Apologies for bumping this very old thread yet again but there are a few things to comment on regarding names of British Champions. For those who don't remember what it's about, some of us here collaborated to discover at least one forename for all the champions listed on the ECF site and my own BritBase site.John Saunders wrote: ↑Wed Sep 15, 2010 11:17 pmNews in from Brian Denman...I take that to be conclusive. Many thanks to Brian.Brian Denman wrote:As regards the U-18 champion for 1965, information in the Crewe Chronicle for August 1965 shows that the initial of 'M' in M N Walsh stands for Michael.
As might be expected, some of the champions name-dropped in our earlier discussions have come across this thread via Google and taken an interest, which is why I have quoted the above post from in which Brian Denman told us that the 1965 Under-18 champion was Michael N Walsh. I've just received an email from Mike Walsh who has lived and worked abroad for many years, played a bit of local league chess in various European countries and is now domiciled in Finland. Mike is very active on Twitter under the name @Mike_Walsh_FIN if you want to know more about him or contact him. I haven't noticed any chess-related tweets as yet.
I spotted one omission from the list of champions the other day. In 1979 Susan Walker won the Girls' Under-14 Championship. This had previously been listed as 'uncontested' in recent issues of the yearbook but the 1979-80 BCF Yearbook clearly states that she won the U14 title that year. For some reason this item disappeared from the yearbook from about 1999. I have added it to BritBase but it also needs to go up on the ECF page. I'll use their online form to get it added.
I have provided full details of the 1979 British Championship results on BritBase here, using the official 1979-80 Yearbook as the source, and also the report in the Guardian. A lot of current forum members' names appear in the results list found therein and I daresay this may spark some memories here...?