Was Gimeno really shot?

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JustinHorton
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Was Gimeno really shot?

Post by JustinHorton » Thu Mar 25, 2021 3:17 pm

In the latest (2021#2) edition of New In Chess there is a piece, Grünfeld's Leg, by Gerben van Manen, recounting various anecdotes from the annual Beverwijk tournaments he attended in his youth, from 1955 onwards. (The piece states that it first appeared in "60 Jaar Hoogovens Schaaktoernooi", New in Chess 1998.)

The major anecdote, from which the piece takes its title, concerns the tournament of 1961 and the late Austrian grandmaster's artifical leg, but earlier in the article there is a passage that caught my eye.
...we had chess players staying with us every year. It started with two Spaniards: Crespo, a good-natured fat guy, and Gimeno, a young engineer and promising chess player. They came together for two years, but the third year Crespo arrived alone. He told us that Gimeno had suddenly and totally unexpectedly succumbed to a brain haemorrhage. Years later, we heard the distressing truth: Gimeno had organized a factory strike against the Franco regime and, after a mock trial, had been shot.
That's a very startling and troubling story, but is it right? The events are not given any dates, but I consulted (as best I could) the relevant volumes of di Felice's Chess Results volumes to see if I could trace them. I have the 1956-1960 volume, the index of which lists only one Gimeno, namely GIMENO PATINO, Tomas, for whom three entries are given, and one Crespo, simply CRESPO, D, who has two. Neither of Crespo's two entries is for a tournament in which Gimeno took part, though I can find both of them playing for Madrid in a three-way match against Barcelona and Lisbon. So Crespo was Decoroso Crespo López, and Gimeno was Tomás Gimeno Patiño.

So far, so relatively good, though I note that although Gimeno has an entry for the Beverwijk tournament of 1959, in the Reserves 1B, no Crespo is to be found. That's not particularly important, but it might be more to the point that nor could I find any Gimeno in the indexes of di Felice's next two volumes, these being for the years 1961-1963 and 1964-1967. However, I do not have the physical volumes and was only able to search online using Google Books, which is not of course wholly satisfactory. That said, I was able to view the tables for the 1961 and 1962 events, which feature neither a Gimeno nor a Crespo. Neither player is listed in any of the tournaments played at the 1960 event, which does appear in the volume I have.

I have also been unable to find any reference to Sr Gimeno being shot or otherwise victimised by Franco's regime though nor for that matter have I been able to trace any other reference to the manner of his passing (he's described as "malogrado", which is to say "late", in this piece on Pablo Morán, who died in 1995). He took part in the 1957 Spanish championship, missing one game due to a family illness and coming fifteenth out of seventeen competitors, the crosstable being available in di Felice or indeed here, where you can also read that he was born in Madrid on 12 December 1932, that he was second to Pomar in the championship of Castilla which qualified him for the national championship (according to a comment here, because Pomar himself already qualified by virtue of his International Master title) and that he was a theorist with a particular keenness for research.

This doesn't leave much of the original story, though nor does it disprove it, since both Crespo and Gimeno plainly existed, at least one was at Beverwijk on at least one occasion and I see no reason not to think that van Manen met them both. But I think that these days at least, people who are known to have been executed by Franco are commemorated (there are of course many many bodies in unmarked graves, but that's another issue). Personally I am not at all convinced, but unless and until we know more about Sr Gimeno I don't suppose we can be absolutely sure.
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John McKenna

Re: Was Gimeno really shot?

Post by John McKenna » Fri Mar 26, 2021 2:21 am

A book by one Decoroso Crespo López -

https://www.todostuslibros.com/libros/i ... 85632-36-7

May not be the same one you refer to above.

Perhaps his friend Tomás Gimeno Patiño received a fatal head injury in a labour dispute. A summary execution after a "mock trial" is possible but not documented here -

http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/garottel.html

Though the gruesome list may be incomplete.

John Moore
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Re: Was Gimeno really shot?

Post by John Moore » Sun Mar 28, 2021 7:21 pm

This is a really interesting post by Justin and I hope that more may be found, one way or another, about Senor Gimeno.

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