As a young man in the 1920s, Lommer sometimes showed his compositions to habitués of the Vienna Café near Leicester Square . Offering to help an elderly gentleman to solve one of them, he met with the response “Solve it! I solved it minutes ago. I’m trying to cook it!” And that was how he first met Emanuel Lasker, who became a major figure in Harold’s chess education.

Lasker later paid him the left-handed compliment: “Lommer, you will always be a born tactician”. Afterwards, whenever someone congratulated him on a nice finish to a game, Lommer would insist it couldn’t have worked against proper positional play, and then add: “Lasker once said to me …. “. Whatever the truth of it, he was generally regarded as a dangerous opponent for almost anyone. The near-win he achieved against Alekhine at Geneva in 1925 (given in the main article, above) was cited by Hayden as a case in point.

An early chess hero of his was Johannes Zukertort. Having learned that he’d died in London, Lommer searched for the grave, and was horrified to discover it neglected and overgrown with weeds. It became his self-imposed task to restore the site and keep it tidy, which he did regularly throughout the rest of his London sojourn.

[For those who’d like to see the rest, the article was reprinted in full in Hayden’s book Cabbage Heads And Chess Kings (Arco Books, 1960), and an abridged version (omitting a pretty finish from one of Lommer’s rook-odds games) also appeared in Fred Reinfeld’s Treasury Of Chess Lore (Dover reprint 1959).]

His friend and fellow endgame study enthusiast Heinrich Fraenkel (better known as New Statesman columnist “Assiac”, and also once an acquaintance of Lasker’s) related an amusing account of the difficulties Lommer had in composing a study that required under-promotion to bishop to secure the win, while using only the minimum white force of K+P. It was printed as a last-minute insertion in his 1960 book The Delights Of Chess, a volume that’s still not too hard to find.