H E Atkins

Historical knowledge and information regarding our great game.
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Gerard Killoran
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H E Atkins

Post by Gerard Killoran » Wed Jan 13, 2021 11:50 pm

John Saunders has begun the necessary and overdue task of assembling the games of H. E. Atkins.

http://www.saund.org.uk/britbase/pgn/atkins-viewer.html

So far he has 328 of them, but surely there must be many more out there. Here's one which might make the list. I wonder what happened to Georgie Hahn?

Leicester Daily Mercury - Monday 09 January 1939 p7.png
Leicester Daily Mercury - Monday 09 January 1939 p7.png (485.86 KiB) Viewed 2593 times


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Paul Robert Jackson
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Re: H E Atkins

Post by Paul Robert Jackson » Thu Jan 14, 2021 9:47 am

I remember the Leicester Congress was named the "H E Atkins Memorial".
There must be residents of Leicestershire & its neighbouring counties with information, games, photographs etc.
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John Upham
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Re: H E Atkins

Post by John Upham » Thu Jan 14, 2021 9:50 am

328 is a considerable improvement over MegaBase 2020 which has 230.

I've attempted to add games and make corrections for ChessBase but I have failed miserably.

I have a tranche of Keith Richardson games from one of his scorebooks but CB are not interested.

Excellent newspaper clipping Gerard !

Did you obtain it from Newspapers.com or from some other source ?
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Re: H E Atkins

Post by Ian Thompson » Thu Jan 14, 2021 10:16 am

John Upham wrote:
Thu Jan 14, 2021 9:50 am
I have a tranche of Keith Richardson games from one of his scorebooks but CB are not interested.
Presumably, they're only interested in complete tournaments. So they'll willingly take all the games from the Outer Mongolia Under 5 Championship, but are not interested in the individual games of quite strong players.

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Gerard Killoran
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Re: H E Atkins

Post by Gerard Killoran » Thu Jan 14, 2021 10:54 am

John Upham wrote:
Thu Jan 14, 2021 9:50 am
328 is a considerable improvement over MegaBase 2020 which has 230.

I've attempted to add games and make corrections for ChessBase but I have failed miserably.

I have a tranche of Keith Richardson games from one of his scorebooks but CB are not interested.

Excellent newspaper clipping Gerard !

Did you obtain it from Newspapers.com or from some other source ?
I got both the picture and the game from the British Newspaper Archive - now at 40 million pages and growing by the day.

Also good news about little Georgie Hahn. George Alfred Hahn was born in Vienna on 22 Dec 1921 and so was 17 years old in the photo. He escaped the Nazis and probably came here on the Kindertransport. He didn't spend much more time in Leicester as he would soon board a ship to the United States, arriving in New York on 24 Nov 1939. He became an American citizen and was drafted into the army, but happily survived the war. His died in New York on the 24th April 2007 at the age of 86, but doesn't seem to have played any more chess.

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Re: H E Atkins

Post by Roger de Coverly » Thu Jan 14, 2021 11:04 am

John Upham wrote:
Thu Jan 14, 2021 9:50 am
I have a tranche of Keith Richardson games from one of his scorebooks but CB are not interested.
I would think John Saunders would be prepared to include them on Britbase. Given Keith's propensity for time trouble, I could imagine a number of the games are incomplete.

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Re: H E Atkins

Post by John Upham » Thu Jan 14, 2021 11:10 am

Roger de Coverly wrote:
Thu Jan 14, 2021 11:04 am
John Upham wrote:
Thu Jan 14, 2021 9:50 am
I have a tranche of Keith Richardson games from one of his scorebooks but CB are not interested.
I would think John Saunders would be prepared to include them on Britbase. Given Keith's propensity for time trouble, I could imagine a number of the games are incomplete.
The games are from the 1963 Niemeyer junior tournament which became the European Junior Championship.

The games were passed to JS some time ago.

Also, I passed a large tranche of materials to TDH for his correspondence database.
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Re: H E Atkins

Post by Kevin Thurlow » Thu Jan 14, 2021 12:52 pm

"Also good news about little Georgie Hahn."

I had noticed the junior winner was about 6 inches taller! I feared that the proximity to the war might have terminated Georgie's career (and indeed Georgie himself), so it was good to see he lived a long life.

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John Saunders
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Re: H E Atkins

Post by John Saunders » Thu Jan 14, 2021 1:04 pm

My thanks to Gerard for opening up this thread, as well as providing considerable help with finding games and full forenames of Atkins' opponents.

The reason BritBase has significantly more Atkins game entries (n.b. about 35 of them are stubs or part-games) than ChessBase is almost entirely down to the good offices of Alan Smith, who sent me 50+ games, mainly from club and county chess, which he had culled from old newspapers and elsewhere, most of which hadn't been published digitally before. Many thanks to him, not just for collecting and submitting the games but for ironing out errors in previously-published Atkins material, including a few found in RN Coles' 1952 Pitman book of Atkins' games. (That's not a criticism of Coles's book, BTW - everything published inevitably has a few errors in it - and we are very lucky that technology now allows us to revisit primary sources so easily, but it's gratifying that so many people are taking the trouble to do this job properly.) Thanks are also due to Brian Denman and Andy Ansel who keep a close watch on activities at BritBase and nearly always contribute something useful to newly published files, as they have again with the Atkins file.

Ian Thompson is right that ChessBase prefer complete games of tournaments. (That said, I'm sure if someone sent them a handful of unknown games of, say, Capablanca, they'd take them like a shot.) Chessgames dot com, on the other hand, arranges games by player. I've read criticisms of that website on this forum in the past but I personally think they do a pretty good job, with a number of chess history enthusiasts working hard to collect games of old masters, as well as identify names and biographical details about players. I sourced 20 or so Atkins games from there.

BritBase policy is more in line with ChessBase in that most files are of specific tournaments but in recent years I've started to post significant collections of players' games where it seems appropriate or someone offers them to me. BritBase games usually find their way into Mega/Big Database when the annual update is published by ChessBase. I've no objection to ChessBase taking them, nor have I any objection to Chessgames dot com taking games for their website should they wish to have them.

Regarding John Upham's collection of Keith Richardson's 1963 Niemeyer games, I would suggest John offers them to Chessgames. The reason I haven't posted them on BritBase, as I believe I explained to John some time ago, is because they were played outside the British Isles and I don't post files of non-British (or non-Irish) tournaments. It's true that I do include games played overseas when I post a file of games by a given player, but I generally prefer to gather a significant collection of games before starting such a file. If John's objection to sending games to Chessgames is that they take a long time to post them, then I'll have to confess that I'm probably worse! It took me over a year to act on Alan Smith's first submission of Atkins games. This is not because I'm not working on BritBase but because I've been prioritising other items (e.g. old British Championships).

Perhaps this post will prompt a few suggestions for additional player files on BritBase. My answer will be along the lines of a famous presidential quotation: "ask not what BritBase can do for you - ask what you can do for BritBase."
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Gerard Killoran
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Re: H E Atkins

Post by Gerard Killoran » Thu Jan 14, 2021 11:02 pm

The score for the following game becomes rather garbled after 12.d4.

Can any reader with access to The Field for 1915 provide the original, or can it be reconstructed?

Atkins Wahltuch 1915.png
Atkins Wahltuch 1915.png (298.23 KiB) Viewed 2280 times

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David Shepherd
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Re: H E Atkins

Post by David Shepherd » Thu Jan 14, 2021 11:56 pm

I assume its something like this - later deleted to avoid confusion, as close but not right either - correct version below.
Last edited by David Shepherd on Sun Jan 17, 2021 8:42 pm, edited 7 times in total.

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John Saunders
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Re: H E Atkins

Post by John Saunders » Fri Jan 15, 2021 12:52 am

Another possibility might be...

...

(LATER EDIT: deleted as it turns out not to be right - close but no cigar!)
Last edited by John Saunders on Sun Jan 17, 2021 6:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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David Shepherd
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Re: H E Atkins

Post by David Shepherd » Fri Jan 15, 2021 12:57 am

Yes, I think your solution is more likely as move 17 for black on the scoresheet says QR-K1 and not R-k1, which suggests there was a choice of rooks to move to K1 as in your line.

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Re: H E Atkins

Post by Gerard Killoran » Fri Jan 15, 2021 2:45 pm

Here's another one where 38.B-B1 and 45... Q-K2 make no sense...

Atkins Yates 1912.png
Atkins Yates 1912.png (282.08 KiB) Viewed 2109 times
My solution:

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Re: H E Atkins

Post by John Saunders » Sun Jan 17, 2021 6:49 pm

Roger Watson has kindly sent me what looks like the definitive version of Atkins-Wahltuch, 27.03.15, which he found in the Bradford Weekly Telegraph, 23 April 1915 (and which in turn sourced it from The Field)...

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