English Chess Forum

John, thanks for sharing these. As you know, my mother was playing in congresses in the 1950s so this is a topic of particular interest to me. Only yesterday I posted on the thread John Saunders started about my father, regarding a column heading about my mother in the Bradford Observer which read: ...

I have just noticed all the additional material posted here by John Saunders since the last time I looked ->https://www.saund.co.uk/britbase/pgn/ivesr-viewer.html#yep Thank you very much, John. I can't help finding this headline in a Bradford Observer column amusing: "Dutch Woman Loses at Yorks Ches...

And so the phrase “a busman’s holiday” can legitimately be traced back to your youth. I love this story!

Haha Nick Was your dad also a chess player? Must have been hard for the husbands to get the wives involved with so few women playing in those days.

A bit off-topic, but here is a page from their wedding album - Valentine's Day 1948. It sets the scene with regard to the fashion of the times and the fact that post-war, austerity was the order of the day and clothing was still rationed, including their wedding and honeymoon outfits. Obviously in t...

John, I have thanked you privately and would now like to thank you publicly for all you have achieved with this project. I know you have been working into the small hours to scan and date these columns, which often involved solving the weekly puzzle to locate the next column, as many of them were no...

Gerard, thank you for this. Every piece of information is interesting and valued to me, especially when my dad was winning. It seems from the Stanley Wilkinson tribute that he was a modest type so better late than never to trumpet his wins as far as I'm concerned!

For anyone interested, there is an article on both my late parents, Ronnie and Cobie Ives, in the July 2023 issue of Chess Magazine. https://chess.co.uk/collections/chess-magazine/products/chess-magazine-july-2023 I co-authored the article with John Saunders. There is also a thread in the Chess Hist...

Thanks Gerard, I read the interview. How absolutely fascinating. Even as a non-chess player, I can see how easy it would be to want to become a chess historian. One piece of information leads to another..... and so many of these people who were my father's chess contemporaries seem to have led, or g...

An example of Ronnie Ives play: [Event "Yorkshire Championship"] [Site "?"] [Date "1958.??.??"] [Round "Semi-final"] [White "Petkevitch, B."] [Black "Ives, Ronald Wilson"] [Result "0-1"] [ECO "B23"] [Opening "Sicilian: closed (2...Nc6)"] 1. e4 c5 2. Nc3 Nc6 3. Nf3 Nf6 4. Be2 d6 5. O-O g6 6. d3 Bg7 ...

John, whilst having absolutely no idea what the Elephant Gambit is, nor any idea of the significance of anything my father wrote in his YEP column, I am just glad that it is being shared here and subsequently to be shared on Britbase. It means a lot to my family and it would have meant a lot to my p...

I remembered the name from when I was posting here about my father, Ronnie Ives, so I had a quick look on my thread and found the attached. Dr Rickman is mentioned in the Woodhouse Cup score tables at the bottom. Would this be 1958 or 1959? Anyway, my father was a contemporary of his and also playin...

A quick update for anyone who has contributed to, or has been following this thread and the thread on my mother, Cobie Ives in the Women's Chess section. John Saunders and I have co-authored an article to appear in the July issue of 'Chess' magazine: https://twitter.com/CHESS_Magazine/status/1672173...

Leonard, on behalf of myself and my sisters, thank you very much indeed for your long and thoughtful post. When Ronnie died, I was only three years old and my sisters were aged only five and seven so it’s very special for us to be talking to people who knew him or knew of him though chess, which he ...

John, thank you so much for unearthing these obituaries which I don't recall ever seeing before you located them. I would think that Mum was too distraught to have looked for them or saved them. Alex Schofield from the Wakefield Club, who wrote one of the obituaries, was one of Dad's closest friends...