I am currently visiting my father John Love and whilst wondering if there were any old Junior Chess magazines referenced online, discovered this thread.
I thought it might be of interest to plug some of the gaps.
John Love and John Hodgkins met at the Gloucester chess club and were both primary school teachers. They started writing books together whilst living in Gloucester “Chess Ideas for Young People” (1962) and “Further Chess Ideas for Young People” (1965). In 1959 John Love moved to Glenrothes, Fife and they collaborated by post. They had also wanted to produce a magazine for school pupils and settled on the title “Junior Chess”. Bob Wade who had relinquished the title the previous decade wrote articles for the magazine and helped promote it, but there was no conscious link to the Chess Education Society. They produced the magazine for four or five years, but it wound up, partly for financial reasons, but also because in 1966 John Hodgkins was heading to a school in Arctic Canada, and John Love to one in Germany (for the British Army of the Rhine). There had been some discussions about the title being taken on by BH Wood’s Chess, but in the end he just took the old stock.
John Love went on to write three more Chess books: “Chess a New Introduction” (1967) which he thinks was the first to use algebraic notation in an English language publication; “Tactical Ideas in Chess” (1981) and “Positional Ideas in Chess” (1985) which though no longer published, still has an entry and reviews on Amazon.
John Clarke wrote: ↑Sat Aug 20, 2022 11:11 pm
Yes, sorry for any confusion folks - I wrote that post in rather a hurry. The image referred to appears below. (BTW, Penrose was 17-18 in 1951, not 28.)
The 1960s magazine was definitely a different publication from this one, though I suspect it might have been a kind of direct descendant. I don't know if anyone's now in a position to confirm or disprove it, but possibly the CES had decided around 1961 not to continue publishing their version, and Love and Hodgkins decided to give it a go independently of them while being allowed to continue using the title. It was a rum sort of arrangement they had, with one of them (I forget which) living in Glenrothes, Fife, and the other in the Bristol area. Bob Wade continued to be a frequent contributor in the early days; Peter Clarke later did a whole series of articles as well. Many reports of junior events were by the participants themselves (e.g. David Smith on the 1961 world U-20s; Peter Lee on the 1963 ones). Mike Basman was becoming a regular towards the end.
The final issue was in December 1964, by which time the editors had evidently run out of money. There was a hint that another chess publisher might cut them some sort of deal, but it came to nothing. (The CES, while still in existence, was by then probably in decline and would have been unlikely to be interested.) All copies still in stock were bought up by B H Wood. Several months later (mid-1965) he was still flogging them off in job lots of 15 issues.
As for the CES itself, Bob Wade was certainly involved, along with the other names I mentioned in the earlier post. (Penrose I imagine withdrew as the demands of his education stepped up.) One issue of the
Junior Chess magazine c1963 carried a report of some big meeting which mentioned the CES " ... rolling up its sleeves and getting down to work" or some such. It ended with a 20-board match in which several well-known names took part; unfortunately I can't remember any of them!
