For many, many years, Jack (JEC) Grant used to write a weekly column titled “CHESS NOTES” for the Portsmouth Evening News / Evening News). The original notes for numbers 1 to 85 (6th September 1976 – 13th November 1978) which were passed to the Newspaper are included in the Hampshire Chess Archives.
The structure of “Chess Notes” was normally split into three sections:
- Portsmouth / Southampton League
- County Updates
- Grading / Game
These are a fascinating insight into local chess in this period including snippets from AGM’s, League and County results, player grades and charity events. I hope you enjoy reading through these as much as I have. For the games these are sometimes positions, so a bit of work re-creating these from the position detailed (no diagram in the notes!) is required. Also the games are in descriptive notation, rather than than algebraic.