British Chess Champs Brighton 1980

[Leonard Barden]

Edward Lee in his prime at age 14 -16 was the king of the GM giant-killers in simuls. He won seven or eight in a row. In our 1982 30-board simul against Karpov I put him in bottom board as a sneaky surprise weapon (Boards 1 and 2 were Hodgson and King who were already IM strength) and Edward duly delivered, winning as Black in a Caro-Kann. Karpov took around 7 hours and described it as the hardest simul of his life. Edward also defeated Korchnoi a few months later to complete his sequence.

[James Pratt]

I saw Edward Lee's parents looking round at Hove 1997, I assume none of them played in their adult lives?

[isaac wallis]

Is Mike Haygarth still alive does anyone know? He would be about 75 now.

[Richard James]

As a member of various genealogical websites I have immediate access to Births, Marriages and Deaths data. I was researching Michael Haygarth on behalf of someone else a few months ago.

It appears that he married Margaret Boardman in 1982. I can find no record of any children. To the best of my knowledge he is still alive.

It seems that no bulletin of the 1964 British Championships at Whitby was ever produced so most of the games from that event seem to be lost.

[isaac wallis]

Thanks for the info. The marriage date of 1982 is suggestive of a connection to his disappearance in 1980. Maybe he found there were things outside chess, or maybe his wife discouraged him from playing.

[John Saunders]

Does anyone know if its possible to view a complete list of results, including them smaller events, from the 1980 British Chess Champs held at Brighton in 1980?

John

Yes, it is. A mere nine years after you asked the question. As those telephone answering systems always say, "thank you for being patient"...

http://www.saund.co.uk/britbase/pgn/198 ... iewer.html

I'm in the process of giving BritBase files a make-over to supply crosstables, full results and some background text for British Championships and have finally reached 1980. As you can see, you scored 8/11 to finish first in the Second Class section.

If anybody spots any mistakes in the list of results, please let me know. I don't have the BCF Yearbook for 1980/81 (I took the results from BCM) so it would be great if someone could proof-read it against the official record. For one thing I find it hard to believe that A.H. Williams scored 1½/5 in the Five-Day, Week 2 Afternoon tournament but it's a common name so could be a completely different A.H. Williams.

Unearthing the 1980 results has highlighted one further mistake in the list of British Champions. Mandy Hepworth won the 1980 Girls' Under-14 Championship on her own, not jointly with Susan Walker as BCF/ECF yearbooks have been saying for years, for the simple reason that Susan did not compete in the 1980 event. The 1981/82 yearbook has the information right but at some later point in time (between 1982 and 1995) a typographer has misinterpreted Susan (who won the U14 title in 1979) as joint champion in 1980. For example, the 1993 yearbook gives Susan and Mandy as joint champions in 1980 but no champion at all in 1979. Pretty obvious what happened there - an open and shut case, m'lud.