|
|
|
|
Jim Draisey at Eighty Horfield & Redland members marked Jim's 80th birthday on Tuesday 20th March with a celebratory tea chessboard cake at the club premises. Jim, who left Fairfield Grammar School in 1935, started playing club chess in South Africa at the Panmuir chess club near East London. Between 1941 and 1946 he was there as a radar and wireless expert involved in training aircrew for the war effort. After the war Jim returned to his pre-war employers: Rolls Royce at Filton. At that time Mr Chapman was the outstanding player at Horfield chess club, but by the 1960s Jim had taken over his mantle - winning the club championship a record 12 times, including an unbroken run from 1962 to 1972. He was a member of the 1962 Horfield Team which won the league championship. Besides belonging to other chess clubs at Charfield, Henleaze and Bristol & Clifton, at this time he was also a member of Bristol bridge club. It was in the early 60s that Jim took over captaincy of the Gloucestershire correspondence chess team from another important figure in Bristol chess: Max Poolake. Gloucestershire were 5 times national correspondence chess champions; twice with Jim as captain. He recalls the pleasant surprise when C H O'D Alexander promptly accepted an invitation to play for the county. When A R Pitt, the Gloucestershire o.t.b. captain, emigrated to the US, Jim accepted the double captaincy. In those days Aitken and Mardle were the big names of Gloucestershire. The team often travelled together by motor coach, picking up the northern contingent in Gloucester and the southemers in Bristol, the order depending on the direction of travel, since matches were played against counties such as Worcestershire and Warwickshire, as well as those of the South West. Jim's team enjoyed a narrow but sweet victory (on board count) against Surrey in the national semi-final in one of those mid-'60s years. Surrey were so confident of success that they had already approached Middlesex about arrangements for the final. Regrettably the Londoners were too strong for the West Country team in the 16 board final. When Jim's mother died in in 1964 he became free to travel away to tournaments and to date he has played in 137 events. He has been a regular at the British Championship, except once when he was unable to get his holiday to coincide. That year he played instead in a tournament organised by B H Wood at Sutton Coldfield. Jim won a prize of a chess buzzer which has become something of a Horfield tradition: a 10 second buzzer competition being the habitual postscript to our AGMs on the first Tuesday of September. Four days after Jim's birthday celebration I found myself reading about Vassily Smyslov's 80th birthday. Jim recalled the great man giving a simultaneous display over 30 boards, more than 40 years ago in Bristol. Smyslov-Draisey concluded with a rook against four pawns. But a pair of Jim's pawns were well advanced, with both kings remote from the action. A smile lights his face as he recalls how those two pawns were too much for Smyslov's rook.
|
Jim Draisey,
our longest-serving member and life president, died last summer in his nursing
home in Weston-Super-Mare. This article, by Howard Millbank, was originally
published in the Bristol Chess Times, No. 129, May 2001, to mark Jim's 80th
birthday.