clues, combined with Professor Rebus’s unique sense of humour, will keep you entertained for hours.

The top tip from The Prof? Saying what you see out loud can often give you the answer to a Pitcherwits® clue... although you might get one or two odd looks!

About the Prof…

I have known the Prof for many years and I count him as a good friend. I was honoured therefore when I was asked to write something about him for his website.

He spent his childhood as a country boy in a family of 8, learning to ride horses, to ‘shoot straight’ and to make his own bows and arrows. I understand he was pretty good with a slingshot, too, claiming to be able to land a plum-sized stone on a target 200 yards away. He says he could ‘shin up a tree as fast as a squirrel’, but I have always taken that with a pinch of salt! (He claims it is fairly miraculous that he never had any serious accidents, apart from twice breaking a leg, and once getting burnt in a petrol fire.) He was brought up learning how to look after cats and dogs, and he reckons that many animals are much nicer than some humans!

He developed a love of crosswords while sitting next to his son’s cot, keeping him company until he fell asleep. He says he has always been fascinated by words and their sounds. He is lucky, he says, to have English as his first language – “it has unashamedly borrowed words from so many other languages that it is one of the most expressive languages in the world, and it’s always evolving.”

Years later, he was blessed with the idea (while on a cross-trainer apparently!) of Pitcherwits®, a simple puzzle of little icons making up the sound of a word, so that people could pit their wits against him and his pictures to solve each little puzzle.

He married for a second time later in life, and it was while taking his wife to the dentist, sitting in the car waiting for her, that he had the idea of combining the picture puzzles with crosswords. And the rest, as he says, is history…

The Prof describes himself as a bit eccentric (perhaps a little proud of it, I suspect!) and claims to be classless. When I say he can trace his family back to the Norman Conquest, and there is a family crest, he smiles slightly and says, “So what? I’m still a mongrel, and all the better for it. They’re all (I assumed he meant everyone, here) my brothers and sisters, from the Queen to the down-and-out.”

He loves playing harmonica and cahon (a sit-on drum) in a group of ukulele players, and walking in the beautiful Derbyshire countryside with his dog. (He describes it as ‘God’s own county,’ and dismisses my objection that not everyone might agree.) He really likes it when people say that his puzzles make them smile.

When I ask him what he doesn’t like, he frowns a little and then says he hates (with quite a passion) any form of discrimination - race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, class or culture. He also hates poverty in his own community, and in the world at large.

Interesting character, the Prof, and I am pleased to be his friend of so many years.

RCR