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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. |