1959/60 Hastings Premier, 30 December 1959 - 8 January 1960, Sun Lounge, Hastings Pier

1959/60 Hastings Premier		Nat'y	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	Total
1	Svetozar Gligoric	YUG	&;	½	1	1	½	1	1	1	1	½	7½
2	Yuri Averbakh	RUS	½	&;	½	½	1	1	½	½	1	1	6½
3	Wolfgang Uhlmann	GER	0	½	&;	1	1	0	1	1	1	1	6½
4	Milko Bobotsov	BUL	0	½	0	&;	0	1	1	1	1	1	5½
5	Cenek Kottnauer	ENG	½	0	0	1	&;	½	1	0	½	1	4½
6	Harry Golombek	ENG	0	0	1	0	½	&;	½	1	½	1	4½
7	Arturo Pomar Salamanca	ESP	0	½	0	0	0	½	&;	1	1	1	4
8	Hermann Heemsoth	GER	0	½	0	0	1	0	0	&;	½	1	3
9	Dr. Karl Burger	USA	0	0	0	0	½	½	0	½	&;	1	2½
10	(William) Arthur Winser	ENG	½	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	&;	0½

1959/60 Hastings Premier Reserves Major

1959/60 Hastings Premier Reserves Major		Residence	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	Total
1	Bernard Cafferty	Birmingham	&;	1	½	½	1	1	1	½	0	½	6
2	Leonard William Barden	London	0	&;	1	½	½	½	½	1	½	1	5½
3	Ronald A Fuller	London	½	0	&;	½	½	½	½	½	1	1	5
4	Georges Nora	France	½	½	½	&;	1	½	½	1	½	0	5
5	Dr. Reinhard Cherubim	W.Germany	0	½	½	0	&;	½	½	1	½	1	4½
6	Denis Victor Mardle	Cheltenham	0	½	½	½	½	&;	½	0	1	1	4½
7	Dr. Stefan Fazekas	Buckhurst Hill	0	½	½	½	½	½	&;	1	½	0	4
8	Andrew Rowland Benedick Thomas	Tiverton	½	0	½	0	0	1	0	&;	1	1	4
9	David E Lloyd	London	1	½	0	½	½	0	½	0	&;	½	3½
10	Alfred Zehnder	Switzerland	½	0	0	1	0	0	1	0	½	&;	3

1959/60 Hastings Premier Reserves A

1959/60 Hastings Premier Reserves A		Residence	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	Total
1	Clifford G Tayar	Birmingham	&;			0			1	1	1		7
2	Hans-Jürgen Döhner	Frankfurt		&;		0							6½
3	Percy Baldwin Cook	Cheltenham			&;								5½
4	James Joseph Walsh1	Dublin	1	1		&;		0	1				5½
5	Heinrich Jühe	West Germany					&;						4½
6	John Crowle Cock	London				1		&;					4
7	Arthur Hall	Oxford University	0			0			&;				4
8	Michael E Ventham	Farnborough	0							&;			4
9	Harry Gethin Thorp Matchett	Bexhill	0								&;		2½
10	Lawrence Alfred J Glyde	Barkingside										&;	1½

¹ some additional data regarding Jim Walsh's participation: his opponents were, round by round: (rd 1) Cock (lost after an adjournment); (rd 2) Glyde; (rd 3) and (rd 4) not known; (rd 5) Döhner (won; game in PGN); (rd 6) Tayar (won; game in PGN); (rd 7) Hall (won; game in PGN); (rd 8) Matchett; (rd 9) Jühe. Thanks to Sean Coffey for the information. Further info: Tayar played Döhner in rd 1 (result not known), beat Matchett in rd 5, beat Ventham in rd 7.

Premier Reserves B: (1) Pank A Hoogendoorn (Netherlands) 8/9; (2) Michael W Wills (St. Ives, Hunts.) 7½; (3) Walter James E Yeeles (Gillingham, Kent) 5½; (4) Neville Benjamin Kinvig Gill (Isle of Man) 5; (5-7) Paul R Bielby (Huddersfield), Peter W Hempson (London), Philip J Meade (Cambridge University) 4; (8) Alan Edgar Nield (New Zealand) 3½; (9) John T Keable (Croydon) 2½; (10) M Maedler (West Germany) 1.

Premier Reserves C: (1) (Patricia) Anne Sunnucks (London) 7/9; (2) John A Henley (Bournemouth) 6½; (3-5) J. Johnson (Liverpool), Robert Hans Pinner (Richmond), Alfred Dempster H Whyte (St. Leonards) 5; (6) R. Hollands (Normanton) 4½; (7) A Philip Primett (Haywards Heath) 3½; (8-9) Leopold Franz Lindheimer (Virginia Water), G. Pelling (London) 3; (10) Percival Arthur Cooke (East Grinstead) 2½.

Premier Reserves D: (1) G. Tanfield (London) 7½/9; (2) J Gordon Lloyd (Cambridge University) 6½; (3) J. Wilms (West Germany) 6; (4) J Murrell (Brighton) 5½; (5) Harold Horace Watts (Southport) 4½; (6) Philip Bernard Sarson (Harrow) 4; (7-8) E. Fairbrother (Ashford, Middx), C. Nicole (Guernsey) 3; (9-10) Willington Lucette Wakefield (Bexhill), Frau E. Wegner (West Germany) 2½.

Premier Reserves E: (1) T. E. Waits (Worcester) 8½/9; (2) William Leonard Brierley (Beckenham) 7; (3) Rev. Henry Middleton Blackett (Hastings) 5½; (4-5) Dr. Francis Henry Charles Marriott (Nuneham Courtney), Oscar Serck (Knighton) 4½; (6-8) Thomas Eagle Lovell Chataway (Clent), A. E. Harris (Hastings), M. Jackson (Doncaster) 4; (9) Anthony G Frish (Staines) 2; (10) V. Horn (Taunton) 1.

Premier Reserves F: (1) Alfred Milner (Didsbury) 7½/9; (2) M. P. Cook (Woodbridge) 7; (3) Patric Kirtlan (Brighton) 5½; (4-7) (Frederick) Michael Akeroyd (Whitby), Roger L Baker (Bakewell), Ernest George Exell (Hemel Hempstead), Gregory Owen J Melitus (London) 4½; (8) John Eyre (London) 3½; (9) Geoffrey George Homan (Rochester) 2; (10) (Edward) Douglas Fawcett (London) 1½.

Premier Reserves Afternoon: (1-2) Miss Milunka Lazarevic (Jugoslavia), Miss Eileen Betsy Tranmer (London) 8/9; (3) J. Horrocks (London) 6; (4) Ronald Ernest Rushbrook (London) 4½; (5-7) E. C. Baker (London), George Arthur Peck (Rugby), H. Taylor (Manchester) 4; (8) J. Hatherley (London) 3; (9) John Myles Gorton (London) 2; (10) Herbert Francis Gook (South Croydon) 1½.

Open A: (1) Miss (Jean) Lesley (Mary) Fletcher (Richmond) 7½/9; (2) T. W. Baxter (London) 5½; (3) J. E. Doran (Hastings) 5; (4-5) J. H. Brown (Farnborough), William Edward Busbridge (Sevenoaks) 4½; (6-7) Harold Edward Druce (Richmond), L. L. M. Jones (Channel Islands) 4; (8-9) H. Cohen (London), Edmond Julien T Leyns (Bishop’s Stortford) 3½; 10 William John Clare Hart Burges (Blockley) 3.

Open B: (1) M. B. Smyth (Manchester) 8/9; (2-3) Brian F Astle (Birmingham), Robert C Pentecost (London) 7½; (4) Mrs. Van de Bergh (Englefield Green) 5½; (5) R. Mugridge (Hastings) 5; (6) Geoffrey Alan Hollis (St. Leonards) 4; (7) B. Berrie (Cambridge) 2½; (8-9) Peter Bernard Ginner (Pett), Sqdn. Ldr. Basil Edwin Wrensch (London) 2; (10) Mrs. Laura Ethel Amelia Start (Finchley) 1.

Open Afternoon: (1) H. G. White (St. Leonards) 8/9; (2) Claud Vernal Warter Lucas (St. Leonards) 6½; 3-4 Victor Major Tilleard (Haddenham), Miss E. Whyte (London) 6; (5) A. H. Harris (St. Leonards) 5; (6-7) A. Buckle (St. Leonards), J. E. Mort (Middleton) 4; (8) G. Burnett (Worcester) 3; (9) Miss Elsie Grace Coulson (Folkestone) 2; (10) D. Wellman (Hastings) ½.

One Week Open A: (1-2) (Derek) George Ellison (Bolton), P. Guillaume (France) 6/7; (3) Malcolm Firth (Chadderton) 5; (4-5) Dr. P. Chadwick (London), R. A. Hubbard (Bishop's Stortford) 3; (6) E. J. Smith (Gillingham, Kent) 2½; (7) W. Bainbridge (Wilmslow) 1½; (8) E. Chambers (St. Albans) 1.

One Week Open B: (1) Victor Wilfred Knox (Moreton) 7/7; (2) L. R. Robinson (Brighton) 5½; (3) Lewis James Worsell (Whitstable) 5; (4-5) Dr. Frederick Bromley Akeroyd (Whitby), H. Thompson (Birmingham) 3; (6) Lady Gwendolyn Harriet Herbert [née Quilter] (London) 2; (7) T. E. Smith (Whitby) 1½; (8) J. Bleek (Hastings) 1.

One Week Afternoon: (1) Timothy Martin Wheatcroft (Germany) 7/7; (2-3) Kenneth George Percy Gunnell (Richmond, Surrey), W. Jaegor (Germany) 5½; (4) G. F. Ramsay (Hastings) 3; (5) H. P. James (Bexhill) 2½; (6) Reginald J Manfield (Hastings) 2; (7) L. Pellandine (Hastings) 1½; (8) Mrs. Jean M Gunnell (Richmond) 1.

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Manchester Guardian, 6 January 1960: Miscellany: "Down Among the Chessmen, by Michael Frayn

Outside the enormous bay windows of the sun lounge the January sun is making the Channel faintly blue. Inside, the light catches the Christmas decorations and shines in the eyes of Svetozar Gligoric, who has been leading so far in the premier class of the Hastings international chess congress It’s no wonder he's leading, said the people I asked—he drinksa pinta milka day.

The day's five-hour session has just begun, and the ten players in the premier are scampering through their openings. Three of them are grandmasters—Gligoric himself, a 36-year-old journalist from Yugoslavia; Yuri Averbakh, the handsome Russian entrant, also a journalist; and Wolfgang Uhlmann. a plump, pink-faced, young man from East Germany. This afternoon Gligoric is playing Arturo Pomar, a Spaniard who at the age of 13 drew with Alekhine. Averbakh is trying an English Opening on Kottnauer. an emigré Czech champion. Uhlmann is defending against William Winser the local Hastings champion, who is having a sporting bash at the masters—and who has managed to hold Giigoric to a draw, too.

An American chess player turned psychoanalyst called Fine once propounded a theory that there is something curious about the family background of most chess masters. The masters who are in action here look pretty normal to me, but I have occasional doubts, I must admit, about the audience watching them.

There are certainly some strange folk in this department—very old heads on very young bodies, middle-aged men with eyes that seem perpetually turned upon some inward chessboard, and a group of what seemed to be teddy-boys chattering to one another in German. I watched one boy throwing his chess pieces at each other with the vacant stare of an idiot, but for all I know he is a national champion.

Just outside the main lounge, which is filled with that quiet, restless rustling you hear in examination rooms, waitresses in the buffet dropped cups and saucers and the players' wives keep one another company over pots of tea. At the back of the main room, behind the audience, sit the players in the more humble sections. The masters refer to them casually as rabbits, mugs, or in American as fish, patzers, pescadas, weakies, or creeps. Some of the most interesting competitors swim among the pescadas, though there is Lady Herbert, A. P.'s wife, and the monocled Mr Douglas Fawcett, 93-year-old brother of the Colonel Fawcett who disappeared in the forests of the Amazon.

There is also the belle of Belgrade, Miss Milunka Lazarevic, a Yugoslav girl who has red hair and a sack dress, and who is so ravishing that she threw Smyslov, the former world champion, right off his game in the recent candidates’ tournament in Yugoslavia. She is top of her section, too.

This afternoon she took her vibrant Titoist voice up to the congress director, Mr Frank Rhoden, and told him, please, she was needing a coupon for the football prognosis. This Is the least of Mr Rhoden’s worries, as a matter of fact. He is a cheerful, red-faced, secondary-school teacher, who got hold of Auerbach for the congress by remembering his father’s advice, "Go to the organ-grinder, not his monkey,’’ and cabling Khrushchev himself.

The congress which got under way as an annual, post-Christmas entertainment in 1920, is run by the Hastings and St Leonards Chess Club with the help of various fragments of charity and a ½500 grant from Hastings council. It is, in fact, the only first-class international chess tournament held in Britain. It may get some official competition in the future when the British Chess Federation, at present homeless, gets its promised headquarters in the John Lewis building in Oxford Street. It was lodged in the old one before it was bombed, because the head of the firm at that time believed in chess as a good thing (He is even said to have hired his staff on their proficiency at the game.)

Uhlmann fetches a cup of tea. Gligoric gets up and walks about among the green-baize tables, looking at each game expressionlessly. Averbakh strides up and down, looking more dashing than you could reasonably expect of a cavalryman, let alone a chess player.

Dr Karl Burger, a 26-year-old Brooklyn surgeon who paid his own fare across the Atlantic to show the American flag, sits lost in his game with the Bulgarian Milko Bobotsov.

In two of the games the King’s Indian Defence is being played, which is annoying because all my inside informants told me the King’s Indian was killed stone dead last year in Yugoslavia, when the Soviet master Petrosian found a way round it. The tendency in the chess world now, they said, was to ever greater complexity and exoticism—an approach which has been brought to perfection, or near it, by Tal, the Latvian engineer who won the candidates’ tournament last year and with it the right to a series of 24 games with Botvlnnik, the world champion. Tal’s system is to construct combinations of such exotic complexity that only he can follow the wild richness of their implications. A system now popular among some lesser players, I am also informed, is to offer your opponent tea just as you launch your attack. If the attack does not go too well you press sticky cakes upon him. If the situation becomes absolutely disastrous, you offer him a draw, which may keep him thinking until he has overrun his time limit.

Quite suddenly, only two and a half hours after the start of the session, Kottnauer concedes the game to Averbakh. The two men remain at the table, starting analysis which will probably continue into the small hours in the lounge of the Royal Victoria Hotel across the road where all the premier players are staying, and which has practically been turned into a box of chessmen for the tournament. Five minutes later, Harry Golombek defeats the West German player Heinrich Heemsoth, and departs to write his column. Another five minutes go by, and then Uhlmann dispatches Winser, gesticulating and pointing in dumb show to explain where Winser went wrong.

Outside, it is getting dark. Inside, the four men left in play are imperceptibly getting a little older—a hard thing in the international chess world, which is young and tough. Bobby Fischer, for example, the American champion, is 16. "I knew he was good," said Dr Burger, who taught him, "because when I beat him he cried."

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File Updated

Date	Notes
(some years ago)	45 out of 45 Premier games previously uploaded as part of a collection of Hastings games
8 January 2023	45 games of the Premier plus 6 games from ower sections, crosstables, results, plus a 'colour' piece on the congress by Michael Frayn.
8 January 2023	Added one game: J.Walsh 1-0 C.Tayar (Premier Reserves A, rd 6). Many thanks to Andy Ansel for the game.
8 January 2023	Added two more Premier Reserves A games: (1) H.J.Döhner 0-1 J.Walsh (rd 5); (2) A.Hall 0-1 J.Walsh (rd 7). Many thanks to Sean Coffey for submitting. Sean also sent a copy of the Walsh-Tayar game sent by Andy Ansel a few hours previously; the moves are identical but Sean's copy adds a little more background detail which I have added to the file.
10 January 2023	Added two games from the Premier Reserves Major: (1) R.Cherubim 1-0 A.R.B.Thomas (rd 1); (2) A.R.B.Thomas 1-0 A.Zehnder (rd 7). Many thanks to Ulrich Tamm.