ECF Members will have just recently received the latest edition of the ECF Newsletter, which sometimes contains an interview with somebody you may or may not have heard of before, and this edition carries an interview with GM Gawain C B Jones, who was born in Keighley in 1987, and has for some time lived in the Hillsborough area of Sheffield. This article adds bits not covered by interviewer, Mark Rivlin (regarding whom the footnote).

A humorous point, not mentioned in the interview, is that while the prefixed “GM” would not impress one who does not play chess, the commonly-seen format “Jones, Gawain CB” rather amusingly suggests to the non-player that he is a Companion of the Order of the Bath. (Not putting a space between “C” and “B” causes worse problems, as when chess.com converts initials “CB” to “Cb” and so on.)

Sheffield chess-players are more likely to see Mrs. Jones than Mr. Jones playing in the local league, she being, of course, better known as Sue Maroroa, who is a New Zealand-born WIM (and also not a Companion of the Order of the Bath).

Sue’s absence from board 1 of Hillsborough A in the 2019-20 season may have been explained by the fact that Sue and Gawain had a daughter, Samaria, born back in June 2020. So, congratulations to Mr. & Mrs. Jones!

Whilst Gawain Jones himself does not play in the local league, he has, nevertheless, played representative team chess in Sheffield. Way back in whenever it was, when Master Jones was a fairly bubbly, and as the writer recalls (dare I say) slightly chubby (okay, “of rugby-oriented physique”), not-very-many-year-old, he represented Yorkshire in a match played against Warwickshire, at The Abbey, 944 Chesterfield Road, Sheffield.

The Warwickshire team, incidentally, was captained by Andrew Baruch, who had been a contemporary, in the Dundee Grammar School chess team, of Chris Jones, a chess-problemist friend of Brian Stephenson. Just as irrelevantly, the present writer, on board 1 for Sheffield’s “King Ted’s”, drew (with Black) with the said Chris Jones in the semi-finals of the Sunday Times schools’ team competition, and Chris Jones went on to beat (on adjudication) Chris C W Shephard of King Edward’s, Birmingham, now Sheffield Nomads. The holistic interconnectedness of chess never ceases to amaze. Anyway . . .

One surprising thing to emerge from the interview was that Gawain plays rugby for Sheffield Vulcans, and, moreover, Sue plays rugby for Sheffield Ladies, no less. That of course was put on hold when the baby made its presence felt.

(The interview can be read on the ECF website at https://www.englishchess.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Gawain-Jones.pdf.)

Footnote (extending the holistic interconnectedness of chess):

The interviewer was ECF Newsletter editor Mark Rivlin, who is a son of Leeds chess-player the late Abba Rivlin, who became a Yorkshire Chess Association Honorary Life Member. (The Yorkshire Chess History website has a page on Abba Rivlin.)