THIS week we say goodbye and thanks to Don Manley, crossword editor since December 1989, when the crossword was first introduced to these pages. For nearly 36 years, he has led a small team of setters, and devised many crosswords of his own — all for a very modest fee (as he described it to me at intervals).

Crosswords have been his sole profession since 2002, when he left a career in academic publishing. He had supplied puzzles to a range of periodicals, among them the Radio Times, The Spectator, The Independent, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, and the Financial Times and the Sunday Times. His pseudonyms have all been a play on his Christian name: Duck, Pasquale, Quixote, Bradman, Giovanni, and Izetti. He is also the author of Chambers Crossword Manual (5th edition 2014).

He is married to Dr Susan Manley, a clinical biochemist. They have three grandchildren.

In his place, we say hello to Paul Henderson, although it’s a bit late for such a greeting, since, after Don set puzzle number 1 on 22 December 1989, number 2, on 28 December 1989, was set by Paul. Since then, he has set more than 150 Church Times puzzles; so regular solvers should be familiar with his style.

Like Don, he sets crosswords for four national UK newspapers, as well as the BBC Music magazine. He is best known as Phi (weekly in The Independent) but elsewhere he is Kcit, Pangakupu, or Pedro.

He was raised in the north-east of England, in a strongly Methodist household (“just to indicate the sort of hymns I might reference”.

He writes: “I worked for nearly 20 years in London, and bought the Church Times from the Church House Bookshop. In 2006, we moved to New Zealand, and now live just north of Wellington — but the editing has been mostly by email for a long time now. It does mean I haven’t seen a paper copy in years.”