player – Tennisarchives.com

General First nameGeorge Alan
LastnameThomas
GenderMale
CountryEngland
Date of birth1881-06-14
Place of birthTherapia, Turkey
Date of death1972-07-23
Place of deathLondon, England

About

From The Times, 31 July 1972:

Obituary – Sir George Thomas

Sir George Thomas the seventh baronet who was for a generation and more one of the strongest chess players in the country has died at the age of 91. Already coming into prominence before the 1914-18 War, he did not reach his full strength until afterwards. In the earlier post-war period he shared with Fred D. Yates the preeminence in British chess. Between them (except for the rare emergences of Henry E. Atkins from retirement and the all too brief career in this country of Mir Sultan Khan) they carried off most of the honours at home and did their country stout service in the international field.

Thomas won the British Championship in 1923 (in which year he also won the Badminton championship for the last time) and again in 1934 when after the death of Yates he was for a time undoubtedly the foremost player in the country. The 1934 championship at Chester was one of the strongest ever held, but Thomas won it without loss of a game. In the same year, too, he achieved perhaps his finest performance, tieing for first place in the Hastings Congress with Euwe and Flohr, ahead of Capablanca, Lilienthal, Botvinnik, and others.

Thomas was almost the permanent holder of the championship of the City of London Chess Club, which he won in all 15 times, the last occasion being in 1939 shortly before the club was wound up. This was the leading club tournament in the country, and ranked second only in importance to the British Championship. It would take too long to recount in detail Thomas’s other successes at chess.

He was for many years captain of the English team in the international team tournaments, in which he had a splendid record. In the first contest, which was held in London, he was unbeaten and shared with the Danish player K. Norman Hansen the prize for the best individual record. He also captained England for many years in the series of international matches with Holland. Thomas continued to play in first-class chess until well on in his sixties, and continued to hold his own with the younger generation until his retirement.

The characteristic features of Thomas’s style were subtlety and finesse rather than aggression. He could make combinative attacks when he wanted to, but preferred to achieve his results by more patient and less spectacular methods. He was an exceptionally good endgame player; in this branch of the game he was one of the few English players to hold his own with the continental masters. Never a “bookish” player (except for the profound knowledge of the Ruy Lopez which years of experience had given him), Thomas preferred to go his own way. It is doubtful if he ever had a book on the opening.

A habit of getting behind on his clock – though he played very well in time trouble – may partly have accounted for his singular proneness to commit elementary blunders, an idiosyncrasy which prevented his results from being even better than they were, or as good as the real excellence of his style would have justified. He was particularly good at defending himself against speculative attacks, and indeed often appeared deliberately to invite them in order to profit from the subsequent reaction.

As a sportsman “Sir Thomas”, as he was almost invariably known among continental chess masters, won for himself a unique position. He represented for the foreign chess players the best traditions of British sport, and no reputation was better deserved. Quiet and unassuming in his manner, courteous and charming both in victory and defeat. Thomas was known intimately by only a few of his contemporaries. To the younger generation of English chess players he was always kind and generous, and he took a particular interest in schoolboys’ chess, which he did a great deal to foster.

In the opinion of many good judges of the game Thomas was the best badminton player of his own, if not of any age. He was singles champion from 1920 to 1923, and both before and after the 1914-18 War he won the mixed and the men’s doubles championship on many occasions. Apart from his preeminence at badminton and at chess, Thomas was also a very fine lawn tennis player, and in one of the early post-1918 Wimbledons his fierce forehand driving carried him into the last eight of the singles.

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