English Chess Forum

Among my stash of old chess bulletins and booklets I found four issues of University Chess Annual, from its 1st edition in November 1950, through to the 4th (and, I think, final) edition in 1953/4.

I have scanned all four issues in and made them available on BritBase as PDFs. I have also input all 92 games and part-games featured in the publication and put them in a game viewer:

http://www.saund.co.uk/britbase/britbasedocuments.html

I was sent some of this material out of the blue some years ago by Dr Geoff Parbrook, who was a founder editor of the publication and had seen a reference I had made to BUCA in an article in BCM (I can't remember precisely which article). He kindly sent me the material as he was getting on a bit and didn't want the material to disappear when he did. This was about seven years ago and, sadly, an online check revealed that he died a couple of years ago.

This 20+ page publication was of good quality and it had articles and annotations by the likes of Leonard Barden, Peter Clarke and Abe Yanofsky, plus some photos and BUCA congress reports. Well worth a look. I'm not absolutely certain that it foundered after four issues but I think it did, at least in that form and under that particular title. I have one or two other subsequent BUCA publications from the mid-1960s (which I hope to put online in due course) but nothing as nicely printed as this early 1950s effort. Of course, it is inevitable that student-produced publications should have a short life, since people are only students briefly and often have a particularly busy time when starting their post-uni careers.

Thanks, John, for re-publishing the interesting collection of university chess annuals from the early 1950s. Some of the games are linked with other BritBase publications. For example you previously created a BritBase file for the 1952 BCF Congress at Chester, though the Oakley v Rhodes game does not seem to have been included in this. Another link is with the collection of Bernard Cafferty's games which you recently re-published. When I checked the date of the Long v Cafferty game in your file for the 1952 university annual, I found a discrepancy with the date given in the general collection of Bernard's games. Also other dates given in Bernard's scoresheets for the 1952 BUCA Congress seem to be different from the dates quoted for the annual. There may be other links with BritBase files.

Brian, thanks for this. Yes, it doesn't surprise me that one or two games might be out of step as regards dates as I have the games in different databases. I shall have a look at those next week as I shall not be at my desk again until Tuesday at the earliest. Off the top of my head, I'd expect the Long-Cafferty game is dated correctly in the Cafferty file. The 1952 British Championship file doesn't seem to have been updated since 1998 so that is likely to be out of date: I should have a few more games to add.

I think 'Gumoelius' is Ivar Gumaelius of Sweden...

http://www.olimpbase.org/playersy/e4kg0c6f.html

... and his opponent 'Zawelbuy' was Zawerbny of France

http://www.olimpbase.org/playersy/mgkaa6i8.html

Possibly Adam Zawerbny of Grenoble

http://heritageechecsfra.free.fr/coupe1952.htm