Firstly, we reproduce C.N. 11819 (posted on 24 October 2020):
11819. A quiz question
Name the person who has written all the following:
(1) on his website, a brief review of Kings, Commoners and
Knaves which said little about our book but suggested,
with no particulars, that we were ‘starting to draw up a
hit-list’, that we might be sued for libel by Raymond Keene, and
that our reputation was for ‘objectivity (bordering on
pedantry)’;
(In his magazine he published a different version of the
review, but still with only one specific reference to our
book’s contents: ‘The “Knaves” of his title would seem to
include Ray Keene and Eric Schiller but I had to smile at his
exposure of the latter’s cheap and unfounded remark about one
of my books in the item on page 271.’)
(2) on a dedicated webpage, an attempt at personal mockery of
us through pictorial ‘Austin Winters’ items (a spoof of the
first Austin Powers film). They were soon withdrawn;
(3) on his website, a review of an issue of the magazine Kingpin,
with about one-third of the entire review consisting of muddled
comments about our having a Forum in Kingpin while also
writing the C.N. column. The Forum ...
‘... looks very like Chess Notes, especially the (I won’t
say undeserved) attacks on Ray Keene and Eric Schiller without
which no article by Edward Winter would these days be
complete. I am far from defending the hack-work of these guys
but it is making Winter sound like a vinyl LP stuck in a
groove. I also see that he is at the same lark on the Inside
Chess website’;
(The above ignored, inter alia, the fact that in a
personal message we had already told him regarding Raymond
Keene: ‘I invite you to note how often his name has even
been mentioned in C.N. since my column began in New in
Chess about a year and a half ago. Answer: not once.’
Further details will be provided in due course on this
point, and all the others in the present C.N. item.)
(4) on a correspondence chess website, the untrue
pronouncement that we had been sacked as a Chess Café columnist;
(5) in an on-line column, this assessment of C.N.:
‘The kind of historical-biographical chess writing which
essentially consists of snippets (even if they are arranged
into “threads”) cannot in the end make any great contribution
to chess history, consisting as it largely does of minor
corrections to the record, a bit of debunking, a lot of
hobby-horse-riding, some settling of scores and the occasional
answer to readers’ questions’;
(6) in a publication, a claim that ‘the piecemeal work of
Edward Winter, whose column “Chess Notes” has transferred to web
publication, is chiefly reliant on editing readers’ input’;
(7) in correspondence with another chess historian, these
statements: ‘I am unwilling to use Edward Winter’s column as a
conduit of information because he never gives me any credit for
data that I have occasionally supplied in response to his
queries, nor does he mention my books if he can help it.’ The
correspondence contained no corroboration of these statements
about us, which are untrue;
(8) on a discussion forum, two posts about Eric Schiller,
again referring to page 271 of Kings, Commoners and Knaves.
The posts included the following: ‘the Winter article (and
usually I don’t agree with Winter) is right on the money about
Schiller’s carelessness when it came to his so-called literary
efforts which are mostly of little merit’ and ‘I knew
immediately that what Schiller wrote was a disgraceful and
intellectually dishonest lie. Nothing since ever caused me to
change my mind about him.’ Our own ‘page 271 criticism’ of Eric
Schiller was written in 1993; the two posts on the discussion
forum (obituary section) were written just a few days after Eric
Schiller’s death;
(9) in one of his books, a declaration that C.N. ‘benefits
from a network of contributors worldwide, happy to do so in
exchange for having their books promoted or just “seeing their
name up in lights”’;
(10) on the same page of that book, an observation that C.N.
‘does not engage in systematic research of the kind this author
believes should be the main aim of a chess historian’, and that
‘the world of the chess historian would be well served if Mr
Winter decided to return to the production of major
contributions to chess literature’, as opposed to C.N.;
(11) on a discussion forum, this assertion (on 15 September
2020): ‘I haven’t for many years contributed to Chess Notes
because of Winter’s many and unfair attacks on my work.’
Persistently challenged on the forum to substantiate those
words, he remained silent.
The answer to the ‘quiz question’ is, of course, Timothy Harding.
Sources for all material are given below and, for ease of
reference, throughout the present article the bullet points have
now been numbered.
***
(1)
Sources: the Spring 1999 book reviews section (an article no
longer on-line) at T.H.’s Chess Mail website, and page 55 of his
printed magazine Chess Mail, June 1999.
(2)
Source: http://www.chessmail.com/austin.html (also no longer
on-line), posted circa January 2000.
(3)
The passage quoted came from the February 2000 on-line edition
of T.H.’s Chess Mail website, in this review of issue 31 (Autumn
1999) of Jonathan Manley’s magazine Kingpin:
Below, in legible format, are the comments on our five-page
Forum article:
The Forum feature in Kingpin which T.H. was ‘a bit
surprised to see’ in February 2000 had been appearing for a
decade, having started in issue 16 (Spring 1990). C.N. began in
New in Chess in the 5/1998 issue. Between the Forum and
C.N. there was no overlap of material or conflict of interest.
(4)
It was at the correspondencechess.com website (yet another
outlet no longer available on-line) that T.H. claimed in early
2000 that we had been sacked as a Chess Café columnist. In an
e-mail message dated 10 February 2000, the owner of the Chess
Café, Hanon Russell, asked him to correct his misstatement. When
reporting back that he had done so, T.H. explained that he had
written his words after seeing us praised on-line. Hanon
Russell’s further replies to T.H. (a Chess Café columnist at the
time) included the following: (a) ‘I don’t know why you have
this juvenile obsession with Winter. All it serves to do is
diminish you, not him, as a respectable journalist.’ (b) ‘You
don’t like anything or anybody that praises Winter. Too bad. Get
over it.’ (c) ‘You need to learn to toughen up and take the good
with the bad, without throwing a temper tantrum every time you
are criticized.’ (In this context, attention is drawn to the
Postscript to the present article.)
(5)
Source: A Tale of Two Conferences by T. Harding at the Chess Café, October 2005.
The relevant passage from the article:
Source: an e-mail message dated 19 August 2012 from T.H. to
Olimpiu G. Urcan (a longstanding contributor to C.N. and, at the
time, also a Chess Café columnist).
(8)
Source: two
posts by T.H. dated 7 November 2018 in the thread ‘Eric
Schiller (1955-2018)’ in the obituary section of the English
Chess Forum.
(9)
Source: page 292 of British Chess Literature to 1914 by
T.H. (Jefferson, 2018).
(10)
Source: page 292 of British Chess Literature to 1914 by
T.H. (Jefferson, 2018).
(11)
Source: post
by T.H. dated 15 September 2020 in the chess history section of
the English Chess Forum. The claim that we have made ‘many and
unfair attacks’ on his work remains unsubstantiated, by him or
by anyone else.
***
Postscript: Anyone inclined to use a word such as ‘vendetta’,
‘obsession’ or ‘feud’ is invited to consider this question: with
the exception of point 9 (which was briefly referred to in C.N.
10815), where, until now, have we ever taken up publicly any of
these criticisms of us that T.H. has published over the past two
decades?
***
For a further illustration of Timothy Harding’s conduct, see Jeremy
Gaige.
Addition on 14 May 2024:
As noted above, Timothy Harding wrote ‘usually I don’t agree with
Winter’. About him, we would never write in such sweeping terms;
our criticisms have been specific (and unanswered). Moreover, we
know of few chess historians who would disagree with this
observation of his at the English Chess Forum on 26
July 2013:
‘I would never dream of using chessgames.com as a source for
any kind of historical data.’
