September 1955. The dying embers of one era, the dawning of another. It’s been five months since Sir Winston Churchill retired as prime minister. In another four Elvis Presley will release Heartbreak Hotel, his first worldwide hit. Food rationing is over. Frozen fish fingers, courtesy of Clarence Birdseye, have just arrived.
Change is also in the air at the Manchester Guardian. On 8 September a young chess master from Croydon, Leonard Barden, writes his first column. His subject is a Russian teenager, Boris Spassky, whose games, Barden notes, “all show the controlled aggression characteristic of a great master”.
The writing is lively and accessible. The judgment impeccable. Spassky will go on to become world champion. Meanwhile, Barden is on the foothills of a journey that, 70 years, 14 prime ministers, and nearly 4,000 articles later, is still going strong.
In all that time he has never missed a week – rain or shine, in sickness and in health. And now, officially, he is a record-breaker. Barden recently eclipsed Jim Walsh of the Irish Times, who started his column in July 1955 and finally retired in May this year, to set a Guinness World Record for the longest-running continuous chess column.
Barden, who recently turned 96, is also the longest-serving daily newspaper columnist for his 63-year stint with the Evening Standard, which ended in 2020. Both records will surely never be broken. Yet they are only a small part of an astonishing career.
He was British chess champion in 1954. He played for England in four chess Olympiads. And he was a key figure in the British chess explosion of the 70s and 80s that turned players such as Nigel Short into world title contenders. As the grandmaster Raymond Keene put it a couple of years ago: “Everywhere you looked in British chess, the giant handprint of Len Barden was to be found.”
Incredibly, he even beat the legendary Bobby Fischer at blitz – one of three world champions he faced over the board, along with Mikhail Botvinnik and Max Euwe.
“I got on very well with Fischer, who visited my home in 1960,” says Barden, who is deeply modest about his many achievements. “We played an informal blitz match which he won 12.5-1.5. After I won game eight, he said something like: ‘English weakie, that’s the last game you’ll ever win from me’ and we stopped after game 14 when I got a draw.
“Bobby was fine in 1960, by 1962 he had become religious and was paranoid about the Russians colluding against him,” he adds.
Those few sentences, rich in detail and insight, are typical of Barden. All columnists believe they know what is going on. Barden invariably did. He not only knew many of the greats, he had felt the power of their moves, and gaze, from across the board.
In 1961, for instance, he missed a difficult move to secure a draw against the world champion Botvinnik. But as he admitted to readers, when the Russian adjusted his tie – a signal to his opponents that he felt comfortable – he feared the worst.
His finest piece for the Guardian, he believes, was an 2016 obituary of the Russian grandmaster Mark Taimanov, who he faced in 1954. But his writings on all the game’s greats – including his favourite player, Paul Keres, and the likes of Fischer, Botvinnik and Spassky – are treasure troves.
It has been an extraordinary career and life. Barden, whose father was a dustman, started learning chess at grammar school and honed his game playing in air raid shelters during the second world war. He insists he was no prodigy, but in the early 50s he established himself as one of the country’s strongest players.
Then came the call to work for the Guardian, after the previous correspondent, Julius du Mont, suffered a stroke. However, Barden’s burgeoning career nearly ended before it had begun due to an error in a chess problem in an early column.
“I trusted Du Mont’s problemist adviser, who according to Du Mont had never made a mistake,” says Barden. “The Guardian switchboard was jammed with callers, the chief sub John Putz gave me an official final warning, and letters came for months afterwards as the Guardian Weekly reached obscure corners of the globe. I replied to hundreds of them individually.”
Barden continued to combine his writing with chess but having to file from the British championships while playing probably cost him more titles. “The worst experience was in 1957, when I had a winning position against [Jonathan] Penrose, and would have been half a point clear of the field before the final round had I won,” he says.
“We adjourned after a time scramble with me a pawn up. I had to play over all the other leading games before I could write my Guardian report and phone it to copytakers. Then I had less than an hour to eat, and analyse the adjourned position before the resumption. The position was winning but difficult, and I was stressed out, played weakly and lost.”
The following year in Hastings, however, he produced his best performance scoring 5/9 and finishing fourth in a field that included three world title candidates, Keres, Svetozar Gligoric and Miroslav Filip. But Barden is modest about his playing strength, which he says was a rating of around 2350-2360 – putting him between Fide master and international master but short of grandmaster level.
So what is his secret to his longevity as a columnist? Barden puts it down to hard work, a strong fear of missing deadlines, and luck. He believes his friend, Gordon Crown – “an excellent writer and a far better player than me” – would have been a contender to be the Guardian’s next chess columnist if he had not died of appendicitis aged 18.
It also helped that Barden knew Du Mont, who had encouraged him as a teenage player. He would proof and correct his columns and books and in return Du Mont would give him tinned meat “for which my mother was very grateful, going hungry in the difficult war years”.
But there is something else that explains Barden’s longevity. He always thinks of the reader. There is always a fresh anecdote or nugget of wisdom in every column. And he writes in a way that is welcoming to a chess beginner while also telling an expert something new, a rare skill indeed.
He is not scared to make bold predictions either. In 1975 he forecast that an 11-year-old Garry Weinstein – who changed his surname to Kasparov – would be the world champion, after following his progress from the age of seven or eight when he was second in the Baku blitz championship.
“I read many Russian chess magazines,” says Barden. “Kasparov was obviously being groomed for the top, had won the USSR under-18s at 11, and performed well against top GMs in clock simuls. When congratulated after beating the strong Soviet grandmaster Yuri Averbakh he replied: ‘Not so special. Averbakh didn’t play well.’”
Barden believes that Kasparov remains the greatest player in history due to his consistently higher-class results over a quarter of a century against the strongest opposition – but he says the gap is closing.
“I might take a different view if Magnus Carlsen maintains his present level for another five years, although I won’t be around to see it,” he says. “I reluctantly discard Fischer, my personal hero of the three, because his absolute peak was over too brief a period.”
While Barden believes the endgame is approaching, his love of chess remains undiminished. Even now he still plays unrated 3+2 blitz most days on Lichess, and has a 2000+ rating.
More impressive still, the quality of his writing remains extraordinarily high, the affection for the royal game apparent in every syllable. His devoted readers will hope that many more moves in his remarkable career still lie ahead.
