About 25% gospel maybe? To expect an "historical" web page by Bill Wall to be accurate is a bit like expecting snow to fall in the Sahara.
That page has changed a bit since I first had occasion to critique it (elsewhere) but I note a few statements that are totally wrong. (Some are right while others are arguably not entirely wrong.) Basically I consider that when he gets something right it is by pure chance that he has happened upon a reliable source to plagiarise; of course he never cites his sources.
For example,
In 1942 the British held its first correspondence championship. It was won by R. Bonham,a blind player.
Bonham, who was indeed blind, did win the 1942/43 British CC Championship but it was not the first.
See my book cited in an earlier posting tonight for a list of champions from the start up to 2010.
In the 19th century chess master Joseph Blackburne was arrested as a spy for sending chess moves in the mail.
Totally false; this is an extremely garbled reference to an incident during the Baden-Baden 1870 tournament.
See my biography of Blackburne (who never played postal chess so far as I was able to discover, though at the start of his career he did enter a tournament that was cancelled).
The page also contains contradictions such as:
In 1884, the French magazine LA STRATEGIE organized an international chess tournament.
TRUE
In 1932 the first international correspondence tournament was held and won by Janos Balogh (1892-1980).
FALSE: there had been many international CC tournaments prior to 1932 including the one Wall mentioned earlier.
Here's another
In 1945, the International Correspondence Chess Assoication (ICCA) was formed
TRUE, apart from the spelling error, but just below we find:
In 1949 the International Correspondence Chess Association (ICCA) was formed by FIDE.
Wrong year and FIDE had nothing to do with it. ICCA was later reconstituted as ICCF.
So he cannot even be bothered to edit his own pages properly.
I think references to Bill Wall should be banned from the history section of this forum. I am surprised that somebody as seriously interested as Gerard Killoran would offer a link to one of Wall's pages.