John Galbraith Graham MBE (16 February 1921 – 26 November 2013[1]) was a British crossword compiler, best known as Araucaria of The Guardian.

After attending St Edward's School, Oxford, he obtained a place to read classics at King's College, Cambridge, leaving to join the RAF when the Second World War began.

On Graham's departure the Principal, Theo Wetherall, paying tribute to his good nature, wrote that "he squandered his sensitive taste and knowledge of Classics on 1B Greek with unfailing patience enlivened by rare expressions of nausea".

[3] Writing his first puzzle for The Guardian in July 1958, he eventually took to compiling crosswords full-time when his divorce in the late 1970s lost him his living as a clergyman (he was reinstated after the death of his first wife).

[6] In July 2011 Graham was the subject of the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs,[7] in which he revealed that he always used Scrabble tiles as an aid when compiling.

The last Araucaria puzzle published before Graham's death also had some hidden meanings: it included answers such as "cottage hospital", "nil by mouth" and "time to go".

Widely admired for his clever use of cross-references and special themes, he was usually called upon to produce the extra-large puzzles printed in The Guardian on bank holidays; these sometimes even included two grids, with complicated rules governing the placing of answers in each.

He is also credited with creating a new format of crossword, the "alphabetical jigsaw" in which the clues are labelled with letters rather than numbers, and the grid has no markers to indicate the placement of solutions.

The anagram was a topical reference to Jeffrey Archer who was the vicarage's current owner and was lying low there at the time following a sex scandal.