Minor Pieces 64: Alfred Lenton (2)

[John Upham]

Richard James via BCN has published #64 in his superb series of historical articles

Minor Pieces 64: Alfred Lenton (2)

may be found at

https://britishchessnews.com/2023/10/12 ... -lenton-2/

Enjoy (along with the previous 63)

[Jon D'Souza-Eva]

Thanks very much. I really enjoy Richard's Minor Pieces. The players he describe are often very similar to those I knew as a teenager at Fareham Chess Club in the 1980s.

[Richard James]

Now updated with a game from 1999.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Are there any plans to celebrate this auspicious number of Minor Pieces? Amazing series and long may it continue.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Running with a question posed by Richard in that latest Minor Piece:

In June 1947 a Czechoslovakian team visited England to play two matches, against an England team in London, followed by an encounter with a Midlands team in Birmingham. Alfred resumed his international career here where he was matched against Tibor Florian (I’m not sure why a Hungarian player was representing Czechoslovakia at this point: if you know, do get in touch.)

Wikipedia article here does not add much.

I have tried looking a bit into this, and my best guess is either that Tibor Flórián had Czech ancestry, or (less likely) that the name "Tibor Flórián" is fairly common and that there may have been another player of that name playing for the Czech Republic? Or maybe the story is more complicated than that. You would have thought if this was a "Central European" team, that would have got more coverage in the chess press or elsewhere.

As well as the BCM report, there was also a report in a publication called The Central European Observer, but probably only of the London match:

...a chess match was played between Czechoslovakia and Great Britain at the Bonnington Hotel, in London. Czecho-slovakia won the match by 12-8 This Czech victory is remarkable, as the British team was one of the strongest that..

There was a publication of that name between 1923 and 1938 in Prague, but it is likely that the publication of the same name after 1938 was different following the loss of independence. It appears to have been published in the period 1940s as well, and one description of it is as one of the:

"little-read, loss-making foreign-language periodicals funded by the Foreign Ministry like the Central European Observer"

Just before the match in question, for example, one of the joint editors (1940-1946) of The Central European Observer was Labour MP Rennie Smith.

This gives a flavour of some of the Cold War politics and British propaganda outlets of the time.

Possibly the chess matches were also an example of Cold War politics?

As Richard says in his piece (as is also documented on BritBase), there were two matches, one against an England team in London and one against a Midlands (MCCU) team in Bimingham a few days later.

The BCM report is on BritBase:

https://saund.org.uk/britbase/pgn/19470 ... iewer.html

Right down the bottom, you see the match card for:

"1947 Middlesex v Slovakia & Moravia, 12 June".

Anyway, looking at the nationalities of the visiting chess players, we see that most of them are indeed Czech. And on board three of the Midlands match, a future British player who would emigrate here 6 years later: "Baruch Harold Wood 0-1 ½-½ Cenek Kottnauer"

The BCM report does refer to Florian as "Dr. Florian". If you search for "Dr. Florian" and "chess" you get a bit more of a clue as to what might have been going on. There was a "Dr Florian" active in Prague chess in the 1880s (the connection here may be family, may be coincidental). And we see a Dr. Florian taking part in the Czech Championship at Prague, 1960, but this was Jaromir Florian (e.g. the game Vesely vs. Dr. Florian).

https://old.chesstempo.com/gamedb/game/1037067
https://old.chesstempo.com/gamedb/player/239603

So is the Florian who played in the Czech team actually this Jaromir Florian? Also a Dr but Czech and not Hungarian?

Maybe the answer is that this Florian has been misnamed in the sources all along? Or that people have assumed that "Dr Florian" has to refer to the Hungarian, not the Czech player?

More on Jaromir Florian here:

https://tartajubow.blogspot.com/2017/09 ... -1944.html

Jaromir Florian (August 13, 1911 – September 9, 1984). Florian, from Brno, was one of the most famous and most charismatic players in Czechoslovakia even though he never possessed an international title. Originally from Bilovec, Czechoslovakia, in 1919 his family moved from the German border to Brno where in 1935 he graduated from his law studies. His first success in chess was winning the championship of the Central Unity of Czech Chess in Brno in 1944. After the war, Florian was a member of the Czechoslovak team that played matches against England, the Netherlands and France. In 1948 he played in the final of the Czechoslovak Championship for the first time and then played five more times, the last being in 1965.

That would seem to confirm it (the answer turned out to be quite simple in the end).

(As an aside, I think the Bonnington Hotel is now the DoubleTree by Hilton? The historic property is still there on Southampton Row, and a number of chess matches were played there over the years.)

[John Saunders]

Thanks for this, Chris. I'm sure you're right about Jaromir (rather than Tibor) Florian. Without even bothering to check, it must be the age-old problem of ChessBase inputters attributing the wrong forename(s) to a player. This so infuriated me around a quarter of century ago that I determined to set up my own database, which I decided to call BritBase - so maybe some good came of it. To be fair, ChessBase have got a bit better over the years (part of the problem was the clunky early 1990s version of their software) but one or two of my early BritBase files can still suffer from what we might term the ChessBase forename virus. I've weeded out a lot of them but this one was more problematic than most, given the unhelpful references to Dr Florian. I'll get it fixed. Do please keep an eye out for other such name anomalies.