Chess Education Society

[John Saunders]

Issue 6 now complete with those previously missing pages 44-45. Many thanks to Simon for re-scanning.

Also coming soon is issue no.8 - I'll probably prepare it for uploading tomorrow morning.

[John Saunders]

Issue No.8 is now available from the BritBase documents page.

EDIT: Issue no.s 9 and 10 also now available.

[John Saunders]

Four more issues of Junior Chess (no.s 11-14) now available from the BritBase documents page, plus the index for Volume 1 (October 1961 to December 1962).

Junior Chess is a great read and testament to the pioneering work done by John Hodgkins and John Love and their contributors 60+ years ago. I'm very grateful to Steve Love for making these available to us. There is still a fair bit more work to do to scan and process remaining issues - watch this space.

Question: does anyone happen to have issue no.15? Steve has issues 16-30 but not no.15. Also, we think issue no.s 1-3 might have been produced in a mimeographed form, so less presentable than the well-printed issues we have seen so far. He still has hopes of finding those but if anyone can put their hand on them, we would be grateful.

[Mike Gunn]

...

Lucy Anness (14 April 1888 - 2nd q. of 1973) Brief obit, BCM, August 1973, p329 & longer obit, SCCU Bulletin, June 1973. "She first became interested in chess in 1938 when headmistress of Aylesbury Senior School for Girls, Bromley, Kent, and immediately put chess on the school curriculum. When she retired in 1952, she threw her energies into the organisation of Junior Chess and became Kent School Organiser and then Junior Organiser, building up the Kent School Chess League from 27 schools in 1953 to 61 in 1961. For many years she also assisted in organising the S.C.C.U. Championships when these were held at Southsea and then at Bognor Regis. In recognition of these services in 1959 the Union elected her their first and only lady President. During all this time, she had close connections with the Bromley and Beckenham clubs and became assistant secretary of the Beckenham Chess Club which met in her own home from 1952 until 1966."

...

While the above statement that Lucy Anness was the "first and only lady President" of the S.C.C.U. was probably true for most of the life of the SCCU, it's not true today as since then we have had Julie Denning as president. See https://sccu-chess.com/index.php/en/wor ... ships-2017.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Regarding issues 1-3 of Junior Chess, it looks as though the editors themselves excluded those first three issues from the index for Volume 1? Which is a pity if so, as even the authors and article titles would have been useful information.

From the introduction to issue 4:

HERE it is at last — “ Junior Chess ” with a New Look. We hope you like it. No longer will you have to rely on intelligent guesswork to under­stand the diagrams. Now that we have arrived at this stage, we are going to number the pages of this and the following eleven issues continuously so that, when all twelve issues have been published, you will be able to have them bound. There’s nothing we can do about including the first three numbers as they are of different size. We shall give you details about the arrangements for binding nearer the appropriate time.

Clearly the diagrams were done differently in some way for those first three issues. Is the above quote the source for the claim that issues 1-3 "might have been produced in a mimeographed form"?

It does say at the end of Vol 2, issue 1 (Jan 1963) that "DETAILS OF BINDING VOL. 1 WILL APPEAR IN THE NEXT ISSUE" but I have been unable to find any follow-on advert or instructions.

Did the Volume 1 index appear with an issue, or was it issued separately? Have the entries in the Volume 1 index been checked to see if they all match the articles in issues 4 to 12 (i.e. those 9 issues)? It appears so.

It seems like the articles in issues 1-3 are not included in the volume 1 index, in part because the pages for those issues were not numbered. It also appears, despite the stated intent by the editors to produce the index for volume 1 after 12 issues of numbered pages, they actually did so after 9 issues (4 to 12) of numbered pages (the highest numbering being page 144 of issue 12 and the lowest numbering in the index being page 3 from issue 4). i.e. the index's stated dates of October 1961 to December 1962.

Also, it is possible some entries missed the eagle eye of the indexer (I can see no trace of the 1960 study by Gullischek [p.144, Dec 1964, issue 12, Volume 1] in the index for Volume 1).

I say the above not to be critical (the fact that the editors produced an index at all is testament to their foresight - my very brief chess-related editorial flirtations never reached those heights), but to help clarify the facts as they appear to be from the evidence so far.

Do we know the publication dates for issues 1-3?

[John Clarke]

Clearly the diagrams were done differently in some way for those first three issues. Is the above quote the source for the claim that issues 1-3 "might have been produced in a mimeographed form"?

I can remember being shown a copy - probably No3 - of one of those issues. (There was an article on "Bad Bishops", which I expect was one of Bob Wade's contributions.) And yes, from what I can recall, the appearance was not unlike that of a club newsletter produced on a Gestetner or other brand of duplicator.