William Roland Hartston is an English journalist who writes the Beachcomber column in the Daily Express and a chess player who played competitively from 1962 to 1987 with a highest Elo rating of 2485. He was awarded the title International Master in 1972, but is now best known as a chess author and presenter of the game on television.
Biography
At the 19th Chess Olympiad, held at Siegen 1970, he won the gold medal for best score on board 3. He won the British Chess Championship in 1973 and 1975. In international competition, he had many fine performances, but failed to achieve the results required for the title of International Grandmaster. During his time as a PhD student at Cambridge, Hartston became the first person to stack the pieces from an entire chess seton top of a single white rook. He studied mathematics at Jesus College, Cambridge but did not complete his PhD on number theory as he spent too much time playing chess. Since the early 1970s, he has made many TV appearances for the BBC, usually in the role of expert commentator and analyst on world title matches, including Fischer-Spassky '72, Karpov-Korchnoi '78, Kasparov-Short '93 and Kasparov-Anand '95. He twice won the BBC Master Game competition before taking over from Leonard Barden as its resident expert. During the 1980s he presented the BBC series Play Chess. In recent years he has diversified into a number of creative areas, running competitions in creative thinking for The Independent newspaper and the Mind Sports Olympiad. He writes the off-beat Beachcomber column for the Daily Express and has authored books on chess, mathematics, humour and trivia. He has also been a regular guest on the BBC Radio 4 and occasional TV programme, Puzzle Panel and appeared in Series 8 of The Museum of Curiosity also on Radio 4. Aside from his chess and media-related activities, Hartston is a mathematician and industrial psychologist. He was educated at City of London School and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics. During the 1980s, he was recruited by Meredith Belbin, at the Industrial Training Research Unit in Cambridge, to work as part of a multi-disciplinary team researching the dynamics of team roles. While continuing to write the Beachcomber column and other features for the Daily Express, he has also been behind the launching of the now defunct wakkipedia.com Internet site of useless information. His latest publication is Even More Things That Nobody Knows, a further discussion of 501 unanswered questions ranging from science to history, including a good supply of typically quirky items. Hartston was the first of three British chess champions to be married to Woman Grandmaster Dr Jana Bellin. With his second wife, Elizabeth, he had two sons, James and Nicholas. On 2 April 2013 it was reported that Hartston had "perfected" a formula for predicting the winner of the Grand Nationalhorse race, in a study commissioned by bookmaker William Hill. The story of the winning formula has since been widely thought to be an April Fools joke that many have fallen for. In 2013 Hartston and his friend Josef Kollar became regular 'viewers' on the Channel 4 programme Gogglebox.
