An Appreciation of Bill Hartston

[Wayne Komer]

An Appreciation of Bill Hartston

August 12, 2020

When England was a hotbed of chess activity in the late 60s and 70s, William Hartston was in the centre of it. Two Batsford books I purchased back then were The King’s Indian Defence and The Benoni, which Bill authored or co-authored.

A list of his major chess books:

The King’s Indian Defence
(with Leonard Barden)
Batsford 1969

The Benoni
Batsford 1969

The Grunfeld Defence
Batsford 1971

The Best Games of CHO’D Alexander
With H. Golombek
Oxford UP 1976

London 1980:Phillips & Drew Kings Chess Tournament
With Steward Reuben
Pergamon 1981

Karpov v Korchnoi: The World Chess Championship 1981
Fontana Paperbacks 1981

The Psychology of Chess
Facts on File 1984

The Kings of Chess: A History of Chess Traced Through the Lives of its Greatest Players
Pavilion 1985

Chess: the making of a musical
Pavilion 1986

The Brussels encounter
Chequers Chess 198

The super clash: SWIFT
Chequers 1987

Hort v Kasparov: the hi-jacking of the world chess championship
Hodder & Stoughton 1993

How to cheat at chess
Cadogan 1994

Soft Pawn
Cadogan 1995

The Guinness book of chess grandmasters
Guinness 1996

Better Chess
Teach Yourself Books 2003

He also writes on scientific subjects and I believe he is the author of SLOTHS: a celebration of the world’s most misunderstood mammal, Atlantic Books 2019. I am still considering whether I should buy this an add it to my collection because it is by chess author.

On August 12, John Upham published an appreciation in the British Chess News:

https://britishchessnews.com/2020/08...birthday-bill/

This is an excellent read if you have the time.

Excerpts from the bio:

William Roland Hartston was born in Willesden, Middlesex on Tuesday, August 12th, 1947. His father was William Hartston, a significant member of the Royal College of Physicians who was married to Mary Rowland. Bill has a sister.

He studied at the City of London School and then studied mathematics at Jesus College, Cambridge and graduated with a BA in 1968 and an MA in 1972, but did not complete his PhD on number theory.

While studying for his PhD at Cambridge, Hartston developed an intricate system for balancing an entire chess set on top of a single rook. See the explanation below

Bill married Dr. Jana Malypetrova in January, 1970 in Cambridge. In 1978 Bill married Elizabeth Bannerman, also in Cambridge and from that marriage he had two sons, James and Nicholas.

Bill became an International Master in 1972 and his highest FIDE rating was 2485 in January 1979.

See also his Wikipedia bio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hartston
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The Great Chess Pile

Could you set a white rook on a table and then pile the rest of the chess set onto it, with pieces hanging on pieces, making a tower with nothing but the rook touching the table?

This can be done and there is a photo of it at:

http://streathambrixtonchess.blogspo...d-on-rest.html

This was accomplished by Bill Hartston and here is the letter to Jonathan B explaining how he did it.

Dear Jonathan,

Here's the picture of the Great Chess Pile as promised. The history of it is as follows:

It all started with a conversation when I was still at school with a lovely fellow, and fine player, called KW Lloyd who told me that he'd wasted much of his time at Cambridge trying to pile an entire chess set on one white rook, but had never succeeded. I didn't know whether he was just making it up, or how hard he'd tried if he wasn't, or how close he'd come, but when I got to Cambridge and needed a way to waste my own time, I remembered the idea and started trying it myself.

The standard cheap set of the time, which I had with me, was made of French boxwood and had knights with ears that pointed upwards. That's very important. The first stage was designing the architecture.

Just trying to balance pieces on top of each other is clearly never going to work, and I quickly realised that they key was to come up with a design that comprised a number of storeys, each with a top that allowed the next storey to rest on top. I soon came up with the following plan:

1) You can hang a couple of knights by their noses over the top of a rook. The knight's ears then form a four-pointed base for the next level top balance on.

1a) Furthermore, two bishops can be tucked under the knights' paunches, held in place by the weight of the knight. Two rooks with knight-and-bishop accompaniment thus gets rid of all the minor pieces.

2) Three pawns may be hung around the Queen's crown to provide a three-point base made of the pawns' bobbles for the next level.

3) The kings' crosses can be used to attach the kings to the top of a rook.

4) That leaves only a large handful pawns to get rid of. Four of these can hang around the top of the rook at the base of the pile, kept in place by the weight of a rook/knight/bishop or queen-and-pawns combo above it. Two more pawns can sit between the ears of the knights. Two more pawns can be right at the top, where the kings' crosses are. Which leaves, I think, only two more pawns to be balanced on a couple of bishops that are already in the pile.

Easy! Only it took me most of my undergraduate career to get it to work, and my rooms was constantly echoing to the sound of clattering chess piles.

You can see why Islam banned representative images in their chessmen in the Middle Ages - flat draughts-like pieces are so much easier to pile.


Regards

Bill Hartston

[Erik Malmsten]

Dobrich used to win bets in Toronto bars by piling all the pieces (8 or 16?) on one square.

[Frank Dixon]

IM Hartston, along with GM Raymond Keene, (one year older) was an essential leading player in the great rise of English chess, beginning in the late 1960s. Following soon afterwards, and no doubt inspired by the examples of Hartston and Keene, was the next wave of very strong English players: GM Tony Miles, GM Jon Speelman, GM John Nunn, GM Jon Mestel. By the early 1980s, England was one of the world's top ten chess nations; this after having had NO GMs at all, until Miles and Keene in the mid-1970s.
Then, GM Nigel Short, then in his mid-teens, was starting his amazing rise towards a world title match in 1993, which was to have profound impact on the chess world for the next decade, as Short and champion GM Gary Kasparov split off from FIDE when unhappy with process and size of prize fund for the title match.
But I do remember with great fondness Canada's team victory over the much higher ranked England at the 1982 Lucerne Olympiad. GM Igor Ivanov defeated Miles on board one in an amazing game, and IM Lawrence Day won on board four over Mestel, in 25 moves from the Black side of a Pterodactyl. The win was reported by FM/GMC/IA Jonathan Berry in En Passant; Berry, on the scene as a journalist on vacation, was a last-minute recruit to the team (literally minutes before the team lineup filing deadline closed) as second alternate, when IM Leon Piasetski had to cancel, due to a family health emergency.
Hartston likely could have obtained his GM title in the 1970s with more concentration on chess, while doing his PhD work (never completed).