Hampshire Individual Chess Championship 1950

The 1950 Hampshire Individual Championship was played between late 1949 to mid 1950 and this would bring Wilf Pratten his third title. With little information to go on it is the HCA Minutes which has provided the majority of the details for this article.

If additional information is located I will update the post. Picture above of Wilf Pratten is from Chessbase.

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For a list of the winners of the Hampshire Individual Championship and links to any articles I have written the table on the Hampshire Individual Championship is the best place to look. In addition, the table on the Hampshire Tournaments will detail these and any other tournament articles I have completed. Both of these are available from the menu at the top of the site as well.

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Hampshire Chess Championship

The tournament would have taken place from late 1949 to mid 1950. The HCA AGM minutes indicate that the championship would if possible be from four preliminary sections:

• Bournemouth and District
• Portsmouth and District
• Southampton and District
• The rest of Hampshire

The 7th October 1950 AGM had details of the current position of the competition which seems to have been behind schedule, as the final had not commenced due to outstanding results. I think it is not a huge assumption that the tournament organisation, or the players completing games was not going as well as expected? By the 1950 AGM you would have expected that the final would be close to completion, or completed?

From what I can see the final was to be between the following players:

• WH Pratten & GH Sydes (presumably from Portsmouth Section)
• H Cumberworth & Brierley?
• GL Pritchard & N Draper or Lesley Vine (Southampton Section?)

It is interesting that a number of these players are not known to me, as GH Sydes and Brierley (if I have the correct name) did not play for the Hampshire County team. H Cumberworth only played the one game on board 17 against Buckinghamshire (which he lost). N Draper only played the two games on board 16 (he won both games) – Note 1

Update from Jon D’Souza-Eva on the page comments who has supplied the correct name for GH Sydes (Gerald Hugh Sydes (1903-1988)) – Note 2

GL Pritchard and Lesley Vine I know more about, with Squadron Leader Vine winning the Hampshire Championship two years later and GL Pritchard (again, if I have this name correct) playing 49 times for the County team between 1949 and 1981, scoring just below 50%

Note 1 – I am missing a lot of results from the County 1950’s matches and therefore this is based on incomplete information.

Note 2 – Gerald Hugh Sydes was a founding member of the Fareham Chess Club and their first club champion. He was also a winner of the Portsmouth Individual Championship. Additional details are on the Fareham Chess Club History Page which I recommend reading.

Final Positions

As noted, there is very little information on the tournament, but the HCA AGM minutes of Oct 13 1951 states that the tournament was won by WH Pratten. Also to support my previous assumption that the tournament was not running as smoothly as expected were the comments that it was a most disappointing contest with most of the games being unplayed.

Below is a picture of the Silver Rook plinth which details the winners of the tournament with WH Pratten as the 1950 winner.

Games

No game from the championship this time.

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Summary

It seems that the tournament was badly run this year, running late and games not played, although if this was the preliminary section, the final or both it is not known (I would presume both?)

There was a notice in the 1951 AGM that the 1950 – 51 Competition was being much more enthusiastically contested, which is a good sign that proactive measures had been undertaken to resolve the issues seen this year.

As has been previously noted Wilf Pratten was a very strong player and a deserving winner, but it does seem that maybe the quality of the opposition was not as strong as previous years? Although to be fair I do not have a list of all the participants, so I am unsure if players such as 1949 winner WJ Fry played?

When we pick up on the 1951 competition we will see if the statement with regards to the competition being played more enthusiastically was true, although I am struggling again to locate a huge amount of detail on the competition.

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Acknowledgements and sources:

• Chessbase for Wilf Pratten photograph
• Jon D’Souza-Eva for the update on the correct name for GH Sydes (as I had as GA Synden). Gerald Hugh Sydes (1903-1988) was a member of Fareham Chess Club and their website has their own history page completed by Reg Clark which is very informative.

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