Big Dave (d. May 2023) was an IT Consultant who lived in the beautiful Worcestershire village of Hanley Swan.
Educated at Rutlish School (Merton), passing 8 ‘O’ levels, and 4 ‘A’ levels, he graduated from Bristol University in 1965 with an Honours Degree in Mathematics.
He worked for more than forty years in IT, over thirty of which were spent as an Independent Consultant. Most of his experience was in project management, application design, program specification, programming, problem determination, standards, system support and training on IBM mainframes.
His passions were Crosswords, the Mighty Spurs, Rock’n’Roll from the period 1955 – 1965 and Blues music.
He started a blog for the Daily Telegraph Toughie crossword, as a complete novice, at the end of January 2009. The following month he took on the main Cryptic crossword as well. Since that time the blog has grown well beyond Dave’s initial expectations. It has become an institution in its own right with over 68,249,810 page views and a dedicated community of readers and bloggers.
As well as blogging the Telegraph crosswords, one of Big Dave’s biggest achievements was to foster new crossword setters, first with the Not The Saturday Prize Puzzle and later with the Rookie Corner. Many current nationally published setters first cut their teeth on the pages of this blog.
You can read tributes to Big Dave here.
There is an interview with Big Dave on Shuchi’s excellent Crossword Unclued site.
Big Dave gathered together several other excellent bloggers, and you can read all about them here.
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