The Search for Chess Perfection

fUR

with special articles by Mrs. Anne Purdy and John Hanks previously compiled and edited as CJS. Purdy His Life, His Games, and His Writings by John Hammond & Robertjamieson recompiling editors Ralph Tykodi & Bob Long Thinkers' Press, Inc. Davenport Iowa 1997

Copyright© 1997 by Thinkers' Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo­ copying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher.

First Printing July 1997 ISBN: 0-938650-78-5

Originally titled "CJ.S. Purdy His Life, Bis Games and His Writings" with two new sections added. This edition is in algebraic notation. n;:;:::=::==r;;iiJ Typos and omissions have been cor­ rected, and clarifications have been added in places to further increase the value to the reader on what is arguably the best "How To" chess book ever written in English. Previous© 1982 by John Hammond and Mrs. Nancy (Anne) Purdy. Reproduced and edited with permission.

Requests for permissions and republication rights should be addressed in writing to: Thinkers' Press Inc. Editor, Bob Long P.O. Box 8 Davenport lA 52805-0008 USA

CJSO Purdy-His Writings

CONTENTS Foreword

Acknowledgments

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Biographical Details

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Tournament and Match Record

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CJ S Purdy - His Life

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CJ S Purdy - The Writer

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Index of Games

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Index of Openings Index of Articles Catalog

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CJ S Purdy - The Player .

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Purdy Library of Chess 3

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back of book

The Search for Chess Perfection

Acknowledgments The publisher would like to thank Mrs. Anne Purdy for permission to republish CJ.S. Purdy's writings, and also Mr. John Hammond for his permission to reproduce and modify his 1 982 work CJS. Purdy: His Life, His Games and His

Writings, acclaimed by many to be the best chess improvement book ever written. Thanks are also due to Prof. Ralph Tykodi for initiating the Purdy Library Project as well as for his superb job in co-editing this book.

This book is in algebraic notation. The previous edition has been corrected; we regret any remaining errors. Ten thousand copies ofthe previous edition in descriptive notation were sold to lovers of good chess writing the world over. Even world champion Bobby Fischer said no chess library should be without this book. Two new articles have been added to the previous edition.

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Cj.S. Purdy-His Writings

FOREWORD CJ.S. Purdy was an unforgettable character to all who knew him. For many years he was, together with Garry Koshnitsky, Australian chess, and through his writing, a world figure as well. From his teens onwards, to his death at the age of 73, he was an inveterate writer. His journalistic activity covered 40 years, during which he wrote 12 issues each year of Australasian Chess Review, Check, and later Chess World from cover to cover. Besides this, he wrote books of importance. In Cec's case, writing was a chosen profession in which he was allowed to involve himself from an early age through the generosity of his father. Capital for his first venture was provided by Purdy senior, and the world of chess must be grateful for this. Purdy took his writing very seriously. His humorous articles are very funny to this day, as any reader will be able to testify. Cec had a sense ofhumor, but this is not enough to make a writer ofhumor. I once lent him a satirical novel, Margaret and the Devil, translated from the Russian. He took great pains to analyze how the author obtained his effects. His teaching articles are superb. Whenever I open an old volume of his journals, I never fail to find it completely fresh and worth readingwith great attention. As an analyst he was on his own until about 1 950, when other chess writers started to catch up with him. His analysis is notable for accuracy, insight, and readability. About a year before his death I sent to him a position from an obscure opening and another in which White was supposed to have an advantage, though I could not even after lengthy analysis see this. I paid his fee, which was always very low. I received the answer to one of the queries in a few days, but the other one took him a month. He showed that White did have an advantage, as was proven by an extremely difficult analysis. Truly a labor of love. Cecil was also the first after Lasker to classify various types of combinational and positional motifs, thereby continuing and extending what Lasker started. He was very proud of this achievement but never received recognition for it. This is not hard to understand, as very few of his predecessors in chess history fared any better in this respect. Purdy's 40 years of activity produced superb writing of very even quality and of lasting value. A selection of his writings is contained in this volume. These articles are timeless in their appeal, and it is hoped that the younger generation of players will read this book and their interest will be aroused in the rest of the Purdy output. In addition to these articles, CJ.S. Purdy's output comprises Among These Mates, How Euwe Won, How Fischer Won, The Return ofA lekhine, Chess Made Easy, and Guide to Good Chess, all of which are out of print except the last one. -

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The Search for Chess Perfection He also planned a further book on Fischer's games and a teaching book comprising most of his correspondence games. The compiler ofthis book feels sure that the readers will derive as much enjoyment from it as he did from its compilation.

Organization of the Material

have been easy enough to select several times the number eventually decided on, but prudence prevailed. The choice is his. The games cannot fail to enter­ tain, and also show the varied facets of Cec's chess style. John Hanks has pro­ vided an appreciation of Cec's playing skills as an introduction to the games section. The notes to the games are by Purdy, unless otherwise indicated.

Articles are from One of the difficulties of this com­ Australasian Chess Review, Check, pilation appeared soon after the first and Chess World steps were taken, namely the enormous output oflasting value ofPurdy's nearly Maurice N ewman is the fortunate 60 years of chess. Ruthless culling was necessary, and it was achieved in the owner of copies of all ofCec's published following manner. writings and intended to select the best. He struck immediate difficulties. The total would have occupied well over a Tournament Results thousand pages on varied subjects of John van Manen, who assembled equal quality and interest. There was statistics relating to all of Cec's appear­ nothing in this output unworthy of re­ ances and results in tournaments, ad­ printing. After some consultation it was vised me that he was making alternative decided that we should include one arrangements for their publication. It article only for each year from 1929 to was therefore necessary to include only 1967. This at least introduced some the most important of these in this vol­ method into the selection and possibly ume. will show development of his writing style and of his chess ideas. Correspondence Games It is said that no one who can read should undertake to clean up an attic. Frank Hutchings undertook the task Yet I am not sorry that I undertook to of assembly. When looking through look through this treasure trove, and the Cec's papers he found that Cec had reader who will look at the samples practically completed a projected book presented here without pretense of se­ containing all of his correspondence lection will agree. Cec was a born writer. games. It was therefore decided that Everything he wrote was interesting, this posthumous work of Cec's be pub­ and once one starts reading any of the lished separately. articles it is hard to put it down. His writing is plain and straightforward, free Collection of His Best Games from any artificiality of style whatso­ ever, yet beguiling. Reading, I felt his Robertjamieson undertook to as­ presence at my elbow and I relived the semble Purdy's best games. It would enchantingmoments ofpast encounters. -

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CJ.S. Purdy-His Writings His good-natured natural wit, always inoffensive, is ever-present and comes through as the essence of his personal­ ity, a quality one encounters in the great letter writers of literature. Purdy, though extremely modest, was nevertheless completely self-confi­ dent and always certain that what he had to say was important and of interest to all and sundry. And so itis. Few other chess writers had actual teaching expe­ rience with moderately talented play­ ers. Accordingly, their books were written above the heads of their in­ tended public. Where else but in Aus­ tralia, a chess backwater, would a great chess intellect be constrained to actual teaching ofbeginners through economic necessity. However, Purdy was vitally interested in expressing and also sys­ tematizing his chess thought, a great deal. of which was new or at least not expressed before. Previous attempts,

such as the works of Nimzovich and other chess writers', were quite in­ comprehensible to an ordinary club player. Even books after Purdy's pioneer­ ing effort, such as those of Euwe or Pachman, fell far short in value as teach­ ing manuals. There are two personali­ ties only who, in this writer's opinion, were equal to Cec as teachers; they are Philidor and Dr. Tarrasch. There are marvelous teaching books, such as for instance Renaud and Kahn, The Art of Checkmate and Theory ofRook Endgames, but each of those deals only with one particular aspect of the game, whereas Purdy's writings encompass the whole spectrum of chess. In addition to the contributors men­ tioned under the various headings, our thanks are due to Mrs. Anne Purdy for the biography as well as the assembler and printer, Mr. W.Jamieson. 1982 J. Hammond

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The Search for Chess Perfection

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS CecilJohn Seddon Purdy Born Began playing chess Editor of A.C.R.!Check/Chess World Australian Champion Australian Correspondence Champion Australasian Co-Champion International Master World Correspondence Champion Awarded "Order of Australia" Died

______

March 27, 1906 1922 1929-67 1935-38, 1949-52 1940, 1948 1952 1953 1953-58 1976

November 6, 1979

TOURNAMENT & MATCH RECORD Mr. John van Manen, to whom chess lovers in Australia are greatly indebted for his patient and diligent research, has collected details of CJ .S. Purdy's chess career, and with his permission I give the following statistics from his work. Summary CJ.S. Purdy's chess career as recorded above includes: o o o

1 39 tournaments (including three team tournaments); 1 4 matches (not including nine play-off matches) ; and 43 games played in telegraphic matches.

In these events, spanning a period of 57 years ( 1923-79) , he played 1 ,586 games, scoring 1099- 1 12 points, i.e., 69%. In the 136 tournaments proper, he won 3 7 first prizes (or sharedfirst prizes), 26 second prizes, and 1 9 third prizes. Of the 14 matches recorded, he won eight and drew one. In title contests he became: o o o o

Correspondence Chess Champion of the World (in first event); Champion of Australia four times; Correspondence Chess Champion of Australia twice; Champion of New Zealand twice; -

viii

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Cj.S. Purdy-His Writings • • •

Champion of New South Wales eight times; City of Sydney Champion twice; and Champion of the Pacific and South East Asia.

Of Australian chess players he was the greatest, and it is to be regretted that during his most successful period he had no opportunities to play in international tournaments. His international fame now rests mainly on his publications and his success in the first international correspondence chess championship. State Championships Purdy played in 36 N.S.W. Championships from 1923 to 1979, finishing first on eight occasions ( 1929, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1939, 1960, 1962, and 1968) and second seven times. He also won the South Australian Championship in 1937. Australian Championships 1926 1928129 1930131 1932133 1934135 1936137

1938139 1945 1946147 1948149 195 1 1956157 1958159 1960 1962163 1964165 1967 1973/74

7- 112 I 10 7-1/2 I 10 10 I 12 8 / 13 12 I 13 7-1/2 I 1 1 8-1/2 I 1 4 416 10 I 13 10-112 I 15 1 1 I 13 1 1- 1/2 I 1 3 12 I 1 5 7-1/2 I 1 4 8-1/2 I 1 6 9 1 15 8 I 13 1 1 I IS 1- 1/2 I 8 9-112 1 15 8 / 15 68%

Sydney Perth Melbourne Sydney Melbourne Perth Play-off:G. Koshnitsky M. Goldstein Sydney Sydney Adelaide Melbourne Brisbane Melbourne Sydney Adelaide Perth Hobart Play-off:D. Hamilton Brisbane Cooma

* Steiner won the tournament but was ineligible for the title.

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3 3 2 1 2-5* 1 2-3 2-3 2

1-2 2

The Search for Chess Perfection Asian and Australasian Championship In 1952 Purdy and Sarapu tied a match for the Australasian Championship. In 1960 Purdy won the Pacific and South East Asian Zonal Championship held in Sydney; however, the following year he lost a play-off match 0-3 against M. Aaron {India) for the All-Asian Zonal Championship. New Zealand Championships Purdy played in six New Zealand Championships between 1924 and 1970, winning the 1924/25 and 1935/36 tournaments. Correspondence Chess Purdy only competed in three correspondence championships, winning the first two Australian Correspondence Championships and the World Correspondence Champion­ ship in 1953.

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All this was a long And I would do it again, But set down this Set down this ...

"

- Thejourney ofthe Magi, T.S. Eliot

The Searchfor Chess Perfection

T

he Magus in Eliot's poem followed the Star unquestion­ ingly because it was ordained, but at the end of his life he wondered sadly whether the journey, which to others would seem so great and adventurous, had really been worth the sacrifices involved. Cecil Purdy, the subject of this biography, fol­ lowed his own particular star with equal devotion, and I have sometimes wondered whether, at the end of his life, the same doubts troubled him. Looking into the past is like holding up the wrong elld of a telescope-everything seems very small and far away, but incred­ ibly clear and sharp. One of the earliest pictures I can see is of a small girl in a pink frock swinging on a gate, and a youth, re­ splendent in a gray suit and a felt hat with the Cranbrook badge (my uncle, much the same age, was still wearing knickerbockers and cap) coming slowly along the road. He was looking for "Newbiggin," my grand­ father's home, where I was staying for the holidays. It was a big, rambling house set in several acres ofbushland - my grandfather did not believe in wasting his time on gar­ dening-near the cliffs at Manly, opposite St. Patrick's Seminary. It had an uninter­ rupted view of the coastline-there were very few houses then so far from Manly Wharf-and was an ideal holiday place for a child whose home was in the less attractive suburb of Balmain. It was during one of these holidays that I first met "the Cranbrook schoolboy," as Cecil was known to his dis­ gust many years after he had left school. It would be nice to be able to report that it was love at first sight. However, he opened the conversation by advising me not to fall off the gate. I had not intended to do this

anyway, and immediately placed him as one of the officious and illogical race of grown-ups. He was nine and a half years older than I was. He told me later that I had not made much of a hit with him either. I started to have a gloomy foreboding that this would be a fine weekend wasted - no pony rides, no surfing, no scrambling around the rocks with my grandfather, listening to his marvelous stories. In this newcomer I already saw a real menace. Earlier in the day I had heard my grand­ father complaining that "some young pup who thought he wanted to play chess" had been "wished on to him" by a certain Dr. Purdy, whose wishes could not be ignored. Like me, he deplored the waste of a beauti­ ful, sunny weekend. I had already learned how this insidious game could keep two otherwise reasonable adults chained indoors for hours, rebuffing all attempts to organize a decent game of ball or hopscotch with cries of"Sh-h!!" or "Do go away!" Like most only children, I was very dependent on adults for company, and I early decided that I would have to learn to play their game. My father, Spencer Crakanthorp, taught me the moves when I was four. He was champion of New South Wales, and was soon to become Australian champion. He had been a child prodigy, playing in an interstate match at the age of ten-his dis­ gruntled victim, at the end of the game, sent a message "Take that child home and put him to bed." Fortunately, my father never seemed disappointed that I did not reach this standard, as long as I was willing to join in the four-handed games and other light­ hearted types of chess which he enjoyed. Why had my grandfather been chosen to nurse along the budding chess genius?

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CJ.S. Purdy-His Writings

Col. (Dr.) John Purdy

Cecil tells the story in the Australasian Chess Review for January 1930. It goes back to 1916, when Cecil was ten and had never even thought of chess. My grandfather, a man with courage, enterprise, and an insa­ tiable thirst for adventure, had enlisted in the army at the outbreak of war, giving his age as 40. He was in fact 59. He was on active service in France for two years. Just after the battle of Messines he was resting with his pack beside him when he was spotted by Colonel Purdy, who was being driven past in a staff car. The Colonel was well known as a martinet, but being also kind-hearted he offered the weary Corporal a lift. My grandfather politely demurred. "Get in, man," barked the Colonel, "that's an order." Corporal Crakanthorp obedi­ ently climbed in and was driven to the next village, where he gravely thanked his bene­ factor and watched the car out of sight. He then picked up his pack and set out to walk back five miles. He had been going in the opposite direction. Some five or six years later, the two met again-this time at a Health Conference. Dr. -

Purdy was now City Health Officer for Sydney, and my grandfather was Health Inspector at Manly. My grandfather re­ minded Dr. Purdy of their earlier meeting and, the chronicler assures us, "they both laughed heartily." I imagine my grandfa­ ther laughed the more heartily of the two, but he soon had the smile wiped from his face when Dr. Purdy brought up the matter of his elder son, who had just learned the moves of chess and would be grateful for a little practice and perhaps a few hints. My grandfather, as Dr. Purdy had apparently found out, had been for many years the unofficial country champion, and was now a leading figure in Sydney chess. Grandfa­ ther, who didn't suffer fools gladly and felt that he was about to be lumbered with one, was unenthusiastic but hardly in a position to refuse; later it was Dr. Purdy who regret­ ted the suggestion. Cecil's family was not one which seemed likely to produce a great chess figure. Cecil was born in 1906 in Port Said, where his father was the British port doctor. When he was a year old the family moved to New Zealand, then to Tasmania, then to New South Wales-back to Tasmania during the war years, when both Dr. and Mrs. Purdy were overseas, finally settling in Sydney

when Cecil was about 12. In Hobart he had been for a while a pupil at the famous Old Hutchins School. Here he had as a class­ mate the future film star Errol Flynn, whom Cecil remembered as a sad little boy, the neglected and unwanted child of two bril­ liant, handsome, and erratic parents. In Sydney he was enrolled at Edgecliff Prepa­ ratory School, and later at Cranbrook, in its first year of existence. It was here that he met Wilfred Wallace, son of A.E.N. Wallace, then New South Wales champion and an ex-Australian champion, who was later to have a great influence on his chess career. Strangely, Cecil (according to his own ac3

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The Searchfor Chess Perfection

Mr. L.S. Crakanthorp in October 1922 on which I played four even games, win­ ning 2 and drawing 2. A month before we played at pawn and two. I had then been playing chess eight months, having be­ gun the game in the Christmas holidays of that year. My uncle sent me a chess board and men from the Malay States, which started me on the game. In 2 months I was a rook, pawn and move player. I improved by leaps and bounds ["more or less," he adds with an uncharacteristic burst of modesty], my chief leap being after reading Ed. Lasker's Chess Strategy.

count) does not seem to have realized what a treasure trove of chess knowledge was buried in his own backyard until he was already quite an advanced player. Had he done so, I don't suppose that bright day in March 1922 would have found him toiling up the hill at Manly after the long trip from Bellevue Hill, and this story would never have been written-or at any rate not by me.

There is even a record of these interven­ ing eight months. Cecil, so undisciplined and ill-organized in so many ways, brought from the very beginning a single-minded dedication to the study of chess which Dr. Purdy later came to feel would have been much better expended in training for some paying profession. With it went a keen ana­ lytical mind and a tremendous amount of industry and enthusiasm, to an extent which, in its youthful earnestness, seems strangely touching all these years later. To quote once again from the "Game Book":

Spencer Crakanthorp

As it was, my worst fears for the week­ end were realized. The visitor, so far from being like W.S. Gilbert's lady "who doesn't think she dances, but would rather like to try," showed himselfjust the kind of protege my grandfather could welcome. Cecil had taught himself the moves, as he tells us, by copying them from the Encyclopedia Britan­ nica during a rainy holiday down the South Coast, and as a reward for his industry had been given a set of chessmen. He tells the story himself in a "Game Book" which he started in October 1922, about seven months after the first visit to Manly.

"Details of Wyncrest Sports Club Chess Tournament {American System) held at Hillcrest, Bellevue Hill, Sydney. Commenced April 2nd 1922."

Then follow, carefully recorded and an­ notated, the moves of some of the most execrable games ever to have disgraced a chessboard, which would lead the reader to believe the Tournament should have started a day earlier-on April 1st. Round 1: Game 1 - C. Purdy v. R. Simpson {odds ¥11, l"\, 4:), ft and move). Won by C. Purdy after a short game. Opened by Fianchetto de Re. At finish of

The first game I record was played against -

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CJ.S. Purdy-His Writings game pieces knocked off with broom by Dr.J.S. Purdy.

Anyone playing through the games would entirely sympathize with Dr. Purdy, but apparently he later gave Brilliancy prizes of sixpence each to four contestants, thereby indicating his forgiveness and a just appre­ ciation of the merits of the play. An epic struggle between the club secretary and his 11-year-old sister is reported: lsabel v. C. Purdy-C. Purdy gives �, )':'!, �. 2 moves and wins. C. Purdy lost a rook early. His opponent was playing well until after the adjournment. C. Purdy changed his tactics of waiting for a mis­ take that never came and advanced boldly, sacrificing pawns right and left. If the pawns had been refused, C. Purdy's posi­ tion would have been hopeless. His com­ bination, of course, was unsound ...

until the right person won. By this time Cecil was firmly committed to the love affair with chess which was to last the rest of his life, and it was clear that he needed something a little more challeng­ ing than the opposition offered by the "W yn­ crest" Sports Club. I don't think that his father-a practical and successful man who naturally desired his own kind of success for his sons-would have encouraged Cecil by sending him to Manly if he had realized how strong his obsession was becoming. He could hardly have chosen a better way to confirm it. My grandfather, then 65, was still a very impressive man, dashing, witty, and cultured, and Cecil immediately be­ came, as most people did, his devoted ad­ mirer. As he himself said in his touching obituary of L.S. Crakanthorp (A.C.R.Jan. 1930), "He loved chess, and one felt that if he loved chess, then chess was a game worth playing."

"1. Purdy's relentless accuracy before the adjournment certainly contrasts mys­ teriously with her indiscreet pawn-grab­ bing subsequently," he later added.

Cecil early showed the administrative acumen which later made him a respected figure in the chess world: As examination of his score sheet will show, the preliminary tournament elimi­ nated all but Wallace [who had a clean score], Addison and the secretary [Cecil himself], who managed to get third. In­ stead of considering this placing final, a final match (triangular) was played. Each played each of the others three games.

This time Cecil managed to win. As he was "generously" (as he himself put it) donating the first prize of five shillings, I have a feeling that the tournament would have gone on

Their constant attraction was mutual. L.S., as he was usually known, and as Cecil al­ ways called him, found the new pupil mod­ est, intelligent, and eager to learn-what more can a teacher ask? He gave him Rook, pawn, and move and a trouncing, but also encouragement and advice. Cecil went away thoughtful and determined. Mter that he spent many weekends and sometimes a week or a fortnight in Manly-I suppose when L.S. had holidays. The presence nearby of a charming family, the Cornfords, with several pretty daughters, was also an attrac­ tion-Millie, the eldest daughter, became the first woman champion of New South Wales. They were friends of my grandfather's and had a tennis court; Cecil was a keen and skillful tennis player, and had already devel­ oped an appreciation of pretty girls, so the holidays must have gone quite nicely. But

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The Searchfor Chess Perfection youthful frivolities were never allowed to crowd out the real purpose of the visits. He studied chess assiduously (his school studies had to take second place, much to his fami­ ly's dissatisfaction), wrote down each game he played, and annotated it painstakingly. Within a year he was regularly playing L.S. on even terms and winning a majority of games. By the time he met A.E.N. Wallace over the board (December 1922), he was able to score a win, a draw, and a loss out of three games-a remarkable achievement even if, as the games seem to show, Wallace was not taking his young opponent too seriously. By 1923, when he was 17, he seems already to have decided on his career as a chess writer, though he probably had not yet confided this ambition to his family. In careful schoolboy handwriting and with spelling which in later years would have made him blush, he drew up a plan for a book of instruction on chess. And a very sensible, logical plan it is too. Many of the ideas, in fact the general system, he used later in his books and articles. There is also a dauntingly long list of "titles for book(s) or articles, etc." I wonder what he had in mind for the "etc."? One of the titles is "How To Win Chess Tournaments," which as he had never played in one (except the Wyncrest Sports Club) seems rather presumptuous. However, he was looking to the future with a confidence which was not misplaced. Some of the titles he listed were used afterwards-"Chess Made Easy" and "Se­ crets of the Chessboard," for example. There is also "Purdy's Way," with the note "Only suitable if happen to become very well­ known player." When he did become a very well-known player he had also be­ come more modest. There is a page of "Chess Notes- Positions for Book," in which "Purdy-Wallace (off-hand) 1923" rubs shoulders incongruously with "Lasker-Ca-

pablanca, St. Petersburg 1914." There are also pages on "Method of Thinking in Chess" (substantially the basis for his book Guide to Good Chess), "Method of Studying," and "Method of Teaching." I suppose this was the method he used to teach the mem­ bers of the Wyncrest Sports Club, and it could hardly be improved upon. That it should have been devised by a 16-year-old who had only just learned the moves him­ self is incredible; it shows his extraordinary gift for getting to the heart of the problem, and for orderly and logical analysis-a gift which unfortunately he rarely exercised in practical affairs. But in his world these did not really matter, and so were not worth wasting much time on; it was chess that mattered, and on that he was to spend the rest of his life. Before this, he had privately determined that his career must be journalism of some kind-partly because of his love of writing, but partly also because of the handicap, from which all the children in the family suffered, of a noticeable stammer. As adults they had all practically overcome this through therapy and speech exercises, and also through the confidence engendered by success in their chosen fields (High became a civil engineer with the Water Board), and many people who only met Cecil in later life would be unaware that such a problem ever existed. It is only worth mentioning insofar as it influenced his choice of profes­ sion, and perhaps was a factor in his enor­ mously powerful will to win. He liked his sports to be competitive-grade tennis, tour­ nament chess, duplicate bridge. If he played family bridge, absurdly small sums of money had to change hands just to prove that one pair had either won or lost by a certain margin. (I think he got this point of view from my father, who stoutly maintained that the only immoral thing about cards was to play for nothing.) On the other hand, no

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CJ.S. Purdy-His Writings

L.S. Crakanthorp

one could have accepted defeat more grace­ fully. He accepted philosophically the idea that there would be another time, and he was prepared to wait for it. I don't think his stammer ever caused him embarrassment, and it certainly didn't stop him making friends, but he found it frustrating and limiting, and was thoroughly relieved when he got rid of it. Today, with his mathematical and analytical ability, he would seek a career in C.S.I.R.O. or in private industry; in those days there were no such opportunities. Teaching or Univer­ sity lecturing were the only careers open to those whose abilities were solely academic, and these were plainly barred to him. Even when he was very young he had a gift for writing, and a great humorist was lost to Australia when he decided to channel his talents into chess journalism. Meanwhile, however, he was still at Cranbrook, which he had attended from the year of its inception, and schoolwork and chess were in sore competition. While most of the games in his score book are still with L.S.C. or Wallace, his horizons were

broadening. He was a member of the Manly A-grade team, and also occasionally played the Mocha stalwarts-Amadio, Crane, and Tonkin, for example. Also, at about this time he started to visit regularly at my father's home. I was surprised to find from his games record book that he had met my father as far back as September 1922, at Manly, and had played a game with him: "Played 1 game with Spencer Crakanthorp, who came 3rd in Aust. Champ. and 4th in British Champ., obtained drawn position in end­ ing"-here follows a carefully drawn dia­ gram, and beneath it the not uncommon hard luck story-"Actually Black sleepily moved K-B2 and lost." Black, of course, was Cecil, and presumably he learned at least not to play while sleepy. They did not meet again for a couple of years. Like L.S., my father did not like being bothered with learners, but L.S. per­ suaded him that the young man was worth encouraging, and that there was no more he could learn at Manly. I remember my mother being rather indignant and pointing out that my father was being asked to train a rival who would eventually topple him from his throne. Of course, in a sense this was true; but, as she should have known, real lovers of chess are never troubled by these petty jealousies. Cecil in later years was delighted to give encouragement and support to promising juniors, some at least of whom he knew were destined to replace him. So Cecil became a regular visitor at my parents' home at Balmain, where there was open house every Sunday, and where any interstate players who happened to be in Sydney and most of the strong local players would drop in. J.A. Erskine, the New Zealand player and problemist, was my father's closest friend, Gundersen and Watson were often up from Melbourne, and Wallace, Crane, Harrison, Spedding, Tonkin, and Bignold were all regular visi-

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The Searchfor Chess Perfection

CJ.S. Purdy, age

17

tors. The chess was not usually very seri­ ous-mostly kriegspiel, blindfold chess, three-dimensional chess, and two-handed or team games. I was often brought in for this kind of chess-as a handicap for the strongest player, as I now realize. I am sure I was very efficient in this role. Cecil first started to visit with Wallace, who was one of my favorites. It was a rule of the house that if I had been a good girl until tea-time (which meant if I had been reading quietly and not worrying anyone), the com­ pany would then play any game I chose. It was remarkable with what good humor these often portly middle-aged men would dis­ port themselves for an hour at marbles, chasings, handball, and French cricket. I think Cecil was taken aback by the frivo­ lous nature of the chess, and although he got on so well with his seniors he certainly had no knack with children; however, he did enjoy the "literary chess," in which each move had to be accompanied by a suitable quotation, sometimes from Shakespeare or sometimes of one's own choice. I think this may be the origin of his habit of accompa-

nying his annotations with quotations. Maurice Goldstein, a few years later, had a great liking for this diversion, and was eru­ dite and witty. I think Cecil was still rather intense about his chess and preferred the hard slogging at Manly, where he still fre­ quently visited. In 1924, when he was 18, his father financed a trip to New Zealand which en­ abled him to play in the championship at Nelson. This was his first real experience of travel, and he loved every minute of it. After chess, it became his second passion. He was an excellent sailor and he loved ships, he enjoyed the romantic friendships so easily made at sea; he gloried in the tension and excitement of the tournament, the sense of importance, and above all the adulation and lionizing which followed suc­ cess. He was realizing the delights of being a big fish, and very sensibly he did not allow the smallness of the pool to diminish his satisfaction. His victory in New Zealand was hailed with a degree of publicity which seems quite absurd today, when schoolboy chess is encouraged and we see younger champions, such as Murray Chandler, win­ ning against much stronger fields. The mere fact that a young man could succeed against veterans aroused the astonishment of the newspapers-now it is far more surprising if the veteran ever wins. One reason for this, of course, is that in those days there was very little chess literature, so that skill could to a fair extent be equated with experience. Wallace and my father had both won state championships at 19, but these had been isolated cases and had been quite a long time earlier. Chess news in the Twenties received a coverage which would make any modem chess journalist green with envy, and columns appeared in Sydney and New Zealand papers extolling the "boy prodigy" (Cecil was almost 19). An interview with Dr. Purdy on the subject of his son's success 8

-

C.j.S. Purdy-His Writings concluded with unconscious irony: "There's a £30 prize goes with the N.Z. Champion­ ship, and Dr. Purdy seems a bit alarmed for fear Cecil will want to make chess his pro­ fession!" It must have been a let-down to go back to school, and Cecil did not intend to let it interfere with the important things of life. His "Chess Record Book" (a kind of chess diary) shows that he played many friendly games against L.S., Wallace, Amadio, and Tonkin, as well as representing Manly in the grade matches and coming third in the State Championship. All the games are care­ fully copied out and annotated. His father was sufficiently impressed with his chess results to finance another trip to New Zealand to play in the championship, which was being held in Dunedin concurrently with the Great Exhibition of 1925-26. A party of us went from Sydney- Cecil, my grandfather and his second wife, my father and mother, and myself. We had four days on the "Maunganui" and it was great fun. We had not been long at sea when my father, who was easily recognized as "the chess player" because of his unusual name, was approached by the usual ship's bore and challenged to a game. My father hastily found some excuse for not playing at the moment, but felt sure that his young friend would like a game, and perhaps some ad­ vice, as he was only a beginner. Cecil looked much younger than his age, and had a beguiling air of innocence and candor. He bumbled his way through several games, getting frightful openings, giving pieces away, and at one crucial stage apparently forgetting how to castle. I was watching and wanted to remind him, but my father wouldn't let me, which I thought was very unkind. Somehow at the end, though­ greatly to his astonishment-he always ended by mating his opponent. The newcomer was bemused but undaunted. "Never mind,"

said my father encouragingly, "you've had bad luck. Have a game with my wife." My mother was one of the strongest woman players in New South Wales (though in those days that was not saying much), and she had no difficulty in winning. "Well, how about playing my daughter?" Father then suggested. But when the would-be giant killer saw a small, curly-haired girl beaming at him agreeably and preparing to seat her­ self at the chessboard, he fled and was not seen again. I think my father was disap­ pointed, as he had several more tricks up his sleeve for occasions such as this. He was a great prankster, and Cecil was a willing stooge. Cecil did not do well in this tournament, which my father won, but once again he had a marvelous time, and the Exhibition was spectacular-splendidly organized and presented, and quite a new idea at that time. I loved prowling round the gardens and the splendid granite buildings of the University of Otago, where the games were being played. I did not see much of Cecil, though we were staying in the same house. To me he still belonged to a different generation, and I always called him "Mr. Purdy." Unfortunately, shortly after this my mother became very ill and remained so for more than two years. We moved to Banks­ town, which was a country district and very isolated, and I lost all contact with the chess world. For a while I missed my old friends and playmates, but I was at High School and I put chess right out of my mind for the next five years. My father continued to play in chess events, in spite of the difficulties of traveling, and he met Cecil frequently at Manly, where he went once a month to visit L.S. At the end of the year Cecil sat for the Leaving Certificate for the second time. He had always been a brilliant student, but no one could have served two masters to quite

- 9-

The Searchfor Chess Perfection the extent he had attempted over the last two years, and his first attempt had resulted in a pass which his family did not consider satisfactory. The second time he obtained the outstanding results his parents and the school expected of him, and, with his career still officially undecided, he started his course at the University in the Faculty of Arts, with the possibility of eventually doing Law. In April 1926 the Chess Championship of Australia was played in Sydney. Cecil naturally put in an entry, but greatly to his surprise and indignation the N.S.W.C.A., who were running the tournament, were reluctant to accept it on the grounds that it would mean excluding older players. Cecil did not endear himself by remarking pub­ licly that he understood their sympathy for the veterans, because "they had been old men themselves once, and knew what it felt like." Both my grandfather and my father espoused his cause warmly-my father, as a young man, had just the same difficulty being accepted. Cecil justified their support by taking third place, behind my father and Severin Woinarski. In fact, Cecil secured first place for my father by defeating Woinarski, then the leader, in a crucial game. Woinarski was the same age as Cecil and was a player of remarkable talent who un­ doubtedly would have reached the very top rank had he continued to play; but he came of a well-known legal family who persuaded him to give up chess in favor of the study of law. He did well at his profession and later became a Supreme Court Judge. He did not lose his interest in chess, though he never competed again. Cecil always kept in touch with him and visited him when he was in Melbourne. The newspapers continued to be dazzled by Cecil's youth and featured headlines like "Boy Chess Genius" (Daily Guardian) and "Chess Prodigy" (Daily Telegraph). He was referred to as "the Cranbrook schoolboy,"

and the cricketer-cartoonist Arthur Mailey, who always covered the chess tournaments in Sydney, drew him as "the Purdy infant," in a pram! He was then 20. During his first year at the University he formed the University Chess Club, with himself as Secretary. Professor Vonwiller (Professor of Mathematics) was President. Cecil had started an Honors course in Math­ ematics and became very friendly with the professor, who was a strong player and sympathetic to Cecil's ambitions, though, I suspect, not as sympathetic as Cecil imag­ ined he was. On one occasion when Cecil was late with an assignment he commented sweetly, "Of course, we mustn't let Math­ ematics interfere with your chess." Cecil was fond of quoting this as an example of his tolerance and goodwill, but I often won­ dered. THE AUSTRALASIAN CHESS REVIEW IS BORN

In his final year at the University (1929), the chance came which he had been waiting for. In 1928-29 he had competed in the fourth Australian Chess Championship at Perth. Once again my father won, and Cecil came third. He had had a good press contract and had made most of his expenses through journalism, at which he now had consider­ able experience. So when Mr.James Prowse, who had run the chess magazine The Austral for many years, decided that he could no longer afford the burden of constant losses, Cecil persuaded his father to put up the money to get it started again. My grandfa­ ther had said that if Prowse ever gave up, he himself would take the magazine on -but he was now dying. I often wondered whether Cecil's decision was made partly because L.S. desired it. Everyone felt that if The Australwere allowed to go, chess in Australia would go with it, but no one except Cecil was prepared to risk the money and energy

- 10-

CJ.S. Purdy-His Writings to save it. It needed a young man's courage and enthusiasm, and Cecil had plenty of both. He ran the magazine from the back room of the family home at Bellevue Hill and everything had to be done by hand, including the addressing of the envelopes. There were, unfortunately, not many needed. The magazine was printed at Parramatta, which was fairly inaccessible in those days of steam trains and infrequent services, and

Cecil keeping a fatherly eye on his younger brother and sisters.

for a long time the magazine meant a lot of work for little return. If Cecil had not been living at home, very inexpensively, he could never have kept it going. In the hope of creating a new circle of readers (The Austral had been rather dreary), the name was changed to The Australasian Chess Review. However, whatever else went short, money was always found for chess trips, and in December 1929 he played in the New Zealand Championship at Wanganui, tying for second and third behind Gun­ dersen. Then in 1930 a merry company took off once again from Sydney, this time to Melbourne for the fifth Australian Chess -

Congress. The group consisted of Cecil, my father and mother and myself, and two very wel­ come additions to the chess scene, Maurice Goldstein and Garry Koshnitsky. We drove down to Melbourne in Maurice's car, with Maurice and Garry alternating as drivers. It was a leisurely trip (as far as Garry's driving could ever be considered leisurely), and we stopped everywhere that might be of inter­ est, including at Canberra, a very new town­ ship of marked-out but nonexistent roads and quantities of tiny trees with large labels flapping from them. My father and mother looked on indulgently, and we four younger people found laughter in everything. I had just finished school, and it was wonderful to be free and grown-up at last! I was 15, and it was evident that Cecil now found me a great deal more interesting than he had in Dunedin. When we got to Melbourne he found it a pleasant duty to show me the city, which I thought the most beautiful and glamorous place in the world. I had fin­ ished with school uniforms and acquired some becoming clothes, and I was being squired by a young man who, it appeared, was going to be the next Australian cham­ pion. But some unkind Fate seemed deter­ mined to keep this particular prize-so much longed for!-out of Cecil's reach. By the last round he had met every one of his strongest opponents, and had the impressive score of 10 points out of 11. His only loss had been to my father in the first round. He had to play Coultas, who was not one of the highly ranked players; Watson was half a point behind. Coultas chose this round to play the game of his life. Cecil struggled desper­ ately for a draw, while officials waiting to organize the prize-giving chewed their fin­ gernails, and spectators standing on chairs and tables fell off in their excitement. At 10 PM he had to resign and see Watson take the

11

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The Searchfor Chess Perfection

coveted title. I never admired Cecil so much. I realized how bitterly disappointed he must have been, especially as a huge crowd had gathered to cheer and congratulate him, but he preserved perfect good hurnor-on the surface at any rate-and shook hands with his opponent with hearty goodwill. He ad­ mired and liked Watson, and no one could have been a more worthy victor. From this time on, Cecil's life and mine became interwoven. I was studying at the University and had started to play chess again. I was very sympathetic to Cecil's ambitions, the more so because I had been brought up in a chess household and was used to seeing a man's life dominated by 64 squares and 32 pieces. In 1931-32 he went again to New Zealand, this time to the Con­ gress at Napier, where he came third. Soon afterwards, he asked my father for permis­ sion to marry me. I was then 16. I could not say that the suggestion was greeted by either set of parents with great enthusiasm, Cecil's parents considering that Cecil was in no position to support a wife (he was not yet able to support himselfj, and mine, that I was far too young. Both arguments were entirely sound. I was in my second year at Sidney University, and al­ though I had won a State Exhibition my parents found it quite a financial burden to keep me there; they expected me to work for at least a few years to justify the expense. For a woman to work after marriage was almost unthinkable-indeed almost impos­ sible, since most jobs, including teaching, for which I was training, were completely barred to married women. My parents did not see why I could not complete my course, get my Diploma of Education, and then teach with the Department of Education for the required six years before thinking of marriage. It was a reasonable suggestion, for even then I would have been only 25. However, people in love are rarely reason-

able; and as Cecil pointed out, by that time he would have been 35, which to us seemed positively middle-aged. My parents were both very fond of him, and had always encouraged our friendship-hoping, I sup­ pose, that it would remain friendship until they had decided the time was ripe for marriage-and they valued his qualities of honesty, sincerity, and kindness ahead of wealth. Our engagement was announced in March 1931, on the same day the Sydney Harbor Bridge was opened. The latter event, in my view, paled into insignificance. In December 1932 Cecil played in the Australian Championship in Sydney, and

At Mrs. Crakanthorp's home at Woolwich

for the first time failed to gain a place. The title was won by Gregory Koshnitsky, the reckless charioteer of 1930-now somewhat more mature and mellow, but no less hand­ some and charming. He was a little younger than Cecil, and their early lives had been very different, but they formed a friendship that lasted for almost 50 years. I think Garry really understood Cecil better than anyone else ever has; he was an example of the

- 12 -

CJ.S. Purdy-His Writings friend "who knows you well, but likes you just the same." Garry's win was a great thing for the Sydney chess community and, incidentally, for Cecil. In June of that year Anthony Hordern's, then Sydney's leading depart­ ment store, had started the Metropolitan Social Chess Club, making available spa­ cious and comfortable premises and the services of Garry Koshnitsky as manager. His new title was quite a boost, and before long there were more than 300 members. With such a manager (unmarried too!), women's chess, especially, flourished as it never had before. Cecil, like most of the other Sydney players, was a frequent visi­ tor, and new subscribers to the magazine were enrolled almost daily. Only a few months after he had started the Australasian Chess Review the Great Depression hit Aus­ tralia, but although it ruined many other businesses, chess seemed to flourish. People who could no longer afford more expensive pastimes turned to it for occupation and companionship, and one had to be very hard-up not to be able to afford the few pence necessary to buy the chess magazine. Cecil was also getting quite a lot of chess reporting, including a column in the Daily Telegraph, and a few months after I gradu­ ated my parents agreed that Cecil's finan­ cial prospects were fairly bright. Accord­ ingly, we were married inJune 1934, a few days after my 19th birthday, and departed happily for a fortnight's honeymoon in the snow at Kosciusko (total cost £20). In December of this year ( 1934) we both went down to Melbourne, where Cecil com­ peted in the Australian Championship. To make our happiness complete, this time he achieved the goal he had striven for so long. He won the tournament from a very strong field, with a record margin of two points. As a young and pretty bride, the daughter of a famous player, and the wife of the new

champion, I shared in the limelight and basked in reflected glory. I am looking, as I write, at a photograph of Cecil taken at about that time. He was a very personable young man, with a thought­ ful, sensitive face, expressive brown eyes, and soft blond hair with a slight wave in it. He was of medium height, slender and ath­ letic-all his life he was a much more power­ ful man than he looked, and even as an old man he could lift and carry quite amazing weights. A good runner and an A-grade tennis player, he was light and quick on his feet and graceful in all his movements. I think what I found most attractive about him was the aura of freshness and good health which he exuded. He neither smoked nor drank, and for preference lived on a very simple diet, which probably contrib­ uted to this, but it was even more something within his own personality-a kind of child­ like enjoyment of the day and a refusal to concern himself too early with the prob­ lems of the morrow. I was later to find out that this carefree attitude could have its disadvantages. From the magazine and other sources, Cecil's income at the time was £5 per week. We paid £ 1 a week rent for a modern two­ bedroom flat close to the beach at Maroubra, allowed 30 shillings a week for housekeep­ ing (when that ran out we descended on the parents), saved £ 1 a week, and had the balance for emergencies. Our furniture, such as it was, was paid for, and we lived very happily. The next year we were able to use our savings, our wedding cheques, which we had been keeping for such an occasion, and generous presents from our parents (my father had given me £ 100 on condition that I didn't demand any fripperies such as a wedding reception) and paid a deposit on a house at Lurline Bay, Coogee, almost on the cliffs, with a beautiful view up the coast. A few months later a fine healthy baby boy

- 13 -

The Searchfor Chess Perfection

These were a great success and sold out very quickly, but of course we did not have the capital to produce any worthwhile num­ ber. We managed to struggle on for a while, living close to the breadline. Looking back now, I often wonder how we managed at all, except that food was very cheap, and healthy young people can live on almost anything. But it became obvious now that, instead of saving, we were getting into debt. The final blow came one day when I dis­ covered by accident a letter from the bank threatening to foreclose the mortgage on the house. It is hard to describe what a shock this was to me. I had never had to think of financial matters before in the whole of my life, beyond the price of a new blouse or a pound of chops, and the money the bank was talking about terrified me. Had I been a little older or more experienced, I would have looked at the matter more calmly, remembering that banks are never as fierce as they sound and are very reluctant to throw respectable young couples out into the snow. But I was only a little over 20 and had no one to go to for advice; my father was dead, I had no brothers or sisters, and my mother had been left poorly provided for, and was working in a solicitor's office in the country. So I did what I suppose was not unusual for girls in those days-burst into a flood of tears, packed up a case and the baby, and rushed up to join Mother. Fortunately for both of us, the law did not encourage young people to make rash decisions about matrimony-or at least not about getting out of it. "For better or for worse" meant what it said, and if the "worse" only meant having to make some fairly basic financial adjustments, the law didn't really consider that to be very bad. My mother was a sensible, well-balanced works will be reprinted by Thinkers' Press}. woman, and I think she realized better than

was born, both sets of grandparents were delighted, and the whole picture looked like one of the rosier fade-outs of the silent movie days. Fate, however, as is its usual practice, was waiting behind the door with a rubber cosh in its hand, and the scenario now turned into something more like the mod­ ern gloomy kitchen-sink drama. It was un­ derstandable that the baby, the house, and the interests which now filled my life so pleasantly were not really enough for Cecil (at heart a most undomesticated man), and at the end of the year he went off again to play in the New Zealand Championship at Wellington followed by a tour of several months through New Zealand, giving si­ multaneous exhibitions and lectures. W hile he was away the Daily Telegraph had a change of ownership, and the new management, as usual, started looking round for ways to save money by cutting down on "features." The ax fell on the chess column, whose incumbent was not there to protect his in­ terests. Dr. Purdy did his best to save it for us, but in this field his influence was worth nothing, and Cecil came back to find him­ self with a new baby, a house to be paid off, and his income cut by almost half. Had our families been able to give us financial help, I am sure they would have done so; but one disaster was followed by another, much worse one-or, in fact, two. In 1936 Cecil's father and mine both died in the same week, in each case of pneumonia, and it was obvious that we would have to try to man­ age for ourselves. Cecil worked very hard at the only things he could do; he got chess reporting whenever he could, he strove un­ ceasingly to make the Australasian Chess Re­ view a magazine of world standard, and he wrote and published two small books on the world championship matches, How Euwe ffiln and The Return of Alekhine [Ed. These

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14

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CJ.S. Purdy-His Writings I did that I might not be terribly happy with Cecil at the moment, but I certainly wouldn't be happy without him-nor did she think I was likely to be happy with anyone else, in which she was probably correct. Anyway, she set about putting matters to rights. She resigned from her job, came down to Syd­ ney, and spent most of the remains of her capital on buying an old rambling house in Woolwich which was selling very cheaply; it was still the time of the Depression, when houses could be vacant for months or even years, awaiting a buyer with some ready cash. It was in a pleasant situation, close to the ferry, and had enough rooms for people to be able to get away from each other when they felt they had to. We settled down to­ gether, she looked after the baby, whom she adored, and I got a job. Here, after she had done some preliminary "smoothing­ over" business, Cecil joined us. It was obvious to me now, as perhaps it should have been earlier, that if we were to have a successful life together I would have to undertake the financial responsibilities for it. Cecil still had all the admirable quali­ ties for which I had married him-he was a man of high principles, he was kind, affec­ tionate, intelligent, amusing, a good com­ panion; and I loved him. He was not equipped to battle with the world, even for himself, much less for a wife and child. I admired him more than any man I had ever known-1 still did, after 46 years of mar­ riage. The decision was an easy one-it was how to implement it that posed difficulties. I easily obtained casual work, but it was of the "superior clerk" nature since I was en­ tirely untrained, and I found it boring and unchallenging. I dare say I wasn't very good at it either, so although we had no crippling debts, we were only just keeping our heads above water. The house at Lurline Bay, which had been my pride, of course had to go. -

At first Cecil continued to run the maga­ zine from Woolwich, but he started, with considerable enterprise but very little capi­ tal, to develop a modest mail-order busi­ ness, mainly in boards and sets, and this demanded more storage space. Providen­ tially, at this moment Mr. E.A. Dunstan, a fellow chess enthusiast, offered Cecil a share in his rooms at 1 Bond Street, Sydney. The building, a scruffy four-story relic of by­ gone days, stood where Australia Square is today. Cecil's new office consisted at this time of one tiny room which he shared with a friendly mouse. Mouse was soon accepted as his secretary and general help, and was left in charge when Cecil had occasion to be out-as he quite often did. Mouse was not good at opening the door, but callers learned to be tolerant, and sat on the stairs waiting for the Editor's return. The building was dilapidated, the lift hardly ever worked, and Cecil lost no time in creating around himself the kind of nightmarish mess which he considered essential for his comfort and well-being. It is extraordinary how, in the midst of such confusion, writings which are masterpieces of lucidity and organization could have first seen the light of day. Cecil was able to spend a lot of time at the Metropolitan Chess Club, where he often gave lessons, and the list of subscrib­ ers to the magazine grew steadily as its value was realized, especially overseas. His chess career was flourishing. He had won the state championship three years running (1934, '35, and '36) and the Australian title at Perth (1936-37) after a marathon play-off with Goldstein and Koshnitsky, and in 1939 he won the state title again. Then once again our world, and this time everyone else's as well, was turned upside down. In the first place, I discovered that I was going to have another baby. Cecil was far too nice a person to ex­ press any opinion, but he was certainly not

15

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The Searchfor Chess Perfection going round handing out cigars and asking to be congratulated. My mother was prob­ ably horrified, but as usual she made the best of it, and I was secretly pleased. I had longed for another child, however ill-ad­ vised it might be, and, as far as my job was concerned, I felt sure that eventually some­ thing would turn up. I was right-it did. In the shape of World War 11. When I heard the announcement over the air that "a state of war exists . . . " I burst into tears again. This sounds as though it were my routine way of dealing with prob­ lems, which was not really the case. But the prospect ahead seemed truly frightening; one small child and another on the way, a husband of military age and almost certain to be called up, our only living at the mo­ ment a small business just shakily struggling to its feet, and the whole world about to burst into flames, with heaven knew what horrors ahead! And yet, paradoxically, the war which brought grief and disaster to millions, and which I thought would ruin us, ultimately set us on the way to a moder­ ate degree of prosperity. Fate, which had for some time regarded us as its favorite foot­ ball, now decided to relent and toss a few goodies from the cornucopia. Perhaps it had enough on its hands now, dealing with other people. In the first place the baby, a girl, proved not only to be fat and healthy, but of such an incredibly placid nature that one would almost have thought she knew we were living in someone else's house on suffer­ ance and that she could get us all thrown out. She was named after my mother, who fell an immediate victim to her charms, which was just as well, for we certainly had nowhere else to go. As I had expected, Cecil received a call-up notice and passed his medical examination Al. He was duly received into the Army, but with more sense than one usually gives them credit for, the -

Cecil at 25 authorities realized, after interviewing him, that if they wanted to win the war they had better find some other place to put him unless of course he could be induced to join the enemy forces, in which case his ability to sabotage any piece of machinery merely by looking at it would be worth a battalion to the Allies. They decided to use him in Security, and he started off in the Depart­ ment of Censorship. Cecil could work untiringly when some­ thing was important to him, and saving his magazine, for which he had already made such great sacrifices, was important. So he set out to virtually do two jobs. He liked the work in Censorship and did quite well there, though he was always in clock trouble, just as over the chessboard. He was never really comfortable under the discipline of work­ ing to someone else's rules. At the same time he was trying to keep the paper going in spite of paper rationing, printing and delivery troubles, and all sorts of other troubles, some of which were unavoidable in wartime and others which stemmed from petty bureaucracy. He was still writing most

16

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CJ.S. Purdy-His Writings of it himself, but Lajos Stein er and Maurice Goldstein proved themselves true friends by contributing articles and sometimes an­ notations, for which I am sure they could not have been paid very much. Graeme Stewart, a young man with a very keen interest in chess who was not eligible for military service, acted as "business man­ ager," which meant attending to sub­ scriptions, looking after the office gener­ ally, and supervising the sending of ac­ counts and the posting of the magazines. He also made a valiant attempt at book­ keeping, but he made just about as much mess of it as Cecil himself could have done, which caused all kinds of problems and nasty talks with the Taxation Department when the war was over and they had time to think about such things. In all other matters he was invaluable, and without his help I doubt whether the A. C.R. could have sur­ vived. As far as I was concerned also, Fate was kind. Of course with two young children I could not be directed into employment, but I longed for some kind of paying occupa­ tion. My chance came when the young man who ran the Council Baths on the Lane Cove River was called up; the Council were at their wits' end to find someone to replace him. I had been a long-distance swimmer of very moderate distinction in my University days, and our house was almost next door to the baths, so I was asked to carry on for the duration of the war. It was an extraordi­ nary job for a girl to be doing in those days, but Australia was getting used to seeing women do things they had never done be­ fore-like working on trams and buses. The job suited me ideally. Our little boy had just started school, but he was very happy to spend all his non-school hours with me at the baths, and I took the baby down with me in a clothes-basket, in which she continued to behave herself with im-

peccable propriety. It was the best paid work, proportionately, that I ever did, for I was receiving exactly the same emolument as the young man would have done, almost an unknown thing in those days, when "equal pay" was a dream-or nightmare-of the future. Mter two years of this, an opportunity arose to manage the baths at Greenwich under the same conditions; for example they had a kiosk (which meant extra rations of tea and butter, and an allowance of to­ bacco and chocolate, both as precious as gold). They also had their own residence, which meant we had to leave the house at Woolwich where we had all lived together happily and comfortably. My mother was sorry to leave it, but she packed up and followed us, partly to help me and partly because by this time she could not bear to be separated from the children. We all squashed somehow or other into a tiny substandard dwelling which would have been condemned if it had not been wartime (and if the house had not belonged to the Council). However, we settled in there and managed surprisingly well. It was pleasant living right on the river-in fact on one occasion when there was a king tide we found ourselves actually in it, with the wa­ ter almost lapping at the door. Cecil was away a great deal of the time, in Melbourne or Canberra, which made things easier, as we were so crowded, but in the summer season we worked tremendously hard do­ ing everything, including cleaning and re­ pairs, and had a lot of fun. On summer weekends when he was in Sydney even Cecil would help in the kiosk, with a slightly bemused expression. After a short time in the Censorship he had caught someone's eye as being too good for the job he was doing, and he was seconded to Mr. (late Sir)John McEwan as private secretary. Cecil admired his new

17

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The Searchfor Chess Perfection

boss enormously, and they got on very well, but Mr. McEwan obviously consid­ ered that Cecil needed to have a secretary rather than to be one (in fact on some occasions he found himself running round finding things for Cecil) and they parted with mutual expressions of goodwill after about three months. Cecil then went into Decoding, where the work was interesting and challenging, and where he made a num­ ber of good friends. During these years, organized chess was at a low ebb, but strangely the game grew in popularity and the A. C.R. 's subscription list continued to grow with it. This was largely due to the work of Gregory Koshnitsky, who was stationed in New Guinea with the Army Education forces, with the rank of lieutenant. He did an enormous amount to popularize chess in the army, and most of

considering the pressures he was under it is not surprising that he did not do particu­ larly well. Rereading those wartime A. C.R.s I realize how hard he must have worked to keep up the standard of the magazine. At last the war ended-we found it hard to believe that it ever would-and in 1946 another adjustment became necessary for us, as for so many other families. A young man came to replace me at the Council baths, and we had to find another home. Now we were in a much better position. Not only had we both been earning more than ever before, but of course we had been living rent-free, and besides, there had been nothing to spend money on. So with what we had saved from our earnings during the war years and the little I had managed to salvage from the equity in the house at Lurline Bay, we were able to buy a very pleasant house at Greenwich. We moved there in 1946 and stayed 26 years. We planted small slips and saw them grow to great trees; we brought up two children, who went to local schools; saw them leave school, get jobs, travel, marry and leave home, and then bring their chil­ dren back to visit us. I think the best years of our marriage were passed there. CHANGE TO CHESS WORLD

The Purdy's first home Maroubra 1937

the new players we met immediately after the war told us they had learned chess from "Koshninsky," as they insisted on calling him. Cecil played in the state champion­ ships several times during those years, but

W hen the war ended, Cecil was released from the Defense Department. If he had wanted to, he probably could have stayed on in Government employment, but he had been longing for the time when he could once again expend all his energies on his brainchild, which was now starting to wilt a little-not so much through deficiencies in contributions or management as through constant wartime shortages of one kind or another. These, of course, were to continue for quite a few years; but chess was still benefiting from the fillip it had received,

- 18 -

CJ.S. Purdy-His Writings and the magazine eventually rode out its difficulties. In 1944 the name had been changed from The Australasian Chess Review to Check!, which had a less parochial sound (by this time there were many overseas subscribers, particularly in America), and in 1946 it became Chess World. This was because of the shortage of back numbers of earlier magazines, which are now as hard to get as the phoenix egg. After this, ample stocks were printed so that complete back issues would always be available, and very popu­ lar they proved to be. He also greatly expanded the office in 1 Bond Street (Dunstan had left some time ago) and set about importing books and chess goods. After a few years he had estab­ lished quite a thriving business, and the shop became a meeting place for Sydney or visiting players, especially schoolboys in the afternoons or on Saturday mornings, the proprietor being only too accessible to anyone who had an interesting position to discuss. W hatever he made was used to buy the one thing valuable to him-time to pursue his chess interests. As the financial return became greater, he put on more people to do the jobs he didn't want to do himself, which soaked up much of the profit. He had not really the temperament to be a good businessman, though he always took a very active part in the printing and distribution of the magazine. The writing was what he enjoyed and did superbly well; he spent hours of patient research on every article he wrote-checking, revising, rewriting. He could not give up his search for perfection simply to meet a deadline. It was a maga­ zine for connoisseurs (there is a file of letters to show how widely it was read and appre­ ciated), but I think it was wasted on many of his readers, who would have enjoyed it just as much with a little less perfection and a lot

more punctuality. It would have been an ideal arrange­ ment if I had been prepared to run the business side of Chess World for him. Theo­ retically we could have made a fine hus­ band-and-wife team, especially as I was play­ ing a lot of chess at this time. I had made many sacrifices for chess, but this was one I was not prepared to make. I had no liking or talent for commercial work, and though I found Cecil quite possible to live with (I don't think anyone could have described him as easy), I knew he would be quite impossible to work with. After she left school, our daughter Diana went in to man­ age the office for him, and apparently en­ joyed it, though Cecil sometimes made her want to beat her-or preferably his-head on the wall. She was a great help to him, and it was one of the few wholly unselfish acts of his life when he gave his support to her idea of a working holiday in New Zealand-from which she came back engaged to be mar­ ried. However, this brought a new chess player into the family in the person of the New Zealand expert Frank Hutchings, who later became one of Cecil's closest friends, so perhaps it was a matter of casting your bread upon the waters and having it re­ turned made up into ham sandwiches. I had to work at something, so shortly after the war I found an excellent job as editorial assistant in the CSIRO Division of Radiophysics. It was very interesting work with congenial people, and the salary seemed to me so generous that I wondered what I could possibly be asked to do that would deserve so vast a reward. There were a number of keen chess players there, and we formed a club under the presidency of Doctor, later Professor, Bernard Mills, a chess master and the designer of the Mills Cross Radio Telescope. He occasionally looked in on our lunch-hour games, and then shuddered away, groaning.

- 19-

The Searchfor Chess Perfection

Cecil was always very generous in his attitude to my career, and never worried whether my earnings were greater than his­ nor did he attempt to dictate to me about how to spend them. He obviously consid­ ered my taste for buying small home com­ forts, rather than traveling, to be extremely odd, but he was prepared to let me alone with my little eccentricities, as I was with his. He was always interested in my work, whatever I was doing, and in this case he was also proud of my association-a very tenuous one-with great scientific projects. He liked to meet my friends, and enjoyed talking with and listening to them. If he resented my preferring academic work to joining him in Chess World, he never showed it. He probably realized that at any rate it was much better paid. Not long after we went to the house at Greenwich, we started a chess club there. There was a big lounge room, and at a pinch we could squeeze in two grade match teams. The club lasted for 17 years, until I felt that the extra work it entailed was be­ yond me. All the members were roughly in the same age group, except for the junior Purdys, and both socially and from the chess angle it was a great success. I made pleasant friendships through it, some of which have lasted to the present day, and have brought me great comfort in widow­ hood. This club was the nursery in which our sonJohn's talents were developed, for there were several strong players there, though of course it was Cecil who taught and coached him-sometimes rather more thanJohn re­ ally wanted. Cecil had absolutely no feeling of rivalry towards his son-they were the proudest moments of his life when John won first the AustralianJunior and then, in 1954-55, the Australian Championship. He gloried in the idea of a chess dynasty, and never tired of boasting about it. Neverthe-

less, when he andJohn met in tournaments, it was a matter of "no quarter asked or given." I was at first annoyed, and then amused, by a suggestion that in tourna­ ments they should be drawn against each other in the first round to assure an honest result! Knowing them both, I felt sure they would fight harder against each other than against anyone else. One of the letters which I appreciated most after Cecil's death came from a very old friend in Melbourne, John Hanks. I quote part of it because it seems to me to sum up the essence of Cecil's greatness as a person. One aspect of his play that I have always admired was that he played every game and tournament right out. There was never the least suggestion of a care­ less or uninterested attitude, even on those rare occasions when he was well out of the running. Though all of us who grew up in the era were noticeably influenced in our play, it was perhaps Cecil's personal conduct which influenced me more, and my own attitude has always been similar. By a rather unjust quirk of Fate, we each unhappily damaged the other at critical times by this otherwise admirable trait.

A. C.R.

So far from either of them resenting this unfriendly behavior, it increased their mu­ tual liking and respect. Playing by the same code, Cecil and the son whom he had taught, and in whose exploits he took such pride, battled to the last pawn to put each other out of prizelists. This was a most active and creative pe­ riod of Cecil's chess life, but it is not my intention to give data about the events he played in; all this has been done by more competent people in countless biographies

- 20 -

Diana's wedding to the New Zealand player Frank Hutchings congratulated by Ortvin Sarapu (1960)

and newspaper articles. There were, how­ ever, some events and achievements which warrant individual attention because of their special importance to him. In Brisbane ( 1951}, he won the Australian Champion­ ship again (for the fourth time} against the strongest field which had ever competed up to that time. In 1952 he played a match with the Estonian-born master, Ortvin Sarapu, for the Australasian Championship, which was drawn; they were declared joint cham­ pions. In 1960, when he was 54, he won the championship of South-East Asia and the Pacific, which was played in Sydney, against representatives from New Zealand (Sarapu again), Indonesia, Malaya, and Singapore. Happily, this victory coincided with our daughter's marriage to the New Zealand player, Frank Hutchings, so we were able to invite all the visitors, together with many others of our chess friends, to a double celebration. Cecil contributed greatly to his own and every one else's enjoyment by making a witty speech, and I had vicarious pleasure in the "frippery" of the wedding I

had missed out on when I was a girl. Perhaps inevitably, from our tally of three grandsons and two granddaughters there has not yet appeared a champion to carry on the dynasty, though as the youngest is two years old there is still hope, if that's the right word. In 1958 John married Miss Fe­ licity Stapleton, a girl who had achieved considerable academic distinction. Their elder son, Colin (CJ.S. Purdy II), was a promising chess junior; but at 19 his inter­ ests are diversified, and he seems likely to seek other, perhaps more profitable, fields. In 1956 Cecil's mother died, and he inherited a small but welcome life pension from a family trust she had set up. This came too late to do any good to the family, John and Diana having both left school and launched themselves into the job market and independence with praiseworthy speed. It did, however, allow him the luxury of overseas travel-the only thing he ever wanted that money could buy. In 1961 he played an All-Asian Zonal match at Ma­ dras, India, against Manuel Aaron, which

-21 -

The Searchfor Chess Perfection he lost-partly, I think, because he found it hard to adapt to the weather and the strange food. In spite of his love of travel, he was a most unadventurous eater, and must be the only person who has run around in the heat of Madras trying to find a hotel where he could get oatmeal porridge for breakfast. He loved India and the Indian people, and always intended to revisit them someday. In 1964-65 he played in the Australian Championship in Hobart, the town of his childhood, and proudly took me to see the elegant colonial manor, built in 1840, in which he and his family had lived. He was sad to see that the ivy had been removed and the orchard and much of the grounds had been absorbed by other dwellings. As more than 50 years had passed, it was not surprising. In this tournament, at the quite astonishing age of 59, he tied for first, losing the playoff to Hamilton. I think he felt that the high point of his career-at least as far as over-the-board play was concerned-had been reached when he was chosen as one of the team to play in the Chess Olympiad in Siegan ( West Germany) in 1970, when he was 64; he notched up the very creditable score of four wins, four losses, and one draw. The team, bolstered up by [Ed.:Walter] Shawn Browne at Board 1, achieved much their best result up to that time. In 1974 he went again, this time to Nice, as nonplaying captain, though he did play one game, which he won. This time I accompanied him and we had a wonderful time, especially as the ICCF as usual held their conference immediately afterwards, so that we had the pleasure of meeting people who before that had only been names, to me at least. At Nice, Cecil received an invitation to compete in an International Masters Tour­ nament at Bienne (Biel), Switzerland, and we spent a fortnight very pleasantly there, Cecil battling away every afternoon and

evening, and quite often in the morning too, while I happily explored the Neufchatel Lakes. Cecil distinguished himself, and cer­ tainly won my admiration, by conducting a long, heated, and technical argument in German, a language of which he only un­ derstood a few words, on the subject of a breach of the rules by one of his opponents. He won the argument of course-on any point concerning the rules of chess he was likely to be right, seeing that he had helped to formulate them-and was grudgingly con­ ceded his point, the officials obviously con­ sidering it was somehow unfair for a man who had to do his arguing with a dictionary in his hand to end up talking them down. His final result was very good, considering the strength of the opposition; he came 23rd (I think) in a field of well over 40, all of IM strength. Mention of the ICCF (International Cor­ respondence Chess Federation) brings me to what was probably the climax of Cecil's chess career, and certainly the title which brought his fame overseas. This was his win of the first Correspondence Chess World Championship in June 1953. He had not played a great deal of correspondence chess previously, but he had won the Australian Championship in 1940 and 1948. How­ ever, when he embarked on the World Championship in 1947 he certainly had no idea that he would be the ultimate winner. The contestants were divided into 1 1 sec­ tions of seven each, the winners of each section to meet in the final- "not a very fair arrangement," Cecil commented in Chess World for August 1948. The tournament was immensely time­ consuming; it cut very much in to his work­ ing hours and left no time at all for social life. The reason he gave for playing was that he would be able to make the time pay for itself with the book he intended to produce. He started work on it, but unfortunately

- 22 -

John

and Cecil at the Chess Club in our Greenwich home 1952.

pushed it aside for 25 years, and then wrote half of it. Had his health been more reliable, he might have lived to see it published. His real reason for playing was the challenge and excitement, the sheer mental pleasure it brought him. He considered it as close to a "pure" form of chess as it was possible to get. Even here, though, accidents could oc­ cur. Cecil was diligent and organized over this as he was in few other things, but the whole family went through a dreadful pe­ riod when he discovered that he had made a clerical error against Mitchell and thrown away what he had expected would be a drawn game. The house was full of boards set up with current games and with note­ books containing columns of hieroglyph­ ics, and it was a miracle that such things did not happen more often. Disaster was narrowly averted on one occasion when Cecil had actually posted a move and then discovered that he had made an oversight. What was to be done? Only Cecil could have dealt with the problem. He stationed himself firmly outside the -

mailbox-1 think he would have chained himself to it if necessary- and waited for the postman to come to clear it. Then he told such a heartbreaking story that the postman allowed him to fossick through the letters till he found his own, open it, alter the move, reseal it, and put it in the bag. The postman doubtless dined out on this story, though not when his superiors were about, believing that this was the move that won the tourney-as, for all I know, it may have been. As the tournament drew to its close, and it started to look as though Cecil might actually become the first Australian to win a world title at chess, excitement in the Purdy household fairly bubbled over. We could hardly believe it when at last, after Cecil had agreed to a draw with the Swedish player Malmgren, victory became certain, hats could be thrown in the air and cham­ pagne opened. The media certainly did well by him, and for weeks pictures and articles appeared, giving him, and inciden­ tally Chess World, all the publicity he could

23

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The Searchfor Chess Perfection possibly desire. He never played in the Championship again, though after his retirement I urged him to consider it. He had reached the top, and there was no further challenge. It gave us both great pleasure to find that he was still remembered 25 years later, when we received a postcard from Munich signed by officials of the ICCF, addressed to Grand­ master CJ.S. Purdy, O.A., saying "Greet­ ing to you upon this the 25th anniversary of the 1st World Correspondence Chess Cham­ pionship." Although the much publicized book of the correspondence games did not come out during his lifetime, he did produce three other books which met with considerable success: Chess Made Easy, in collaboration with Garry Koshnitsky, Guide To Good Chess, and How Fischer Won. The first of these has gone through 24 editions and sold almost half a million copies. I have often wondered how many households where no one plays chess must have a copy lurking somewhere, possibly bought in the hope that some child would learn to play in the school holidays, as Cecil had done so long ago. In 1976 he received the award of Mem­ ber of the Order of Australia (A.M.) in recognition of his services to chess in Aus­ tralia as a player of international standing, an administrator, and a writer. This public acknowledgment of what he had meant to chess in the past helped to sweeten a little the bitter pill he found so hard to swallow­ the realization that time was dulling his concentration and weakening his splendid mental powers, and that the moments of glory would never come again. He raced desperately against old age right to the end, and I don't know whether he ever, except in occasional bouts of depression, accepted the fact that it had caught up with him. Although things on the whole had gone well with him in the Fifties and Sixties, a

few nasty little clouds were gathering. In Chess World for March-April l967 there ap­ pears an article headed "No Bitterness," but it is obvious that when he wrote it, he was in fact quite bitter. In 1948 the NSWCA had started to produce their own publication, which gave local news, local games, and dates of forthcoming events. Unfortunately, it was no use these being advertised in Chess World, whose dates of publication were no­ toriously unreliable. The event was likely to be over before the issue advertising it had come out. Cecil had to acknowledge the logic of this, and he accepted the new pub­ lication with a good grace and did what he could to help it along, with the Council's assurance that it was not intended to be a competitor. But as time went on, the mem­ bership on the NSWCA changed, and so did their policy in this matter, so that by 1967 they were producing a rival magazine, ex­ pensively printed and produced, and fea­ turing overseas news and games with anno­ tations. They were able to do this because they did not have to make the magazine pay for itself, much less make a profit. Sub­ scription was automatic when a player reg­ istered with the Association, as of course all active players, including Cecil, had to do, and the costs came out of registration fees. The final blow came when they started printing more copies than were needed and selling the surplus to Gordon and Gotch at a loss. No privately owned paper could stand up to this kind of competition, and Chess World appeared for the last time in Sept.­ Oct. 1967. Cecil had made a last desperate bid for a compromise, but the "gentlemen's agreement" of 1948 did not bind the new Association members, and apparently they did not consider that horror bound them to anything, either. I think this was what Cecil felt most, for he himself was incapable of behaving in any ungenerous way. His own attitude was not a very sensible

- 24 -

Wilfred Wallace, Lajos Steiner, Cecil and Berniejohnson

one. He would have been wise to simply hand Chess World over to the Association and retire with a good grace, for it had not for many years paid for the time and effort he had put into it; but this he simply could not bring himself to do. He had brought the magazine into the world, nurtured it as a sickly infant, seen it grow to robust maturity, and now he had to stand back and watch it die. For him, nothing could really take its place. Sore though he had obviously been in March-April l967, by the next issue (MayJune 1967) he had found it expedient to hold out a cautious olive branch. His life was still bound up in playing chess and selling chess goods, and he was hardly in a position to pursue the kind of merry ven­ detta that had been accepted in the chess life of 50 years earlier. Besides, he was never a man to cherish a grudge. He never really disliked anyone, and, even in the face of fairly pointed evidence to the contrary, he found it hard to believe that anyone disliked him-and in fact very few people did. He could irritate and hurt people, but -

he did it so innocently that he was always forgiven, usually without ever realizing that he had been in disgrace. In a brief editorial note (Chess World, Mayjune 1967, p. 104), he disclaimed any personal animus against individual mem­ bers of the Association. An Association, as he realized, has no heart to touch and not much reason to appeal to; it has no regard for the past or responsibility for the future. Cecil himself, who had been part of the chess world for so long, was rather in the position of the monarch who sees parlia­ ments come and go-or as he, a devotee of "Mr. Chips," put it:

25

The Editor of C.W. stands in much the same position in the N.S.W.C.A. as a veteran schoolteacher, who sees one lot of pupils after another pass through the school. Each lot thinks of itself as being the school, whereas to Mr. Chips the school is largely memories, and the present pupils merely the cast that happens to be performing a play whose run is so long that it outlasts them. -

The Searchfor Chess Perfection

Order

of Australia 1976

The NSWCA did compromise to the extent of giving up the grossly unfair system of "remaindering" below cost for casual sales, and with the latest (and present) edi­ tor, a friend of long standing, Cecil always had the most cordial relations; he had the pleasure of continuing to annotate games and drive printers into hysterics of rage and frustration with his late copy right up to the time of his death. Of all the many bodies which paid tribute to him after his death, none did so more handsomely or gener­ ously than the Association with which he had been jousting since he had entered the lists as a brash youth of 18. Mter Chess World ceased publication, he carried on for a while with the shop and importing business, but he was not really a business man. Writing was what he liked doing, and what he did superbly well. Why didn't he now write the books which had always been waiting "until he had the time"? Mainly, I think, because although he could discipline himself to meet the dateline de­ manded by a magazine (even though he did

not always meet it very punctually), he could never discipline himself to producing a set amount of material when there was no set time. He still did so much writing, rewrit­ ing, correcting, and starting all over again. In the search for perfection he wasted an incredible amount of time and, over the last years, achieved very little. It was part of his temperament that he would fling himself into anything which took his interest and work at it furiously, doing with very little sleep and stimulating his flagging mental powers with caffeine; these periods of feverish, often rather aim­ less activity would be followed by weeks, even months, of profound depression, when he would withdraw entirely from his sur­ roundings, and his exhausted body and brain would be given a chance to recuper­ ate-just in time to be hurled into another round of frantic activity. In his old age he was able to pursue many of his interests with all the enjoyment of a young man. He played bridge, chess, and tennis (he had been playing in a regular

- 26 -

CJ.S. Purdy-His Writings four the Saturday before he died). Only a few months before his death he had been joyously dashing around South America, in the wake of the Australian Chess Olympic team. He contributed regularly to the maga­ zine Chess in Australia and did quite a lot of private coaching, which he enjoyed and at which he excelled. Happily for those count­ less friends who remember him, it was dur­ ing one of these active periods, when he was having great fun playing in a chess tournament in Sydney, that he suffered a massive heart collapse and died within half an hour. He was actually playing a game when he collapsed, and his last words to John, who was also competing, were, "I have a win, but it's going to take time." He didn't realize how fast his time was running out. One of the rules of tournament play which he had always impressed on his fam­ ily was "The only thing whichjustifies with­ drawal from a tournament is death-and even then only with a medical certificate." For himself, even this was not enough. He had to have a number of expert witnesses present to testify that his withdrawal was indeed unavoidable.

- 27 -

The Search for Chess Perfection

Cecil Purdy's international reputation did not rest on his World Corre­ spondence Championship victory, but on his writings in A . C.R./Checkl

Chess World, which earned him recognition as one of the world's best chess

journalists.

His secret was that his magazine was the only one in the world that set out to actually teach its readers how to play better chess. Each volume is a gold mine of instructional articles that give advice on all phases of the game. These days every time a promising junior asks me how he can improve, my first advice is to read through all the articles in Chess World.

Fortunately, back issues of the magazine are still readily available, and one

can only shudder to think how low would be the standard of Australian chess had each decade of aspiring players not had Cecil to teach them through the pages of Chess World.

In the folowing pages we have selected one article from each volume of

A.C.R.!Check/Chess World, presented in chronological order, as a sample of Cecil's teachings. Anyone who reads through them cannot fail to improve

their chess.

- 28 -

His Writings

EXCHANGING To swop or not to swop. In chess this problem is often an extremely nice one, beset by all sorts of complex questions. But there is one simple aspect of it, extraordinarily important, which is usually not fully understood and which has never, as far as I know, been specifically dealt with in any book. That is the time aspect. The general rule is: An exchange loses time for the player exchanging first if the opponent can retake with a developing move. (A developing move is one which brings or helps to bring a piece into better play, or brings you nearer to attainment of a special objective.) An obvious example from Morphy's famous game against the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard, played in a Paris opera box: 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 Bg4? 4. dxe5 Bx£3. This exchange is forced, but it loses a move; for before the exchange, White and Black each had one piece in play, but after White has played 5. OJJ3 White will have one piece in play and Black none. The tragedy oflosing a move is brought home to us when we realize that to be three moves ahead in development is, other things being equal, almost invariably a sufficient advantage to win the game. And Morphy was now two moves ahead, for being White gave him one at the start. Had White been compelled to retake by 5. gxj3, a nondeveloping move, each side would have lost a move in development, and things would have balanced. The point is that if both pieces exchanged are equally in play, the player exchanging first never advances his development because he virtu­ ally takes his own piece off the board as well as his opponent's, for it will go into the box next move. The second player will or will not gain a move, according as he retakes with a developing or a nondevelopingmove. Most players realize all this only vaguely, so that they often forget it. -

But suppose the first capturer was in play, and the captured not. Then the first player will actually put his own develop­ ment one move back! If then the opponent retakes with a developing move, he gains not one move but two! The most striking example I can find is from a game Purdy­ Gundersen, Melbourne Christmas Tourney, 1927. The position was:

White played 1. R£8, and Black replied 1... Rxf8 which, of course, lost a move, since White's 4) was brought one move nearer the capture of the ft , its objective. It would actually have paid Black to play the absurd-looking move 1... RcB! This is not merely a nondeveloping move, but a retro­ gressive move. But it would have made White exchange himself, thus capturing a piece out of play with a piece in play, and himself putting back his development a move as explained above. Then Black would

29

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The Search for Chess Perfection have retaken with ...KxcB, developing his �. He would thus have saved a move, and analysis showed that this would probably have made all the difference between los­ ing and drawing. One often hears a player say, "Well, if I don't exchange, he will, so here goes!" But allowing the opponent to exchange will often save two clear moves. E.g., a game sent by a Victorian country correspondent: 1. e4 c5 2. b4 (the Wing Gambit) cxb4 3. a3 e6. Now White, probably reasoning as above, played 4. axb4? which, of course, is a move-losing exchange since Black retakes by 4 .. Bxb4, a developing move. Had he left Black to exchange fts, White would have gained a move by retaking with his own .1£). This would have made a difference of two moves, and White would have had some compensation for his ft . Such cases arise in nearly every game, most frequently with .§. exchanges. A marked characteristic of the style of the 1929 Australian Champion was his will­ ingness to allow opponents to exchange off their .lbs for his As. He relied on the gain of time outweighing the small difference in the value of these pieces. Here is an out­ standing example from a gem of a game played at board 1 in the N.S.W.-Victoria match of 1923: .

1 1. Qxd3 Let us take stock. White needs but one move to complete his development, namely, with his �- .§. . But Black needs five, one with a ft to free his light-squared A, one with his light-squared A, one with his ¥11 to free the .§.s, and two with his .§.s. He is therefore four moves behind instead of one! How has Black lost three moves? First of all, he lost a move by 2 . . e6, for it prevented his developinghis light-squared A in one move. Then his exchanging maneuver lost him two more moves, for 9.. Nb4 was moving a piece already developed and 10 .. Nxd3was a move-losing exchange, since White re­ took with a developing move. White won instructively as follows: 11 ... dxc4 12. Qxc4 Be7 13. Bc7! Qe8 14. Nb5 Nd5 15. e4 a6 16. Nd6 b5 17. Qb3 Bxd6 18. Bxd6 Ne7 19. Rc7 Qd8 20. Rd1 Ng6 21. Qc2 h6 22. Bxf8 Qxf8 23. Rcl Ne7 24. Qc5 1-0.

S. Crakanthorp-G. Gundersen d5 1. d4 e6 2. c4 3 . Nc3 c5 Nc6 4. Nf3 5 . Bf4 Nf6 Be7 6. e3 7. dxc5 Bxc5 0-0 8. Bd3 Nb4 9. 0-0 A very plausible exchanging maneu­ ver, but it was fatal. Nxd3 10. Rc1

- 30 -

.

.

.

His Writings

HOW TO IMPROVE AT CHESS COMBINATIONS The Motif of Function

Some players have a habit of saying: "If your Rook wasn't there, I could mate you." This is irritating, but nevertheless, it is by observing things of this sort that an enormous number of combinations are found. The :§ in such a case has the "function" (Lasker) of defending his r3f from mate. Now any piece which is burdened with a "function" (defensive task) is thereby enfeebled. Its power in other directions is curtailed or perhaps nil; though it may have a whole ocean of squares to which it can legally move, one must see through all its sham and treat it just as if it did not command those squares at all. For instance, an undefended enemy :§ is confined to its back rank to prevent a mate by our :§ . Now we can put our ¥!1, say, en prise to that :§ and chase it to another square on the rank, and by this means we may gain some other piece or a tempo. Yet the average player does not readily grasp such opportunities; the mere visual effect of the :§ apparently commanding those squares is too much for him.

article are also present. The geometrical motif gives the idea of forking the :§ and the "loose" A on e7 with the � ' and the encircling motif is really the most impor­ tant of all, for the real theme of our combi­ nation is the attack on the castled r3f, which as we said is to be included under the "en­ circling" heading. Now in nearly all middle­ game combinations, these three motifs all occur together. In this instance, any one of them would give a good player the idea for the combination. In his Manual, Lasker gives a position from one of Alekhine's games which is a perfect example for our purposes. L. Kubmann

In the Lasker-Capablanca position dia­ grammed after the moves 1. Bxf6 Nxf6? White wins, as Breyer pointed out, by 2. Ng6! The motif of function gives the idea for this move. The f- i has the function of defending the point e6, and the � can be put en prise to it with impunity. But note also that two motifs we discussed in our last

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Alekhine (to move)

The Search for Chess Perfection It is clear that combinations are in the air, so we naturally search for possible mo­ tifs. The geometrical motif appeals at once­ white Y/1 and black W and the 4Js on the same open file! But we must not make the mistake of seeking at once for moves to exploit this. If we do, we may waste much valuable time or even forget to look for other motifs. Learn as much as you can about a position before working out any particular line of play. So we look for the second motif-any pieces with very few squares to move to. The black 4J, of course, is one, because he is practically pinned; but the black