Helen Eliza Sidney (1858-1939)

Helen Eliza Sidney (née Eliza Truelove) was a regular competitor in the British Women's Chess Championship before the First World War. Her best performances were in the first British Women's Championship in 1904 when she finished sixth, in 1907 when she finished fourth, then 3rd= in 1909 and again 3rd= (with three others) in 1911. She scored 10/19 to finish 11th= in the 1897 Ladies' International tournament. She was many times Sussex Women's Champion and was co-founder of Hove Chess Club in around 1898. She still turned out for them in the last year of her life.

She remained a generous sponsor of chess to the end of her life. In 1938 the Mayor of Brighton paid tribute to her, saying she had "done a great service to Brighton in getting the British Chess Federation to hold their congress there." She presented the prizes at the 1938 British Championship.  

 

Helen Eliza Sidney in 1897 (John White Collection, Cleveland Library)

Mrs Sidney proved to be elusive in BMD records as regards her forenames and d.o.b. She seems have been born Eliza Truelove in Newdigate in Surrey on 23 July 1858, the daughter of an agricultural labourer, William Truelove and Hannah (who died when Eliza was young). (Having researched many chess players of her era, she is one of very few who came from such a humble background.) She later assumed a first/middle name of Helen or Ellen, giving her original name variously as Eliza, Elise or Elizabeth, and varying her d.o.b. by a few years. (In chess references she can be Mrs E H Sidney or Mrs H E Sidney.) She married a much older man, Paul Sidney (1830-1914), in Brighton in 1883. He was referred to as an architect in census returns and it appears that he worked as a property developer in the Brighton and Hove area, with Mrs Sidney assisting in that work. Paul Sidney left £2,212 in his will.

Mrs Sidney died (name given as Helen Eliza Sidney) on 9 December 1939 in Hove, Sussex. She left a total of £33,144 in her will.

I came upon a short biography of her in the Lady's Pictorial of 10 August 1895 and thought it would be useful to record it here for future reference.

Lady's Pictorial, 10 August 1895 (presumably written by Miriam Gunsberg who conducted the chess column in this paper. The photo above also appeared with the article)

A lady who has beaten Mr. Lasker surely deserves a place in our gallery of Chess celebrities. Mrs. Sidney, whose photo we gave has accomplished that brilliant feat, and as far as we know she is the only lady that has ever won a game of Mr. Lasker. Mrs. Sidney gained her victory, as a matter of course, not in single combat, but as one of twenty-five players opposed to Mr. Lasker at the Brighton Chess Club.

The home of Mrs. Sidney is Brighton, she is a member of the St. Ann's Club and of the Sussex Chess Association, and also of the Brighton Chess Club. Mrs. Sidney has played in many matches with invariable success. Unlike most of our other Chess devotees, she only began to play Chess after her marriage [in 1883], her husband offering to teach her. The first two games did not impress her favourably with Chess as a pastime. She thought it an exceedingly slow recreation; and when her husband admonished her to take time over her moves, and think well before she touched a piece, Mrs. Sidney swept the pieces off the table and said, "No more chess for me, it requires too much thinking." But after a while she not only took to the game but determined to thoroughly master its difficulties and rapidly succeeded in her task. She is now one of the best players in Brighton, and her house is a pleasant rendezvous for lady Chess devotees sojourning at the Queen of Watering Places.

As regards the simul win against Lasker, this occurred on 3 October 1894 when Lasker won 21 games, drew three and lost to Mrs Sidney and Mr W Walker. The score of the latter's win is extant but not Mrs Sidney's. 

Here's an example of Mrs Sidney's chess, beating a future British Women's Champion at the 1897 Ladies' International:

MRS SIDNEY GOES TO COURT: SHE WHO DARES, LOSES

Mrs Sidney's name appeared in newspapers on at least three occasions in connection with court cases. One was for breach of contract (in connection with money allegedly owed to a workman) and another for slander, but she defended these two suits successfully. However, she lost a second slander suit, reported in the Daily Chronicle, 20 July 1926, and was removed from the court when she dared to interrupt the Lord Chief Justice...

Online references to Mrs Sidney:

'BatGirl' of Chess.com wrote an article entitled Houlding, Herring and Sidney, with interesting details about Mrs Sidney's performance in Sussex Championships.

Wikicommons has a photo of Mrs Sidney at the time of the 1897 Ladies' International. (I have colourised it as shown above)

A small tweak to apply to a PGN file output by ChessBase

Here's another minor tweak which might be of benefit to, say, one ChessBase user in every 1,000. Yes, it's very obscure but someone who creates and distributes PGN files, or maybe uploads them to the web, might find it useful.

This is something I personally do a lot. Every games file you see on BritBase is output from ChessBase to a PGN file and then uploaded to the web. I've already described how I create a PGN file for email transmission or web uploading in a previous post here. It's pretty simple and I do recommend you read the detail. To summarise, you highlight the games you want to batch into a PGN file, select OUTPUT and then SELECTION TO TEXT in the drop-down menus, create the file and you're done.

A quick recap of the basics of creating a PGN output file from ChessBase

THE "POINT" OF THIS POST...

The output from that is OK but there's just one little quirk that bugs me. If a player's name is given in the original database with initials (e.g. Atkins, HE) rather than with full forenames (Atkins, Henry Ernest), then you'll discover that ChessBase adds a gratuitous full stop (period to North American readers) after the initials in the output PGN file.

So: Atkins, HE becomes Atkins, HE. 

I know there are more important things to worry about in life but that gratuitous little dot bugs me. I didn't ask for it and I don't want it.

It's a bit weird because it doesn't do it to a middle name initial. If the name is, for example:

Thomas, George A then ChessBase outputs it correctly as Thomas, George A

So it only happens to initials or pairs of initials. But why does it happen? Answering my own question, I think it is a throwback to a time when ChessBase didn't have a proper forename field and only had room for a couple of initials. Then you'd see databases littered with these dots after initials. When the software was upgraded in the late 1990s I guess this particular feature was forgotten about and not updated. But that's just my guess.

HOW TO GET RID OF THE FULL STOPS

What to do about it? I've not found a solution within ChessBase itself, but have come up with a workaround that solves the problem. It involves the use of different software. I use something called TextPad but other brands of text editors are available and will probably work. (I tested it with Notepad++ and it worked fine.)

One of the good things about PGN files is that, if you don't like the way they are formatted, you can edit them with a text editor. And that's what I do to eliminate the unwanted full stops.

The steps are as follows:

1. Open the PGN file in TextPad (or the text editor of your choice)

2. Run the following global edit...

Find                  ^\[(White|Black)( \"[a-z, ]*)\.(\"\])

Replace with    [$1$2$3

n.b. it's best to cut and paste from the above, to make sure you don't fail to include the two single spaces that appear in the 'Find' field

3. Save the file

You're done - your PGN file is now free of those pesky little dots. If it's something you do a lot, you'll probably want to make it into a macro. I've done that and run the macro routinely as the last thing I do before uploading files to BritBase.