In Competition No 2547 you were invited to write a poem or some prose ending with ‘The pen [or pun] is mightier than the sword’.
The tag comes from a play, Richelieu, by Lord Lytton, the 19th-century politician and writer remembered today, if at all, for The Last Days of Pompeii. The idea for the pun bit came when I read of a proposal to remove a statue in central London of General Charles Napier, the Victorian conqueror of Sind, who is remembered today, if at all, not for his feats of arms but for the one-word telegram ‘Peccavi’ (I have sinned) that he allegedly sent to his London masters.
In a big entry you divided fairly equally between penners and punners, while a few clever dicks chose to ignore the space between ‘pen’ and ‘is’. The winners, printed below, get £25; Frank McDonald’s piscatory paronomastic angle on the new Scots nets the bonus five puns.
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