Record-breaker: Leonard Barden’s chess column celebrates 70 years and a place in history

Leonard Barden at the Hastings Chess Congress in 1957, two years after starting his column for the Guardian. Photograph: Courtesy of John Saunders

September 1955. The dying embers of one era, the dawning of another. It’s been five months since Sir Winston Churchill retired as prime minister. In another four Elvis Presley will release Heartbreak Hotel, his first worldwide hit. Food rationing is over. Frozen fish fingers, courtesy of Clarence Birdseye, have just arrived.

Change is also in the air at the Manchester Guardian. On 8 September a young chess master from Croydon, Leonard Barden, writes his first column. His subject is a Russian teenager, Boris Spassky, whose games, Barden notes, “all show the controlled aggression characteristic of a great master”.