English Chess Forum

From 'The Times Digital Archive 1785-1985' (there are far more details there than I've given here, including details of the other competitors, the time limit in the first contest, for example, was 24 moves in the first hour and 12 moves every half hour after that, though not every contest was reported, well, either that or the search was deficient):

*Report Monday, Feb 20, 1922; pg. 7; Issue 42960; col D on the scheduling of the inaugural Boys' Championship at Hastings, to "conclude on Monday 10 April". Clearly the Boys' Championships held at Hastings was not a summer event, but an Easter event, and it was played in grouped knockout stages as far as I can tell, with the winners of the groups advancing to the next stage.

*Mr A. Mortlock is mentioned in the reports of the 1928 championships: Wednesday, Apr 18, 1928; pg. 14; Issue 44870; col D: "A. Mortlock who won the Class "I", A tournament at Cheltenham last week should do well" (he went on to win). There is an account of Mortlock's game against Golombek in Saturday, Apr 21, 1928; pg. 9; Issue 44873; col D (no moves, sadly). And a description of the winning game is in Monday, Apr 23, 1928; pg. 8; Issue 44874; col F, in which we learn that Mortlock also won the First Class, Section "A" in the Christmas Congress at Hasting, making it three wins in a row (Hastings Christmas Congress, Cheltenham and the Ginner Cup).

*Friday, Apr 17, 1931; pg. 9; Issue 45799; col G has the game score for a game between the boys' champion that year from one of the preliminary rounds. J. M. Craddock vs J. E. Bufton was a Petroff Defence and Craddock won in 46 moves. I'm mentioning it in case John Saunders would be interested in that game for BritBase.

*Saturday, Apr 18, 1931; pg. 8; Issue 45800; col C has the game score for E. B. Bowyer and B. N. Winchurch from the Boys' Championship of that year, which the Times Chess Correspondent saw fit to publish, though I don't know how good the game was, but seeing as the Times correspondent says that Black could have won a piece on move 21, maybe not that good.

*Monday, Apr 20, 1931; pg. 7; Issue 45801; col C tells us that Craddock won 20 and drew three of the 23 games he played in the three years he won the championship three times in succession. The piece ends with the delightful comment from the chess correspondent: "I am informed his father intends to send him [Craddock] to Cambridge University". (who was the chess correspondent for 'The Times' in this period, not Golombek who started in 1945, but was it anyone well known?)

*Thursday, Apr 14, 1932; pg. 8; Issue 46167; col E has another chess game from the Boys' Championship (I'll stop pointing these out, as there are lots of old games in old chess columns - whether those in the chess column of 'The Times' have been put into databases, I have no idea, though Saturday, Apr 14, 1934; pg. 8; Issue 46728; col C has a game by Frank Parr).

*The Times, Monday, Apr 18, 1932; pg. 10; Issue 46110; col D has an account of the presentation of the Memorial Board in memory of Harley Rodney (for whom, see http://www.hastingschessclub.co.uk/ghrodney.html).

*The various articles in 'The Times' give the schools (or at least clubs) of the winners of the Boys' Championship, if that would be of interest to add to the records held by various people. There is also an account in the 1932-3 period of how the BCF expanded the event by inviting the constituent unions to send a representative to the championships.

*Monday, Oct 23, 1933; pg. 7; Issue 46582; col E is a report on the 30th annual council meeting of the BCF, where we learn that it was only then (in 1933) that a motion was passed to officially recognise the "Boys' Annual Congress at Hastings" (the Ginner Cup) as being the competition for the title of British Boys' Champion. So in the early years, it was an unofficial championship.

*Monday, Mar 26, 1934; pg. 14; Issue 46712; col D tells us that the birth date calculations (for that year at least, and likely for other years) were based around the following: "All competitors must be British subjects, and no boy may compete whose eighteenth birthday is before April 15".

*Wednesday, Apr 05, 1950; pg. 8; Issue 51658; col E is nothing to do with the Boys' Chess Championships, but it is an account of how the secondary school I attended won the London Secondary Schools' Chess League!

*Saturday, Apr 22, 1950; pg. 3; Issue 51672; col C confirms the name of "Malcolm Barker" if confirmation was needed (clearly we are now in the era where first names are given and not just initials). Given the score of 7.5/9 as opposed to 6.5 for the second placed player and references to "ninth and final round", it seems that the format had switched to a Swiss one (does anyone know when the changeover took place?). Still at Hastings and still in April, though.

*And Monday, Apr 09, 1951; pg. 2; Issue 51970; col C tells us that Malcolm Barker won the title for the third year in a row, a feat achieved "only twice before in the 26 years of the championship" (Duff and Craddock, the reference to 26 years here is interesting, as the competition had been going since around 1920, but the Ginner Cup wasn't awarded until 1923, and it wasn't official until 1933, so the 26 years may refer to number of years, with around 4 years missing due to the war). That column also says that Barker was due to represent England in the first world junior championships to be held in Birmingham that June.

*Apparently there was a record entry of 74 boys for the 1952 contest.

*Tuesday, Dec 28, 1954; pg. 8; Issue 53124; col C has an interesting account of the BCF plans to "search for junior chess talent".

*Saturday, Feb 23, 1957; pg. 7; Issue 53773; col F is a full-length article about the state of chess in the country at the time, titled "Few Champions But A Massive Army Of Players" (given that Golombek was correspondent from 1945 to 1989, this would be him writing here).

*Saturday, Dec 05, 1959; pg. 3; Issue 54636; col F, again, this is not British Championship chess, but it is something so different that I'm adding it here anyway. It is a photograph and account of a match played in King's Lynn after the Russian timber ship Akademik Komarov arrived in town and the crew "made an open chess challenge to anyone in the town". This challenge was "accepted by the boys' chess team of King Edward VII school" and the match was "played in captain's state room". Clearly this was not the Russians sending their best chess players, as the schoolboys held the Russian sailors to a draw, but that is a fascinating piece of what I suppose would be Cold War history. It would be nice to think that it was genuine, but I wonder if the Russians (Soviets, really) were recruiting spies (or maybe the Russians were trying to defect)... Probably not as exciting as that, as maybe all they really wanted was a chess game!

*Monday, Dec 20, 1965; pg. 11; Issue 56509; col C is 'The Rise and Fall of Junior Chess' by Joan Springall, a fairly entertaining account of a mother attempting to get her sons interested in chess.

*Saturday, Jun 17, 1967; pg. 8; Issue 56970; col E is 'Youthful outburst' by Harry Golombek, an account of how junior chess had grown in size immensely in the past 20 years.

And that is where the references to "boys" and "chess" end, though more careful searching would probably find more (the phrase "junior" was being used more by then). Unfortunately, the search facility of the Times Digital Archive doesn't find everything (for instance, a search for Mortlock failed to find the references to him above, either due to incomplete scanning or poor OCR scanning for the full-text search facility).

What I have failed to find is when the Boys' Championship moved from Hastings in April to become part of the main British Championships in the summer (presuming that the British taking place in the summer was itself established fairly early on) - does anyone know when that change took place, and also when the switch from a knockout to a Swiss took place (seems to have been after the war)?

EDIT: Saturday, Apr 18, 1953; pg. 3; Issue 52599; col D says that K. F. H. Inwood won in 1953 at Hastings (BritBase gives him as the U18 champion), but then Saturday, Apr 11, 1953; pg. 3; Issue 52593; col E reports on another tournament taking place at around the same time, the "British junior championship at Birmingham", with a "D. F. Griffiths" lying in second place, and the tournament being for "players under 21" and containing the "most eligible Midlanders with a sprinkling of Londoners" (BritBase gives David F. Griffiths as the U21 champion that year). So it seems that the U21 and U18 titles were decided at separate tournaments about a week apart. Can anyone confirm this and the details? I had presumed from the layout at the BritBase list that these junior titles were decided at the same tournament, but for some of them it seems not. Furthermore, Monday, Apr 13, 1953; pg. 10; Issue 52594; col G tells us that the 1953 Birmingham tournament was the "newly instituted British junior chess championship". Which still doesn't tell us when the Hastings one was discontinued as an official U18 title (it seems the main British Championships were held in Hastings in 1953, but I can't work out when in the year they were held).

Confirming some of the above, there is:

1) Account of the 125th anniversary celebrations at Hastings Chess Club:

http://www.bcmchess.co.uk/news/hastingscc125years.html

"...the honours board at the Hastings club, where they have a list of the British Boys Champions who won the title when it was held annually at the club during Easter between 1923 and 1953 (these days this event is held as part of the British Championships in August)."

[It seems from this that there was only one year of overlap between the Boys Championships in Hastings at Easter and the British junior championships held in Birmingham that same Easter of 1953, though I haven't seen anything yet to confirm when the BCF officially moved the U18 title to the new junior championships in the 1950s.]

2) History of Junior Chess in Sussex:

http://www.sussexjuniorchess.org/History.htm

"An important breakthrough came in the early 1920s when the Hastings Chess Club began to arrange annual boys’ tournaments. Players came from far and wide to play in these junior events and after about ten years of these competitions they became known as the British Boys Championships."

[This clearly refers to the BCF motion of 1933 that made the title official.]

3) Chess Tournaments in Hastings

http://www.endgame.nl/hastings.htm

"A Christmas and New Year Congress was held in 1920/21 and a festival for boys occurred in Easter 1921. Herbert Dobell became the President of the club in the Autumn of 1921 and shaped these two initiatives into a tradition of Hastings chess festivals."

[From this, it seems that the first boys event was in Easter 1921, and from the Times archives the column of Monday, Apr 18, 1932; pg. 10; Issue 46110; col D, the one about the Rodney memorial, says that "it should be noted that though this year's congress is the twelfth, the Ginner Cup was not presented until 1923". Presumably, this means that there was the initial boys chess festival at Easter 1921, then the inaugural contest at Easter 1922, and then the Ginner Cup award was established the following year at Easter 1923, and then the BCF made it official in 1933, and it possibly ceased in 1953, or at least ceased being the official title.]

An important breakthrough came in the early 1920s when the Hastings Chess Club began to arrange annual boys’ tournaments. Players came from far and wide to play in these junior events and after about ten years of these competitions they became known as the British Boys Championships

I used to know Wilf Pratten, who won this tournament in 1924 and 1925, quite well, as my father used to give him a lift to Fareham Chess Club in the 1970s. I'm sure he told me that the tournament was for the British Boys' Championship when he won it two years in a row.

Here is a great game of Wilfs:
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1242961

Jon D'Souza-Eva wrote:

An important breakthrough came in the early 1920s when the Hastings Chess Club began to arrange annual boys’ tournaments. Players came from far and wide to play in these junior events and after about ten years of these competitions they became known as the British Boys Championships

I used to know Wilf Pratten, who won this tournament in 1924 and 1925, quite well, as my father used to give him a lift to Fareham Chess Club in the 1970s. I'm sure he told me that the tournament was for the British Boys' Championship when he won it two years in a row.

Oh, I'm sure it was effectively that, but it seems that it started as a festival of boys chess organised in Hastings over Easter that grew in size over the years, and there is a report in The Times on the BCF Council Meeting of 1933 that made it officially the Boys Championship, so the bit that says "after about ten years of these competitions they became known as the British Boys Championships" does seem to be correct. The term "Ginner Cup" and "Boys Championship" was used before 1933 (though when the term "British [Boys] Championship" was first used I don't know).

I think John Saunders is right to start the BritBase list in 1923 with the first award of the Ginner Cup. Probably the honours board at Hastings starts the list at that point as well (this is also covered in one of the reports in 'The Times' of that era). Possibly John could amend his list to make the early history clearer, but I think it is only a list at the moment, not a history (for a fuller history, you would want at least dates of the tournaments, winning scores, and schools/clubs/counties the winners came from).

What I'm still not clear on is when the format changed and why there was this overlap in 1953 between Hastings organising the junior championships (U18) and the new junior championships (U21) in Birmingham that year about a week before the Hastings one. I suspect, from references to "awarding the junior championships to Hastings for another three years" (starting from 1933), that the BCF awarded the junior championships to Hastings on a rolling basis, until this changeover came in 1953. I'll post separately to see if anyone can answer that question. I'm sure it is covered in the chess magazines of the time.