Life
As a child he moved with his family from Egypt to New Zealand, then to Tasmania, Australia, before they settled in Sydney when he was 12, where he was educated at Cranbrook School. While in Tasmania one of his classmates was future film star Errol Flynn.
He began his chess career at the age of 16 and soon decided to become a full-time chess writer and player. Initially an over the board (OTB) player, he soon began to mix OTB play with correspondence play. He was four times winner of the Australian Chess Championship, in 1935, 1937, 1949, and 1951. He won the first two Australian Correspondence Chess Championships, in 1938 and 1945. He also won the New Zealand Chess Championship in 1924/25. In Auckland 1952, he drew a hard-fought match with Ortvin Sarapu, at the time by far the best player in New Zealand. They were thus declared Australasian co-champions.
He was married in 1934 to Anne Crakanthorp, the daughter of two-time Australian Chess Champion Spencer Crakanthorp. The marriage produced two children, John (1935–2011) and Diana. John Purdy followed in his father's (and grandfather's) footsteps in winning the Australian Chess Championship in 1955 and 1963. Diana was also a keen chessplayer, and married leading New Zealand player Frank Hutchings in 1960.
Purdy founded and edited the magazine Australasian Chess Review (1929–1944); this became Check (1944–45), and finally Chessworld (1946–1967). He was described by Bobby Fischer as being a great chess instructor. Some of his writings are still in print. He is somewhat famous for saying "Pawn endings are to chess as putting is to golf."
In 1976 he was awarded the Order of Australia for services to chess.
Read more about this topic: Cecil Purdy
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.”
—André Breton (1896–1966)
“You must not eat with it anything leavened. For seven days you shall eat unleavened bread with it -the bread of affliction -because you came out of the land of Egypt in great haste, so that all the days of your life you may remember the day of your departure from the land of Egypt.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Deuteronomy 16:3.