My home town Luton not only had its own league but also its own schools league simultaneously. Whereas reportage of the Luton league appears in several other posts, evidence of the schools league can be found below. If only it were true today!
It should be noted that at the bottom of the column the initials T.W.S are Tom Sweby’s, who was a science teacher at Challney Boys School, appearing in the league table above.
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Can you remember your first game of your first full season? I can, although admittedly some details remain rather sketchy.
I played for Luton C, possibly Luton D, and it was away to Leighton Buzzard in late September 1988 when they played at Cedars School in Linslade. I went in the car with Peter Whone and Gary Aimes, perhaps one other too. On board 1, Peter played Kevin Williamson who was rated 142 at the time and beat him quite quickly, much to his surprise and delight. I played old Henry (Bill) Charlotte. I was white, he played the French, I went for the advance variation. It was the first time I faced the French and I hadn’t even been playing for one year and didn’t know what to do. He played an early Qb6 and piled on the pressure on my d-pawn. He also generated pressure down the c-file and I lost. My handwriting wasn’t very good and I had some difficulty writing down the moves. On the way home I told Gary I had lost and he said ‘anyone can lose to Bill’.
I have nothing but positive memories of old Bill. He always had a pipe and was always playing about with it. Sometimes it seemed like he was concentrating more on that than his game! I used to see him at county matches all the time. He always dressed 60’s style and was a jolly old fellow. He liked his chess and his mannerisms made me smile. I have two pictures here of Henry (Bill). He’s not forgotten.
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When you are up against stiff opposition, it’s not usually a good idea to field a weakened side! Especially when they have future Dunstable based J. M. Craddock on their team!
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As the years have gone by, I have become increasingly ambivalent towards the English Chess Forum due to its conservatism, which is the thing I dislike the most in the chess world. Nonetheless, it does contain professional players, many knowledgeable souls and some established historians too. There is a chess history trivia section of which I am a contributor and recently I have started upping the ante, asking difficult questions which no one can answer. Now I’ve gone a bit cryptic and deliberately asked a question that only I on this planet can answer (the key to it lies in a column I have not yet published on my site)! Not only that, no one is likely to attempt it either, and that includes the most senior chess historians in the world even though they are actually familiar with the person who is the answer. It is worded in such a way, no one is going to get it. Or has McCready got it all wrong and is going to be shot down in flames? Is this nothing more than some sort of Killing Joke? Want to see what it is?
English Chess Forum
It’s cryptic and quite unlikely to be answered seeing as no one will know the answer. This will be the second question in the last three that will not get an answer 🙂
What was the other one?
English Chess Forum
I should add that this is answerable if you know where to look. It is buried deep within a publication and isn’t googleable. No one answered it though.
Twitter/X
To conclude, is McCready going to get super-tough and ask even harder questions, perhaps in a verbose manner with jargon thrown in? Naughty naughty! 🙂
Mark. J. McCready
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The Luton Chess Club trophy has reappeared on show at the club courtesy of long standing member, and former champion, Peter Montgomery.
But who selected and purchased that boy back in the mid-nineties? Here’s 4 clues to help with the answer:
Super tough clue: the trophy was bought on a Friday in late September in time for the AGM. Before he picked it up, he stopped off at Burger King and had a spicy beanburger, french fries and coke downstairs in the restaurant, which he paid for with his giro. He spent most of the time looking through the windows in St. George’s Square thinking about not very much at all whilst eating.
Tough clue: he’s rubbish at chess.
Medium clue: he had been the tournament organizer at the club for a couple of years already and was left with the responsibility.
Easy clue: he’s known around the world as Luton’s most handsome chess player of all time. 🙂
MJM
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On this day 2010, my daughter Grace plays chess with me during the dreaded covid lockdown when my parental duties were elevated somewhat.
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This individual is hard to track down. I first encountered him in the 1908 British Chess Magazine, and referred to him in the following post towards the end of it. Our clash of future champions
In the 1933 publication Chess in Bedfordshire he can be found playing board 1 for the county (as the link above shows) but here we learn that his achievements went beyond that. It would appear that he was an eminent member of the Bedfordshire chess scene of his day, although I must add one not often mentioned or written about. This may be due to him being from Leighton Buzzard and not Luton or Bedford.
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I am by no means an expert and may well be wrong here but do forgive me for thinking that what you see below is not how Karpov used to play when he was young.
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A side note on how to read old Tom Sweby's columns
Not perhaps, but quintessentially, Old Tom Sweby is best thought of as a passionate devotee to the newspapers he wrote for. He was well read and knowledgeable of the Bedfordshire chess scene and well beyond, given that he was the president of the S.C.C.U. once upon a time. He was generally well-respected and rubbed shoulders with many, if not all, of those eminent within British chess circles. It would, however, be a critical mistake to see his column is primary source material entirely. That it is not. You will also find secondary source material quoted too, and the reliability of that is not quite as Tom hoped. Given that he wrote for decades, this is to some degree inevitable, and after all we are all prone to error whether we realize it or not. Thankfully, with regards to old Tom Sweby, they are infrequent and for the most part old Tom continued to document events and developments in the Bedfordshire league from the get go as best he could but, of course, everything lies open to interpretation. Despite this, and generally speaking. this does indeed make him informative and thus worth reading. Dare I say his columns constitute a narrative describing the latest developments, match reports and changing nature of the Beds league...he knew his audience and wrote according. This manifested itself over decades but brevity was always in play courtesy of the restictions imposed by writing a column. Should you wish to read a in instrumental figure of the Beds' league post WW2, you are quite welcome to peruse what has been posted here... . :-) I should, however, point out that as the decades wore on he gradually moved on away from narratives concerning the Bedfordshire league towards affairs both historical and international. The reasons for this are multifarous, old age was a predominante factor presumably, however, the bottom line is with regards to how the Bedfordshire chess scene developed post WW2: old Tom Sweby is your go to guy. He wrote more about chess in Bedforshire than anyone else did but given he was a Lutonian and writing for a Luton newspaper there is both bias and greater coverage of his hometown than the rest of the county.
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