I'd nominate Leonard Barden. Because he is a chess player no-one else will care, but he was a good player in his day (British Champion 1954), has turned down an honour (*BE but I don't know which), was responsible for the training of the young players who made England the world's second-strongest chess-playing nation in the 1980s (behind USSR) and has been writing an excellent article for the Graun for as long as anyone can remember.
He is also one of the few surviving players with a Morphy Number of 3, and it is because I once played him that I have a Morphy Number of 4.
He is also a damned good sort.
I read that today will be Leonard Barden's last daily chess column for the Evening Standard. He has produced one every day since June 1956 with days off for certain public holidays. He has been writing for the Grauniad for even longer, but that, apart from when there is a major event like a World Championship to cover, is only a weekly column so I think he is carrying on. He has also written for the Financial Times since 1974.
I'm full of admiration for the guy. For 16 years I wrote a weekly column on chess for the Recorder group of newspapers (Ilford, Romford and Newham principally, but for some reason it also occasionally turned up in the Ham & High - for whom it was totally irrelevant as it was about chess in Essex) and it was often a struggle to get suitable material.
He was largely responsible for "The English Chess Explosion", as it was dubbed at the time - an intensive programme training the strongest junior players and designed to produce grandmasters. It was a phenomenal success and, after Tony Miles became the first English GM when he won the World U20 Championship, several others followed and England ended up winning the silver medals in the Olympiad, behind the Soviet Union. He continued to keep a database of strong juniors' results and once I was helping to run a tournament in London. The previous weekend my daughters, then aged 12 & 17 I think, had been playing in an adult tournament against some strong players, and each won their section. I was writing up some results when Leonard Barden appeared and came over to speak to me about them. He had clearly seen the results and was impressed - previously, although they had been around for a long time with pretty good results, they were normally about one level below the best players nationally in their age groups: on a good day they could beat almost anyone, but didn't have the consistency to be really considered "top players". I can't really recall much about the conversation other than to say that I was nonplussed that he would take such a keen interest and I was surprised that he knew who I was.
https://www.standard.co.uk/staticpage/chess/chess-with-leonard-barden-a1939236.htmlToday is my final chess article (dedicated to SJF) for the Evening Standard. The series began on 4 June 1956 and has continued for 63 years, 7 months and 27 days without missing a day, a world record in all journalism for a daily column by a single individual.
Thanks to loyal readers, especially those of long standing who have solved the puzzles over years or decades. Good luck with today's puzzle and with all your future games.
