Geoffrey Harber Diggle (6 December 1902 – 13 February 1993) Edward Winter
Chess Note 4337
quoting Winter, CHESS magazine, June 1993, p. 46. was a

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player and writer. Diggle contributed articles to the ''

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'' (''BCM'') from 1933 to 1981, and to the British Chess Federation's publications ''Newsflash'' and ''Chess Moves'' from 1974 to 1992. C.H.O'D. Alexander called Diggle "one of the best writers on chess that I know". In his ''A Book of Chess'', Alexander reproduced ''in toto'' Diggle's account, first published in the November and December 1943 ''BCM'', of the match between Staunton and St. Amant. After Diggle told Alexander of a game he had lost in seven moves (1.e4 e5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.Bc4 Nxe4 4.Bxf7+?! Kxf7 5.Nxe4 Nc6 6.Qf3+ Kg8 ?? 7.Ng5 ! 1-0 Davids-Diggle, London Banks League 1949), Alexander affectionately christened Diggle "the Badmaster", a facetious counterpoint to the more familiar title Grandmaster. Diggle later adopted the sobriquet as a

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, writing a series of articles in ''Newsflash'' under that name between 1974 and 1986. Chess

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Edward Winter wrote the following in his remembrance of Diggle in CHESS magazine:

Specializing in nineteenth-century chess history (particularly the Staunton period), he brought the old masters to life with rare wit and shrewdness. These qualities also permeated his accounts of the idiosyncratic doings and sayings of club "characters", such as the elderly player "who fumbled his way to perdition at reasonable speed until he was a
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and two
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s to the bad, after which he discovered that 'every move demanded the nicest calculation'", or "the
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bottom board of 1922, who complained that he had 'lost his queen about the third move and couldn’t seem to get going after that'." A former county champion, G.H.D. was charmingly self-deprecatory in his reminiscences, as when he had a game adjudicated by Tartakower: "The Great
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, having been fetched, sat down at the board very simply and unaffectedly, and drank in through his spectacles the fruits (and probably the whole deplorable history) of the Badmaster’s afternoon strategy."

Little escaped G.H.D.'s eye, even towards the end. Modestly adapting
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, he claimed to have "nothing to declare but his longevity", simply adding that he had "mingled from time to time with three generations of eminent players ranging from
Isidor Gunsberg Isidor Arthur Gunsberg (also spelled ''Günzberg'', ; 1 November 1854 – 2 May 1930) was a Hungarian chess player, best known for narrowly losing the 1891 World Chess Championship match to Wilhelm Steinitz. Biography Gunsberg began his caree ...
to
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, and rambled extensively round the highways and byways of provincial chess". He was one of the game's most stylish chroniclers.

In 1984 and 1987, ''Chess Notes'' published two collections of Diggle's ''Newsflash'' articles as ''Chess Characters: Reminiscences of a Badmaster'' and ''Chess Characters: Reminiscences of a Badmaster'', Volume II.Schachliteratur 1946-1998, Section 4.3. (Belletristik)
.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Diggle, Geoffrey 1902 births 1993 deaths British chess writers English male non-fiction writers People from South Holland (district) 20th-century British chess players 20th-century English male writers 20th-century English non-fiction writers