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KES Chess A Team 1968-1971 |
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Contents
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Other Schools
The two divisions of the Sheffield & DCA Schools’ League in the season 1966-67 consisted of the following teams:
In each division teams played each other team twice, once at home and once away.
There had been a Carter Hall team. KES beat them 6-0 in both matches in 1963-64, so they can’t have been even moderately strong and they seem to have dropped out at that point.
Abbeydale were probably the strongest opposition. They had J Lloyd Powell who was probably the second strongest Sheffield junior. Lloyd was born on 26/08/1950, so will have left in 1968. Next, they had Norman Clarence Wilson, born 10/11/1952 in the Dromore/Banbridge area of Northern Ireland,. He and I both attended Glen Road Junior and Infant school. He was a strange child, and I remember him pulling my hair in the reception class. He blossomed into a strange adult! He was known within his family an at primary school as Clarence. His father was Wilfred Norman Wilson, known as Norman. When Clarence got into the chess world, he adopted the forename Norman, in part due to the television programme Daktari which embarrassingly featured Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion! Another able player was Steve Everson: born 11/11/1950, Sheffield; died 13/02/2001, Sheffield, from cirrhosis of the liver. For some time he worked on a team who built and repaired dry stone walls, Steve being the only member of the team who did not have a PhD! Later, he worked for Biff Books then ran his own second-hand bookshop. He regularly played on board 1 for the Sheffield second team in the Yorkshire league. Another able player was Stephen B Housley (born 1954). He continued playing chess as an adult and until around 2017, playing regularly for Chesterfield in the Sheffield league.
Ecclesfield had some able players, though their names have evaporated. Board 1 was David Somebody. His father was the headmaster.
High Storrs had a reasonably able board 1 in the form of Stephen R Gough. The first thing Steve did after leaving school was to move in with one of the female teachers! He gave up chess for caving. Steve was one of the team which explored a large cave, Nare River Cave, in New Britain, one of the islands off Papua New Guinea. He was on of the two forming an advance party leaving England for Papua New Guinea on 3/10/1984. The expedition lasted until March 1985. In the book about the trip, The Untrained River Expedition, Steve is referred to “Steph” not “Steve”. One might wonder if this is the High Storrs chess-player, but someone named in the acknowledgements on page 48 is “Mr. D. R. Gough, Sheffield”, and checking births and marriages shows the chess-player’s parents to have been Donald R Gough and Mary C Gough née Waddam. So, “Steph” is indeed “Stevie G.” as Geoff Frost used to refer to him. See https://www.mef.org.uk/uploads/uploads/MEF-85-07.pdf.
Thornbridge had no players I remember or can name. A master there, whose whole name I forget (surname Clarke), went to the same church as my parents. The whole Clarke family, parents and daughter, came round to visit my parents once on spec, but I was the only person in the house. So, one by one they all went upstairs to the toilet then left. Bizarre!
Generally, we would beat Dronfield 6-0 - full name Dronfield Henry Fanshawe School. For a KES player to draw, or even lose, was something of an embarrassment.
De La Salle had a player called Kieran Hosty, who attended DLS from 1960 to 1968, according to https://www.kpmd.co.uk/danielsfamily/dlsc_E.htm#H. After he left school as a pupil, he seemingly turned up at chess matches as a member of staff. De La Salle closed in 1977, the site being taken over by another Roman Catholic School.
Not too surprisingly, I remember nothing of Penistone in Division 2.
No other school springs to mind as participating in the Sheffield Schools league in the period under consideration.
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