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Notes
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Robert Graham Wade, an appreciation.
On May 20th, 1919, Thomas Graham Wade, aged 27, Sergeant in the NZ Expeditionary
Force, repatriated with honour from war-time service in Egypt, Gallipoli and
France, married Amy Lilian Neave, aged 21, in South Dunedin. A New Zealander of
Scots and English descent, his family was Graham from Montrose. The family name,
Wade, came from Marshall George Wade, the soldier and engineer who lead the
Hanoverian forces against the Scots at the time of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion
and was immortalised in the original third verse of the British national anthem:
Lord, grant that Marshal Wade,
May by thy mighty aid,
Victory bring.
May he sedition hush and like a torrent rush,
Rebellious Scots to crush,
God save the King.
Robert Graham Wade, known in the Scots manner to his family as Robin, and later
to his many friends as Bob, was their first child, born April 10th, 1921, at
Dunedin. Over the next few years he was joined by sisters, Lilian, Agnes, Betty,
June, his brother Ted and finally by his youngest sister Amy. The family lived
for a number of years at Portobello. At that time, Portobello was a scattered
community of about 150 people with three shops and a pub on the Otago Peninsula.
Bob attended Portobello Primary School, a small country school, finished “dux”
or top of class, and then attended the King Edward Technical High School at
Stuart Street in Dunedin. Note 1
I first met Bob in December 1971, when he autographed my copy of “The Closed Ruy
Lopez”; however, I did not get to know him well until the early 1980s when he
played in an Athenaeum team I captained. At that time Bob lived in Blackheath in
a house owned by Mrs Phillips, the wife of the former British Champion Alan
Phillips. Also living there was Hilary Thomas who wrote “The Complete Games of
Mikhail Tal”. At that time Bob invariably answered the phone with the abrupt
“Wade!” which was affectionately mimicked by the less respectful players of the
younger generation. His telephone manner did mellow with the passage of time.
Bob was a generous man, always willing to help, at no benefit to himself. When I
was approached by West London Chess Club just before their centenary for
information on their club's history I was able to tell them that Vera Menchik
and Sir George Thomas had been members. But I added: “this is obviously known to
you, if you want I can approach someone who can provide something more
worthwhile.” Bob was duly happy to oblige.
If I can summarise a man in one adjective, that adjective would be “kind”. Bob
travelled up and down, pretty well anywhere, to promote the game. It didn't
matter to him whether advocacy of chess involved a trip to Jordan, South Africa
or merely a south London school. When eighty Bob came down to muck in when the
British Chess Federation moved premises to Battle, the site of the famous Battle
of Hastings.
Never snobbish, Bob treated both grandmaster and amateur with seriousness and
respect. He played Fischer three times, as well as many other leading players
such as Uhlmann, Smyslov, Tal (“the temperamental Wade”
Note 2) and Korchnoi. It was amusing to hear Bob
dismiss Kholmov, a world class player; but then the New Zealander did play well
against the Soviet. One time I annotated a game of Bob's against Korchnoi for a
club newsletter. Rather than deride my notes, Bob let me have a copy of
Pachman's, tactfully leaving me to work out that they were rather superior to
mine. Bob was looking for a critical examination of what was happening. It was
not good enough to say: “Black has an advantage”, the why and the how counted
for more.
To Bob chess was an inclusive game, anyone who wanted to play should be afforded
the opportunity to do so. He helped several London clubs in their early days,
including Mushrooms and Drunken Knights, who were vociferously supported by Bob
when they first applied to join the London Chess League. Bob has even been given
credit when it has not been due! It has been written that Bob instituted chess
at Morley College Note 3. Not so, I attended
lessons there in the early 1970s, when they were given by Daniel Castello (“Rook
on the third, king on the queening square” Note 4).
Bob took over, along with Les Blackstock, after Daniel's death in his nineties.
Bob supported the game at all levels, including county chess. He first turned
out for Middlesex in 1948 and played regularly from 1953 onwards. His notable
opponents included Jonathan Penrose, Frank Parr, ARB Thomas, WA Fairhurst, PH
Clarke, Gerald Abrahams, Sir Stuart Milner-Barry, John Littlewood, RD Keene, Max
Fuller, George Botterill, Nigel Povah and Harriet Hunt. I believe his last game
for Middlesex was in 2001, after which the strain of travelling proved too much
even for this most enthusiastic of competitors. Thus he played more than fifty
years for the county. He turned out one hundred and forty-seven times, at least,
over this period. In the 1970s Bob was Middlesex President, which has never been
a purely honorary title.
The victorious Middlesex team of 1979
One of Bob's complaints about British chess was the poor
standard of endgame technique, an opinion he held to his dying day. Thus I was
privileged to see Bob win and draw many an inferior ending. Yet this view also
revealed a certain dogmatism; one time when I had the pleasure of playing Bob I
knew he would exchange queens, even though at that point it was not to his
advantage. Note 5
Bob thought deeply and creatively about the game. Many will know of his
contributions to opening theory in the Advance French (...Bd7-b5), the Meran
(Bb7) and the unorthodox ...d6 followed by ...Bg4. In old age he came up with an
early ...b5 in the Advanced French; sceptical, I could not refute it when I
quickly analysed it with him. I was delighted to see Bob win with it in a
serious game against a good amateur player in a league match. Bob placed a
premium on piece activity, current and potential; a useless, lazily placed piece
was anathema to him, particularly the queen's bishop; all the Wade systems are
associated with the early development of that piece.
Note 6
It would be wrong to suggest Bob had no interests outside chess. He had more
opportunities than most people to talk to foreign players and dignitaries. I
remember an informed conversation we had before a county match when the Rumanian
dictator Ceausescu was demolishing traditional villages in Transylvania in
favour of hideous modern constructions: neither of us approved. We also had
discussions on the Great War and other subjects in which we shared an interest.
It would, however, be fair to suggest that playing the game was Bob's greatest
love: far more so than acting as an arbiter, which he did out of duty rather
than pleasure.
Bob had an excellent sense of humour and would have enjoyed the story I heard
from Athenaeum Chess Club member Richard Wright. I have no idea whether it is
true, but it certainly deserves to be. All too few women play chess; thus it was
a refreshing sight to see a young woman attend Bob's lectures at Morley College.
Every session she would go home with a different member for “further study”.
After several weekly lessons she had studied with every attendee save two: “I'm
too old, what's wrong with you?” asked Bob of the married Richard. A further
instance of Bob's playful sense is given in the notes to his name.
Note 1
A friendly man, Bob lent me his copy of Robert Traver's “Anatomy of a Murder”,
which I returned a few days later, having read it at one sitting. At first I did
not fully understand the book's significance to him, but I did later gain an
inkling. The book possibly cost Bob a win against Korchnoi in Havana in 1963,
for he lost a night's sleep reading it before their game. As well as being
linked to this memorable game, the book may have brought back to Bob memories of
his time as a Civil Servant in New Zealand. He had had a small role in the
drafting of legal documents, a training that proved useful when he later served
on FIDE's rules committee. His curiosity may have been piqued by the intricate
legal manoeuvres recorded in this book; and the manner in which truth can be
transmogrified into useless ballast, or something worse. In real life Bob was to
suffer from circular proof and misinterpretation. The one thing lacking would be
solid evidence. Note 7
Bob tried to be scrupulously fair to all sides, not something that was
necessarily welcome in the heat of the battle But an active administrator and
arbiter cannot avoid controversy. At the height of the Cold War, in 1953, he was
a member of the FIDE qualification committee which rejected Fedor Bohatirchuk’s
application for the title of International Master. The Ukrainian Bohatirchuk was
detested in Soviet circles because he had worked for the German authorities when
living under the Nazi occupation in WWII. When the Red Army pushed the Germans
out he had chosen to join the retreat westwards; he eventually settled in
Canada. The Canadian federation mishandled the application, not even sending a
delegate to the FIDE congress to counter predictable Soviet arguments that he
should be rejected on political grounds. The Canadians based the claim on the
only two international tournaments in which Bohatirchuk had competed by the time
of his application, at Moscow in 1925 and 1935. Considering the strength of the
opposition (Capablanca finished third in 1925 and fourth in 1935) his
performances were quite impressive, but in neither event did he score above 50%.
Bob suggested that the correct procedure was to make the claim on the strength
of Bohatirchuk's performances in Soviet Championships; but it is not hard to
understand why this was not done in the first instance. Bob made clear that the
claim was rejected on technical, not political, grounds.
The rejection created a storm in Canadian chess circles where Bob had already
given offence by suggesting that Canada should cease to be a separate FIDE zone
and unite with that of the US. In the spirit of Senator Joe McCarthy, the
Canadian Vice-President denounced Bob as a lackey of the Soviets and a closet
Communist. His letter to the December 1952 “Canadian Chess Chat” was
subsequently reprinted in the February 1953 issue of “Chess” magazine. The right
wing editor BH Wood, who had served with Bob within FIDE, dismissed the
allegation Note 8. In the April issue Bob
presented his own side, he specifically denied being a communist.
Note 9 Unfortunately, these preposterous
allegations dogged Bob ever after. It cannot be stressed enough that politics
was not what Bob was about, chess was his great love.
What a lot of people did not, and some still do not, understand is that Bob's
respect for Soviet chess training methods Note 10
did not extend to respect for the Soviet system as a whole. The Soviets produced
the world's best players and Bob was ahead of his time in seeing how this was
achieved. His political views were left of centre, but certainly never
communist, never mind Communist: unfortunately, these subtleties are often
misunderstood. Bob did once have a regular column in the widely circulated
“Daily Worker”, which was passed on to him by William Winter, who, unlike Bob,
was a Communist. This eked out Bob's earnings from other chess related
activities such as teaching; it did not point to his political views. Winter was
firmly of the view that national chess columns should be written by chess
professionals; he objected to strong amateurs, such as Alexander, earning money
they did not need at the expense of struggling chess professionals. The column
continued until the “Daily Worker” could no longer afford the luxury of a paid
chess columnist. Bob never again obtained the financial cushion afforded to a
national chess journalist. Note 11
The life of a full time chess master has never been an easy one in Great
Britain; it required an asceticism that Bob possessed in full measure. This
self-discipline was expressed in an excellent track record when it came to the
production and writing of quality chess books. For Bob, as editor of Batsford's
“Contemporary Chess Openings” series, had a hand not just in those he himself
authored or co-authored, but countless others too, including a small role in
perhaps the most overrated chess book ever written: Kotov's “Think Like a
Grandmaster”. Bob wrote an acclaimed account of the 1951 World Championship
between Botvinnik and Bronstein jointly with William Winter; other well received
books included “Soviet Chess” (published 1968); “The World Chess Championship”
jointly with Gligoric (published 1972, it should be noted that the annotations
were by Jimmy Adams, Kevin O'Connell, Les Blackstock, Leonard Pickett, George
Botterill, John Moles and Tony Swift. Gligoric dropped out of the 1986 edition
in which Bob collaborated with Ray Keene and Andrew Whiteley); “The Closed Ruy
Lopez” with Les Blackstock and Philip J Booth (although dated, because it was
written before the invention of the Zaitsev defence, there is still much good
material present); and "The Games of Robert J. Fischer" written with Kevin
O'Connell (the book whose publication just prior to the 1972 match between
Fischer and Spassky ruffled the American's feathers).
Making a living out of playing, teaching, writing and acting as an arbiter did
not leave much in the way of a disposable income. So I was astonished to see how
generous, in monetary terms, Bob had been to the Athenaeum his main chess club;
to which he had been introduced by Daniel Castello in 1953. He gave so much of
his time free that British, indeed world, chess will forever be in his debt. I
count myself fortunate to be the recipient of gifts from him, including one of
only ten copies of a booklet he produced. I was lucky enough, too, to be invited
to both of Bob's eightieth birthday parties; at least I assume there were only
two, for given his popularity there may well have been others.
Bob's collection of chess materials was vast; it included a signed copy of the
book of the World Championship match between Lasker and Capablanca. Bob also
showed me a book signed by Vyacheslav Ragosin, he was obliging enough to agree
with my clumsy: “an erratic, but talented, player”. Many contributed to the
build up of his library, best known, of course, is the role played by the
publisher Batsford Books; however, Leonard Barden, too, donated a lot of
volumes.
Bob always lived for the present and the future; he did not dwell on the past. I
can accept that he spent his final hours plotting an overseas trip. Bob was
always aware of his limitations, as he advanced in years he tried to adjust to
his reduced stamina by playing quickly, although he had never been a slow
player. What upset him was the suggestion that he should not be taken seriously
because of his age: as I told Bob the penultimate time I saw him, he was very
much compos mentis: he expressed his thanks and wished others would recognise
this. I never hesitated to ask Bob for advice when occasion demanded it.
Who could not like Bob, once one knew him? He had so many friends that it was
hardly surprising that his last competitive game was played on 18th November
against one of these, Jim Stevenson. Bob had been expected to play a London
League game for the Athenaeum at home on 26th November. There was consternation
when he did not appear; for he always arrived early. In the more than thirty
years that I knew Bob, I can only recall him defaulting once, and that through
no fault of his. We must have sat on adjacent, or nearby, boards dozens of
times, if not hundreds.
I should like to express my thanks to Andrew Whiteley, Jim Stevenson and, most
especially, Bob's authorised biographer Paul McKeown for their help in the
writing of this tribute.
Simon Spivack.
Bob Wade, born Dunedin, New Zealand 10th April, 1921;
died London 29th November. 2008.
For three, two of which are previously unpublished, Wade games, annotated by
Paul McKeown, please click on this link.
For further details on Bob's contributions to Middlesex, generously made
available by Paul McKeown from his unpublished biography of Bob, please click on
this link.
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