This, incidentally, is the only occasion when I've found Cohen's name given with the middle initial "E". In newspaper match reports he is invariably "B. Cohen". An exception was in BCM when they reported the news of his county individual success:Manchester Guardian, 18 January 1926 wrote:Great interest was taken in the meeting of B. E. Cohen, the young Lancashire champion, and H. E. Atkins, the British champion.
I am wondering whether the initial "R" there was simply a typo.BCM, September 1925, p377 wrote:The championship of Lancashire has been won by R. Cohen, a young member of Manchester Chess Club, who has rapidly come to the front. He defeated C. Y. C. Dawbarn in the semi-final and Dr. Edge in the final.
I found the forename "Bertie" in a spreadsheet at the Manchester Chess Federation site, listing officials of the MCF back to the year dot. It has "Bertie Cohen" as its 1928/29 president and that is surely our man.
Mike Conroy's A History of Lancashire Chess (2009) has some words about Cohen's 1925 county championship success:
A History of Lancashire Chess, p61 wrote:The county individual championship produced a surprise winner. B.Cohen, a member of Manchester Chess Club, who had only been on board 23 in the Yorkshire match, defeated Dawbarn in the semi-final and Dr.Edge in the final. He was a young player who achieved success very quickly but then retired from the game. Here are three of his wins from the event:-
I found one further game by Cohen - a loss to Alekhine in a simul in 1934...
We have to consider whether "Bertie" was his formal birth name. We know from other examples (e.g. Fred Yates) that an apparently informal forename can appear on the birth register, particularly in the north of England. (I have a formally-registered "Bertie" in my own family tree.) Another possibility is "Bertram" but I'm wondering whether we can rule out "Albert" and "Herbert" on the grounds that his initial is always given as "B" (except that one time in BCM when he was "R"). Age-wise I guess we may be looking for someone born a few years either side of 1900, given the references to him being young in 1925.
Anyway, I will be interested to see what forum members can add to what I've unearthed for Bertie Cohen so far.