In the previous post, I said I would have more to say about the English player Malcolm Neil Barker, who played in the 1949 Glorney Cup.
He was British Boys’ Champion three times, starting in 1949, and also played in the Glorney Cups of 1951 and 1952.
In between these last two, he finished clear second at the first World Junior Championship in Coventry and Birmingham in 1951, behind Ivkov, and ahead of Larsen and Olafsson. “A great future was expected of him in chess, but he soon gave up the game completely”, as the Chess Scotland Glorney Cup page puts it.
However, Neil Blackburn of Birmingham has recently (November 2019) put together a remarkable series of posts on “The Short But Extraordinary Chess Career of Malcolm Barker”, divided into Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. (See also the introductory post Malcolm Barker by Richard James at The Chess Improver blog, December 2019.)
Barker had been out of contact with the entire chess world for well over half a century, but Blackburn managed to make contact with him, and Parts 2 and 3 above contain photos and recollections from Barker himself. Part 2 contains a very high quality photo of him in play against Walter Marshall, which he thinks is from 1949. (The post specifically asks for the photo not to be reproduced, so see the article directly.) Part 3 sees Barker give his recollections in his own words, including his reasons for giving up the game, two of his games from the 1951 Glorney Cup, and his recollections of the 1949 Glorney Cup in Birmingham, among many other topics.
I was delighted to see that Barker had spotted and cited our two previous posts at IRLchess on the 1949 Glorney Cup (my post Marshall-Fagan, Glorney Cup 1949 and David’s Marshall’s reminiscence about his game against Fagan, from October 2018).
As far as the Glorney Cup 1949 is concerned, there is a discrepancy. Barker thinks that the photo of his game against Marshall must be from the 1949 Glorney Cup. But this doesn’t match contemporary newspaper reports from that event, which had Jonathan Penrose drawing against Marshall, and Barker winning against J. Murphy, in the England – Wales match that year. Barker speculates that one of the cups in the photo was the Glorney Cup competed for in 1949, but, as discussed in the last post, that doesn’t seem to match descriptions of the inaugural event the previous year.