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Thanks for persevering despite my stupidity, Will37. It's a case of....oh THAT type of capital and THAT type of Don.

Cheers!

0pt0

You are quite close. Put those 4 letters to one side. From the middle of the left of the two horizontal places you should have a separate 3 letter run. From the middle of the right of the two horizontal places you can vertically line up these three vwith your other 4.

From the first two letters of the starting place (if you have that worked out) you can get the 5th letter in your 4 letter sequence. From the 5th and 6th of the left vertical place you can then get a fourth letter in your three letter row.

Remember that non alphabetical runs are very likely to be in the top three rows of the grid as the bottom couple tend to be the unused, more unusual letters. If you try the lined up 4 and 5 letter rows above and below each other and cycle through the 5 possible options for the left hand letter in each row, something thematic should hopefully jump out at you.

Well I really wrestled with this one but enjoyed the end game. My first introduction to playfair and I too found the support on this forum very helpful. Thanks, all.

Sad to say good bye to Dysart, and also, you, JEG! A retirement without another cross word sounds very peaceful! All the best.

Drxx, your post @ 80 does indeed lead me to an eight letter thematic word. I had previously tried this as the keyword, but it did not work. If I am understanding your hint correctly, the thematic word would appear as the last letter of a row, followed by the whole of the next row and the first two letters of a third row. That would leave four blank cells in the first row of these three and I cannot see what could go in these.

Smellyharry, sorry but I do not follow you. When you refer to the letters of the horizontal places, do you mean the encoded letters, or the plain text letters?

0pt0, you should know from previous posts and your encodings that ND > DS and HF > CH. This should have given you the information that NDS and FHC each appear in sequence in a row or column, and really should help you complete the square.

Many thanks, Dodgepot, Smellyharry and Drxx. I have finally worked out the Playfair square. Now to follow the instruction!

Both OptO. It's the mapping that matters. Remember if pq is mapped to xy and they aren't all in the same row or column then p is the the same row as x, q is in the same row as y, p is in the same column as y and q is in the same column as x.

I loved this one, what a great theme. Can someone please give me a nudge on the wordplay for 23d? I know what the answer must be but I'm drawing a blank on the parsing.

A short preposition given in the entry for 'to' in Chambers is taking in/'inspiring' an army regiment (abbrev). 'Early' because the word defined is archaic (Spenser?).