Jun-18-11
 | | Richard Taylor: Philips committed suicide he was a prodigy who was NZ Champion at the age of about 15. I met him on quite a few occasions and a few times I played in the same tourney. He was a history lecturer at the time. Very intense and nervous. No question of his huge talents. |
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Jun-18-11
| | Richard Taylor: Sarapu and Phillips were very close. Pity Ortvin not alive to say something about him now. As NZ, with a small population and a badly organized chess association, doesn't have so many strong chess players such as Phillips stand out. |
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| Dec-21-12 | | Cibator: If I remember right, he performed well at the 1961 World Junior Championship, winning one of the lesser finals. I can recall reading a very brief report of his premature death in "Chess", but had no idea it was a suicide. How tragic. |
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May-02-16
 | | GrahamClayton: Phillip's participation in the 1967 British Championship was because he was a student at Sussex University, researching the effects of the Common Market (EU) on New Zealand. |
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Jul-01-17
 | | Jonathan Sarfati: Definitely a very talented but tragic figure. Unfortunately he didn't seem to know how to get help. Many years later, when I was in my teens or 20s, different older players told me that Phillips had visited their families in their homes, and they had dinner and chatted, and next they heard, he had taken his own life. Some of these older players were unaware of the other players with the same experience. The late Edward G A Frost was one of them, and he wasn't aware of C B Oldridge. Mr Frost thought that another strong Wellington player, J E Eriksen, gave up serious competition because he was so upset by the death of his friend (but he was patron of the Wellington club for many years). Sarapu was also very upset by his death. |
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Sep-30-17
| | Richard Taylor: I remember Ted Frost. I am pretty sure I met him, I was quite young. My father talked with him about chess admin etc. I think we were in Wellington for the Congress... |
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| Oct-11-17 | | Cibator: I once played Ted Frost by post in 1980, until he suddenly stopped replying to my moves. Puzzled by this at first, I later realised it was perfectly excusable. Ted was at that time editor of "The Dominion" (Wellington's morning newspaper) and he'd managed to get seriously offside with Rob Muldoon, NZ's rebarbative and thuggish prime minister. His mildly left-leaning direction of the "Dom" was also unpopular with a sizeable chunk of the paper's mainly conservative readership. The stress he was under must have been immense. Fortunately he had the sense to chuck the job, and eventually lived to a ripe old age. |
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Oct-21-17
| | Jonathan Sarfati: Yes, Ted Frost made a comeback around 1980. I was the schoolboy champion at the time, but Ted had kept a lot of his previous strength and our game from that time was drawn. Then he disappeared from chess for about a decade, and reappeared as a real dynamo in chess organization. He was a leader in the Wellington Chess Club then later in the NZCF. He could still play a good game, and upset Russell Dive once in this period. |
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Oct-21-17
| | Jonathan Sarfati: <Cibator:> I remember as a kid cheering for you to win Mastermind, given your chosen specialist subject. |
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Sep-14-19
| | Jonathan Sarfati: In the late Ted Frost's autobiographical sketch in NZ Chess, July 2007, p. 15, he tells of the dinner he and his family had with Rodney Phillips, and some of the other older players who had the same experience. http://newzealandchess.co.nz/nzches... |
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Kibitzing
