1930
Wins 10s 6d in a three way tie in 21B:
1932
Wins 108B: £1.1s.0d
O.H.T. Dudley was Oscar Hugo Thornton Dudley, born in 1877 in Sedgley, Staffordshire, and a man who had spent about a quarter-of-a-century as a leading inspector of schools in India, until at least the early 1920s. His family were clergy – his grandfather was the vicar of Ticehurst in Sussex, and had been the chaplain on one of the first four ships that took settlers (and his family) to New Zealand in 1850. His father, the only one of his family to come back from New Zealand, was the curate of Aldridge at the time of his birth, and was later a Derbyshire vicar at Bradwell and also Whitfield. He went to school at Christ’s Hospital, and he was subsequently at Wadham College Oxford.
I suspect he was retired by this time: he was a literary scholar on the side, and erudite articles or letters about, for instance, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Keats were published in scholarly journals just before and during the existence of the WR. He also proselytised on behalf of Maria Jewsbury, the Derbyshire poet.
Dudley retired back to Derbyshire, and wrote letters to the papers when the fancy took him, for instance on the difference between amber and umber. He was an active member of the Derbyshire ‘Education Extension Committee’, i.e. extra mural education. In 1936, in a classic, hyperactive, competitor-style spirit, he was the author of an article on folk-dancing – in the form of a Boswell-Johnson dialogue.
He died in 1969.
New Statesman Competitions and New Statesman satirical poems: a history 