BCN Remembers Sir Richard William Barnes Clarke KCB OBE (13-viii-1910 21-vi-1975)
According to chess-poster.com : “He was commonly known as Otto Clarke”
Here is his Wikipedia entry
Here is a small article from chess-poster.com
Here is detail about the Clarke Grading System
and more about chess ratings systems in general
From The Oxford Companion to Chess by Hooper & Whyld :
Creator of the British system of grading. He gave up active chess after leaving Cambridge University where he played second board between C.H.O’D. Alexander and Jacob Bronowski.
At first a financial journalist (one of the two who created the Financial Times Index), he became, at the outbreak of the Second World War, a temporary civil servant, remaining to become one of the most distinguished of them, and to receive a knighthood.
According to Arpad E. Elo in “Ratings of Chessplayers Past and Present” : “In the chess world, rating systems have been used with varying degrees of success for over twenty-fove years. Those which have survived a share a common principle in that they combine the percentage score achieved by a player with the rating of his competition. They use similar formulae for the evaluation of performance and differ mainly in the elaboration of the scales. The most notable are the Ingo (Hoesskinger 1948), the Harkness (Harkness 1956), and the British Chess Federation (Clarke 1957) systems. These received acceptance because they produced ranking lists which generally agreed with the personal estimates made by knowledgeable chessplayers.”
Here is an article in full reproduced from British Chess Magazine, Volume LXXXIII, Number 2, February, 1963, pages 49 -53 :
According to chess-poster.com : “Clarke died in the University College Hospital, in London, on 21 June 1975 and was cremated at Golders Green three days later. He was survived by his wife Brenda Pile and their three sons.”
One of those sons is Charles Clarke
The June 1975 issue of British Chess Magazine announces his passing and promises that a tribute would follow : it never did.
