1967 British Championship

[John Saunders]

The games from the 1967 British Championship...

http://www.saund.co.uk/britbase/pgn/196 ... iewer.html

... have been on Britbase for a long time, and previously updated to include all dates and full names. But recently, to my horror, I noticed that three games had wrong results recorded. As a result, every database in the world seems to have the same three errors!

The correct results are as follows: Parr-Gilbert (R1) 1-0 (not 0-1); Horton-Ludgate (R2) 1-0 (not 0-1); Whiteley-N.Littlewood (R4) 1-0 (not ½-½).

I've a feeling I may have been the person who originally input the games from the bulletin, many years ago. It underlines the importance, after inputting all the games, of using ChessBase's tournament crosstable facility to check results against published crosstables (which is how I belatedly picked up the errors). I have also taken the opportunity to update a few names and generally tidy up, making the file viewable, etc. If anyone can supply full forenames (rather than initials) for players, please let me know.

Note that there are 198 games from the Championship (complete), two from the Ladies' Championship, 28 from the Major Open, 37 from the U21, 41 from the U18, 40 from the U16, and five from the U14. I've also included full results of all sections and a photo of Norman Littlewood and Dinah Dobson from the Times.

[Michael Farthing]

Well I was going to tell you that my name is Michael, but I see you've worked that out.
My game against DT Marr was in Round 1 on 7.8.67.
The only other new fact I have is that A Charlton (u18) is Alan. He hasn't played chess since school, but became Ambassador to Brazil. I'm working on getting him back into the game.
Quite interesting to discover some of the secret middle names!
I have a copy of the bulletin should that be useful, but it cannot be relied on to deduce round numbers other than in the championship itself.

[John Saunders]

Thanks for the added information, Michael, which I have now added to the Britbase file. I too have a copy of the bulletin.

I see Alan Charlton has a Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Charlton - which says he was at Cambridge. I would have been his contemporary there and hadn't heard of him as a chess player, which confirms what you say about him giving up the game after school.

David Hebbert Powell was another Cambridge chesser (and a very strong one) of that vintage who also became an ambassador.

http://www.nato-pa.int/default.asp?SHORTCUT=1939

David was ambassador to Norway between 2006 and 2010. If you look at the photo on the page linked to, you may note a scar on David's left cheek. Not a duelling scar but an injury sustained in a car accident on the way to a chess county match, from memory, Cambridgeshire vs Berkshire, in about 1974.