Before we start requesting corrections, there's still one little ambiguity. The match result I gave above shows White's name as "W. A. Brown", while the game score in your kibitz refers to "W S Brown". Did that score come from Kneebone? I checked a few other matches, and the player in question always shows up as "W. A. Brown". By the way, at the time of this game he had a BCF grade of 185, which translates to about 2080 Elo.

<JoergWalter> Indeed.

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Thanks for getting the ball rolling on this one. <<<>>> >>

Cambridge Uni top players called me the weakest good player in the world: probably nobody has wrecked more good positions (through nerves, mostly) than I used to manage.

Highlights of my chess career:
captained a Cambridge Uni side in a National Club match (I had a car and it was the only way Keene/Hartston/Williams et al could persuade me to take them to some remote corner of East Anglia); won Berkshire championship twice in the 1970s; had a couple of years of averaging over 200 (BCF) in London Opens, winning grading prizes; suffered another publicised humilation against D. Miller in a Welsh Open, which appeared in CHESS magazine; leaping into the lead after 3 rounds of the West of England Champs, and then "flatlining"; helping my son to become a junior England international; organising junior chess in Cornwall; winning Cornwall championship in 2011 soon after my 60th birthday (41 years after first trying for it), and after being second 8 times.

Why did I not become a stronger player, someone asks? As I wrote before: partly nerves when ahead (no longer a problem); inaccurate calculation (an increasing problem, with age); and a focus on career - I was a teacher then headteacher and my termtime grade was about 20 BCF points less than vacation grade.

Enough of me.
I'll give my views on the game v Browne, and of my "discovery" of Michael Adams later (or "drekly" as we say in Cornwall).

I had the same line a year or two later and played 10 ... Nxd4 and 11 .... b5, winning the game.

Of course I was correct - Walter Browne played no chess in the UK in 1985 ... or at least, I could find no evidence of this.

Back in 1979 I played in an away league match for St Ives against Falmouth. At the time my BCF grade was about 185, the highest in Cornish league chess (ex-international Peter H Clarke lived in the county but rarely played in league matches). I helped, through coaching and controlling, Cornish juniors.

After winning my individual match game I was approached by a man who asked me if I'd play his son - as sometimes happened when I visited clubs, so I thought little of it.

An hour or so later it was time to go; whether it was Michael's bedtime or my car passengers were all waiting I'm not sure. To my embarrassment, the position was very level after perhaps 20 utterly sensible moves on each side.

As I drove out of Falmouth, I said to my passengers who were teasing me about drawing with an infant, "I'm either going senile, or I've just played a genius". You can imagine what they initially said, but I told them the moves and a hush came over the car with two other BCF 170+ players sharing my view that indeed a possible chess genius was living in Falmouth. Michael (I can't get used to "Mickey") had never before this game with me played anyone graded over about 140. As we watched him develop his chess we always remarked what an extraordinary talent he had for knowing the best squares for his pieces and his natural ability to understand pawn structures: it all seemed so desperately and infuriatingly easy.