A number of obituaries which were included on the original Hampshire Chess Association website are being added to the website.
Jan Richmond
Jan Richmond died at the end of July 2007 aged 91. He has been in Hospital for some time.
He was a member of Chichester Chess club for over 50 years and had been President for some years. He played regularly in the MacArthur Cup, South West Sussex League and Portsmouth League teams for all that time. During the 1970s and 80s he played regularly in the Sussex County Second team and was a frequent last minute reserve for the First team. He was the answer to a County Captain ’s prayer. He would turn out on a Saturday when someone backed out the evening before, sometimes cancelling his Golf appointment do so. He hated having to write the score down. The juniors in the county team used to look forward eagerly to, win or lose, his ritual tearing up of the score sheet.
In 1996 he won the Ruth Rose Cup in the Portsmouth league with a score of 84%. This is for the veteran, over 60, who had the highest % score in league matches over the season. About that time he appeared in the top 20 of his age group in the BCF grading list. Also he did two holes-in-one at Goodwood golf club in a month.
He played regularly in the Portsmouth congress, while his health allowed and also in BCF tournaments when they were in Portsmouth or Brighton . His proudest boast was that it took ex World Champion Max Euwe 4 hours to beat him in a wartime European tournament, but I have no record of where or when. He was a very tenacious player, particularly with his knights. His opening strategy used to be to exchange his bishops for his opponent’s knights at the first opportunity. There was never a need to play pawn to rook 3 to make him play bishop takes knight on bishop 3, as he would do it next move anyway. We did eventually persuade him that bishops had some uses.
He came to England in 1940 on a plank of wood, after the vessel which took him off the beach at Dunkirk was sunk. This was balanced all night with, at the other end, an Englishman (Stan) who did not speak Polish. They met some years later at a reunion and it took them some time before they placed where they had met before. Apparently he had reached Dunkirk having walked across Europe from a Russian POW camp in Siberia, where he had been sent as prisoner in the Polish/Russian conflicts before the German Invasion of Poland in 1939.
He served with the Royal Air Force at Chichester and married an English girl, who predeceased him. They lived at Fishbourne, where he had a successful business repairing sewing and like machines.
Ray Williams
Acknowledgements and sources:
- Ray Williams