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Editor: Dr Tim Harding
      

Tim's research queries page

This is a new page I am starting about some historical research I am doing, mostly about 19th century chess players. It will be developed further in future.

I have been commissioned to write two articles which are now in preparation for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

These will be for posting in the year 2012 (in conjunction with the Olympic year in Britain) but I have to finish them by early next year. The subjects of the profiles are:

Isidor Gunsberg and Mary Rudge.

Their chess careers are now well researched. Readers with good information about their early years and the last years of their lives are invited to contact me privately by email.

Some people related to Gunsberg have already helped me but Rudge, winner of the first Ladies' International tournamnet in 1897, had no descendants and there are some mysteries about her last twenty years.

For a future book, I am interested in finding out more about some other Victorian players, mostly amateurs,but I am not interested in anecdotes, only documented fact. In most cases I have already collected a substantial amount of information about their careers, but family historians or chess club historians may be able to help.

Players I am interested in include the following:

George Bellingham (why did he suddenly give up chess?), Henry Bird, J. H. Blake, F. N. Braund (some time of the Isle of Wight) , H. Brewer (of Bournemouth), Captain W. D. Evans (inventor of the gambit), B. W. Fisher (disappears from chess after 1883), William H. Gunston, C. J. Lambert (of Exeter), and F. A. Vincent (of Dursley).

There is also on this site now separate page here about my next chess book, Correspondence Chess in Britain and Ireland, 1824-1987: A History, due out in late 2010.