Leonard Barden - Role in "English Chess Explosion"

Role in "English Chess Explosion"

Barden's most important achievement was his key role in the rapid advance of English chess in the 1970s and 1980s from also-rans to Olympiad silver medal winners. His involvement began in 1971 when he noticed that Tony Miles and Michael Stean were both likely contenders for the biennial 1973 world junior (under-20) championship, but that the only way for a country to have two representatives was to host the event. Barden knew the financier Jim Slater, who offered to co-sponsor the event, which was staged at Teesside. There, Miles and Stean won silver and bronze medals, respectively, and Miles won the title in 1974 when it changed to an annual contest. Slater also agreed to Barden's proposal that he should finance special coaching by Bob Wade for the five best teenage prospects. They all became grandmasters.

In 1972 after Slater saved the Bobby Fischer versus Boris Spassky world championship match from collapse by doubling the prize fund, he offered £5,000 to the first English grandmaster and £2,000 to the next four players to qualify. Barden worked out the detailed terms, and wrote the speech at Hastings where Slater announced the awards. Encouraged by success, Barden and Slater then agreed on a wider programme to stimulate talent at much younger ages, aiming to produce a generation which could compete with the Soviet Union, the world's leading chess nation.

Barden organised weekend junior invitation events at which the best prospects played a tournament and had coaching from masters between games. They were also introduced to top master chess at the annual Evening Standard weekend open and via grandmaster simultaneous exhibitions. The model was the USSR's own programme in the 1930s when future masters scored impressively in exhibitions against José Raúl Capablanca and Salo Flohr during the 1935 and 1936 Moscow tournaments. Very few juniors in the 1970s had international ratings, so Barden compiled his own world ranking lists for every age group from under-18 to under-10, updating the figures at monthly or weekly intervals and posting the results at the invitation events.

Barden read much Soviet chess literature, and in 1974 decided that an 11-year-old named Gary Weinstein was a likely future world champion. His Guardian column of 24 February 1975, headlined "World Champ 1990", made this a specific forecast. It was, by more than a year, the first such prediction by anyone for the future Garry Kasparov.

By summer 1975 Barden believed that Nigel Short, then aged 9, also had world title potential. The simultaneous programme was intensified for Short, who in the next few years played three world champions and several other top grandmasters. Barden also used his columns to promote his juniors, whom some called "the Barden babes". When Short defeated Viktor Korchnoi, the world's second strongest active player, in a 1976 Evening Standard simultaneous the result was announced on that evening's ITN news bulletin.

One purpose of the publicity was to attract more sponsorship, and in summer 1976 Barden secured backing from Lloyds Bank. The bank's chairman, Sir Jeremy Morse, was an eminent chess problemist, and its sponsorship manager, Pat Bowman, liked the concept of the bank financing a serious challenge to Soviet chess supremacy.

The first Lloyds Bank event was a pilot, a London v New York telex match to celebrate the United States bicentennial, in which the American captain agreed to Barden's proposal to include extra under-11 boards, on one of which Short (who lived near Manchester) beat the future US champion Joel Benjamin. By then many juniors were advancing towards master strength, but lacked official FIDE international ratings and titles. So in 1977 the annual Lloyds Bank Masters was launched, modelled on a successful US event at Lone Pine where the best US juniors competed against grandmasters. Barden also organised an all-play-all tournament, the Lord John Cup, where the grandmaster score was sufficiently low that three young English masters - John Nunn, Michael Stean and Jonathan Mestel - all achieved it.

By 1978, when England won the world under-26 championship at Mexico City ahead of the USSR and a group financed by Lloyds Bank performed strongly at Lone Pine, the golden generation was on the way to the Olympiad silver medals achieved in 1984, 1986 and 1988. Barden continued to seek new primary school talent, and in 1980 recognised the exceptional promise of the then 8-year-old Michael Adams. Adams lived in Cornwall, far from the major chess centres, so Barden arranged for a Devon organiser, Ken Butt, to stage an annual Lloyds Bank under-18 international tournament in Plymouth. Adams first played there at age 10, and by 12 missed an international master result by only half a point in his Lloyds Bank Masters debut where, in line with Barden's policy of matching the best talents against top grandmasters, he also performed well in a blitz game against Spassky.

In 1980, George Low wrote in Education magazine:

Mr. Leonard Barden, manager of the junior squad, traces the resurgence of interest to media coverage of the Fischer-Spassky duel eight years ago and its sequel between Korchnoi and Karpov five years later.

In about 1972-73, he recalls, the selectors started casting their nets much wider than the Home Counties grammar schools where the recruiting ground had traditionally been. He and his colleagues looked through the results of a lot more tournaments all over the country. Those who had real talent were encouraged to go in for the National Junior Squad Championships and to enter adult tournaments. They were also given the opportunity to play against adult grandmasters in 'simuls' (simultaneous games involving 20 or 30 boards). Mr Barden now has 500 players on his books in whom he takes an active interest, following their tournament games and writing to suggest alternative strategies in their games.

By the 1980s the "English Chess Explosion" was in full swing, but Barden took a lesser role due to having to care for his mother, who suffered from Alzheimer's Disease. He still spotted talents early, notably Matthew Sadler, who debuted in the Lloyds Bank tournament at 11 and became a leading grandmaster in the 1990s. In 1992 when the British Chess Federation was reluctant to send Luke McShane, then 8, to the world under-10 championship in Duisburg, Barden campaigned for a positive outcome which was rewarded when McShane won the gold medal. In 1988-90, he managed the early programme for David Howell, then 8, who at 16 became England's youngest grandmaster.

In recognition of his efforts, Barden was offered an OBE, but declined it. Brian Walden has written that "Leonard Barden has done more for British chess than anybody since our famous 19th century champion, Howard Staunton."