William Fairhurst

William Albert Fairhurst

In 1931, he went to live in Scotland and laid the foundations for a chess boom north of the border, winning the Scottish championship a record eleven times between 1932 and 1962. A gifted blindfold player, he held a twelve-board simultaneous blindfold exhibition in 1932 at the Glasgow Polytechnic Club, winning nine games and drawing three. A year later, he drew a six-game match with the then Austrian master Erich Eliskases, a player of noted strength and very much a rising star in world chess. In 1937, Fairhurst won a fiercely contested British Championship in Blackpool.

Playing team chess, he represented Great Britain many times, in a series of matches with Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands and Russia, held between 1937 and 1954. Playing board one, he spearheaded the Scottish Chess Olympiad team on six occasions between 1933 and 1968; his victims included the Danish champion and future world championship contender Bent Larsen, who was close to his peak. In 1947, he played in a radio match with Australia and at the end of the year, achieved a creditable fifth place at the Hastings International Chess Congress of 1947/48. His next performance at Hastings was similarly praiseworthy, finishing the 1948/49 event in a tie for fourth place.

In 1950, chess organisers took advantage of the fact that the leading players of England, Scotland, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa were all gathered in Britain at the same time. An impromptu first (unofficial) Commonwealth Chess Championship was arranged and held in Oxford. Fairhurst won the event, ahead of Daniel Yanofsky, Robert Wade and Wolfgang Heidenfeld, among others. He later lost a match to Wade in Glasgow in 1953.

As the best of his playing days drew to a close, Fairhurst continued to give generously of his time and money, for the furtherance of Scottish Chess. He was made President of the Scottish Chess Association (SCA) from 1956 and forged new links with the

His business interests caused him to move to New Zealand around 1970. While there, he played in the New Zealand Chess Championship and decided that he liked the country so much, it would make an ideal venue for his retirement. He competed at the Nice 1974 Olympiad for his new adopted country, playing board one and registering a 40% score; an outstanding result for a seventy-year-old.^[2]

Bridge designer

After building a career and reputation for himself in civil and

For his engineering achievements, he received a doctorate,^[