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KES Chess A Team 1968-1971 |
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Contents
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Earlier Generations
Roger Hoole
The oldest KES chess-player still living appears to be James Roger Hoole. The most recent record of him comes from 2024. Roger was born in Sheffield on 30/12/1936 to James S Hoole and Evelyn M Hoole née Bracklesby. He has always been known by the forename Roger. This presumably differentiated him from his father. In 1939 his father was a clerk to a chartered accountant, the family then living at 463 Springfield Road. He started at KES in 1948. The following is a photograph of Roger’s 6th-year form, 6MSII, of the year 1954-55, showing Roger 2nd from left on the back row.
Roger left KES in 1955, going on to study at Victoria University of Manchester. Thereafter he spent most of his working life at Ferodo in Chapel-en-le-Frith.
In the earliest days when I (Steve Mann) was aware of chess gradings, Roger was grading officer for the Sheffield & District Chess Association. In those days such graders manually calculated players’ points scored from a game, totted everything up at the end of the season, then sent names and totals to the county grader, who amalgamated such local results then forwarded those results to the NCCU grader, and after a further amalgamation a Combined Union Grading List was produced by the BCF containing those people with a grade above some cut-off point such as 185. I once noticed Roger was at the top of the Sheffield list – the grader’s perk!
In time, possibly first performing other jobs within the S&DCA, Roger became President of the S&DCA. When a President retires, they are accorded the title of Past President which title Roger now holds, though he has not been involved with the Association for many decades.
Meetings of the S&DCA Executive used to be held at the homes of this or that executive member, and so I on occasion went to his home at 33 Cardoness Road, Crosspool, Sheffield. In retirement he eventually moved to his present address in Bamford, where for some time he was organist at the methodist church there. He has also been involved with a local grant-making charity, Poor’s Allotment, for the relief or prevention of poverty among the elderly or disabled.
Geoff Frost
Geoff was also born in Sheffield and is the oldest KES chess-player still to be active in the Sheffield & District Chess Association, currently playing for Darnall & Handsworth, of which, as it happens, I was a co-founder. Geoff started at KES in 1959 in form 1(3) and acquired the nickname “Jack Frost”. The following is a photograph of KES form 4GC of 1962-63.
Geoff is 3rd from right on the back row. Remove that part of his hair on the top of his head (male pattern baldness) and fade what’s left to a tasteful shade of grey and you can believe it’s Geoff, just about. If he did his O-levels and A-levels in the customary six years, then he’ll have left in 1965. He did not go to university but plunged into gainful employment becoming an accountant. He never actually achieved any accountancy qualifications, but worked for one or more major accountancy firms in the centre of Sheffield. He also had a number of private clients which would consult him in the evening. Thus, if I rang up about an impending chess match, then his wife would sometimes say he wasn’t available as he was with a client. Sometimes she’d say he was in the bath. I was waiting for, “he’s in the bath with a client” but that never happened!
Geoff was a member of the first ever KES Sunday Times team.
Apart from playing in the Sheffield League, in the Yorkshire League, for Yorkshire in county matches, British Team Lightning and so on, he has served as an official of the S&DCA, being until very recently its President, like Roger above.
Paul Kington
Paul was born in 1946 in Bromley, which was then in Kent (becoming a London Borough in 1965). It rather looks as though his parents were from the southeast, but his sister, Caroline, was born in Sheffield in 1948, suggesting the family had relocated to Sheffield perhaps in 1947. Paul started at KES in 1957 in form 1(1). Caroline attended Sheffield Girls’ High School and was in the same form as the writer’s sister Christine. I have a feeling the Kingtons lived up Twentywell Lane. The following photograph is of those in form 6MS2 who left in July 1962. Paul is on the front row, 2nd from the right.
Paul was a member of the first ever KES Sunday Times team.
Paul organised a Christmas Congress at KES in at least one year. I recall him describing, with a smile, games between weaker players as “dog eat dog”. As I can remember such an event, it must have been after he’d left KES, so maybe he was Junior organiser of the Sheffield & DCA for a while and that the congress(es) held at KES were open to players across the Sheffield Schools League. Contemporary records are not available. to clarify this.
Paul now lives in Horsham, West Sussex. He’s still active as a chess-player, playing for Horsham Chess Club in the Sussex League.
Guy Hickling
A yes, the inimitable Guy!
Some boys joined KES part way through their secondary education, for instance when their families moved to Sheffield from further afield. That means they’d probably been part way through a 5-year O-level course at their previous school and consequently not adequately “up to speed” to enter the KES 4-year O-level system. In such a case you’d expect them to go into one of KES’s slower streams: years 1 to 5 for the O-levels, then forms 6 and 7 for the A-levels (with no dedicated scholarship year).
Guy started at KES entering form 4B in 1963. He is pictured here with some other boys all of whom started at KES in 1964 not in the 1st year but variously in the 2nd to 5th years. Guy is the middle one of the five in the back row.
Having started in the 4th year in 1963-64, if he continued as described above, then he’d end up leaving in 1967 which accords with memory.
Guy served for a while as secretary of KES school chess club. He could exhibit a mischievous sense of humour, as when in the run-up to Bonfire Night he approached me holding out his hand and asking, “Penny for the Guy?”
I once had occasion to visit Guy at his home on some bizarre mission (to collect signatures on a “Get well” card or something). I recall seeing two little girls, presumably Guy’s sisters, peering at me in amazement from halfway down the stairs, as though they were not accustomed to seeing visitors to the house.
Rod Nicolson
Rod Nicolson started at KES on 12/09/1961 in 1(4) moving thence to 2(1), 3L and 4L at which point he will have done his O-levels. He left in July 1968 to go to Cambridge University. In the following photograph of 1968 leavers he appears, like Paul Kington above trying to look intelligent (okay he was!), leftmost on the front row.
A summary of Rod’s subsequent career in his own words appears on the internet here. The following is a relatively recent photograph of Rod, though his hair is now greyer if other photographs are anything to go by,
KES Magazine of May 1963 reported, “Very early in the season, Mr. J. E. Scholes, the Universities' Champion, provided a simultaneous display on ten boards, of which he won seven, drew three, and lost none. Among those who drew, special credit must be given to R. Nicolson who is still in the second form.” Jim Scholes, born in Oldham registration district on 25/12/1942, played for the original Hillsborough Chess Club meeting at the Brown Cow pub at 1 Mowbray Street, Bridgehouses (not the Brown Cow once on The Wicker). He now lives in Tunbridge Wells.
Rod was a member of the first ever KES Sunday Times team.
Rod was still at KES, as was Guy, when I first joined the chess club in my second year. They tried me in a school chess team. I won. Rod borrowed my scoresheet and annotated it with his thoughts. I annotated his annotations, pointing out the things he’d got wrong (in my opinion)!
Rod had an older brother Don, who was at KES from 1959 to 1966 but was not a chess-player of note. Don did however go on to manage the Old Edwardians website. Rod and Don in time acquired a half-brother Andrew McCaig featured in “B Team and Others”. The sequence of events was as follows.
Phyllis Lockett married Malcolm M Nicolson in 1942 in Manchester. Don M Nicolson was born to them in 1947 in Cambridge, and Roderick I Nicolson was born to them in 1950 in Wharfedale. Tragedy struck when Don and Rod’s father, Malcolm, died in 1951 in Leeds, aged 32. Then Phyllis married another Malcolm, namely Malcolm McCaig in 1955 in Sheffield. In the registration of the marriage, the name of the bride got recorded confusingly as Phyllis Nicholson with a spurious “h”. That second marriage resulted in the birth of Andrew M McCaig in 1957 in Sheffield.
Rod also had a chess-playing uncle in Manchester, Jim R Nicolson, born 25/01/1930. I met said uncle once at a chess congress in Sheffield.
I discovered that Rod’s mother had a scientific bent, and was perhaps the original “brains” of the Nicolson/McCaig family. I was told she’d been carrying out experiments with laboratory mice, and at the conclusion, having no further use for the mice, rather than kill them, let then loose in the wild up Ringinglow way or some such place. That discovery was made, I think, visiting the McCaig/Nicolson household when I was on the same mission which took me to Guy’s home as described above.
So, . . . . . . .
KES Magazine of May 1963 reported that G. L. Porter had secured a place at Oxford, and KESMag of Autumn 1963 reported the retirement, as both Captain and Secretary for chess, of said G. L. Porter. KES Magazine of Spring 1964 reported the captain (for 1963-64) to have been Paul Kington.
As evidenced in the Autumn 1966 KES Magazine list of officials and the Chess Report in KES Magazine of Spring 1967, in 1966-67 Rod Nicolson was KES Chess Captain while Guy Hickling was Chess Secretary. (Rod was also Secretary for Tennis.) Guy had left by July 1967, and Rod left in July 1968, leaving the younger generation to assume control.
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