Leonard William Barden (born 20 August 1929, in South Croydon, London) is an English chess master, writer, broadcaster, journalist, organizer and promoter.
The son of a dustman, he was educated at Whitgift School, South Croydon, and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read modern history.
Barden learned to play chess at age 11 while in a school shelter during a World War II German air raid.
The following year, he tied for first with the Belgian grandmaster Albéric O'Kelly de Galway at Bognor Regis; was joint British champion, with Alan Phillips; and won the Southern Counties Championship.
[17] Barden also played four opponents of James Mortimer: Edward Sergeant,[18][19] Savielly Tartakower,[20][21] Sir George Thomas,[22][23] and Eugene Znosko-Borovsky.
His best-known contribution was a consultation game, recorded in 1960 and broadcast in 1961, where he partnered Bobby Fischer against the English masters Jonathan Penrose and Peter Clarke.
[35] It is by far the world's longest running daily chess column by the same author, the previous record having been set by George Koltanowski in the San Francisco Chronicle: 51 years, 9 months, and 18 days, including posthumous articles.
[41] His involvement began in 1971 when he noticed that Tony Miles and Michael Stean were both likely contenders for the 1973 world junior (under-20) championship, but that the only way for a country to have two representatives was to host the event.
In 1972, after Slater had saved the world championship match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky from collapse by doubling the prize fund,[44] he offered £5,000 to the first English grandmaster (who wound up being Miles),[45] and £2,500 to each of the next four players to qualify.
Encouraged by success, Barden and Slater then agreed on a wider programme to stimulate talent at much younger ages, aiming to produce a generation which could compete with the Soviet Union, the world's leading chess nation.
Very few juniors in the 1970s had international ratings, so Barden compiled his own world ranking lists for every age group from under-18 to under-10, updating the figures at monthly or weekly intervals and posting the results at the invitation events.
The first Lloyds Bank event was a pilot, a London vs. New York City telex match, to celebrate the United States Bicentennial, in which the American captain agreed to Barden's proposal to include extra under-11 boards, on one of which Short (who lived near Manchester) beat the future US champion Joel Benjamin.
So in 1977 the annual Lloyds Bank Masters in London was launched, modelled on a successful US event at Lone Pine where the best US juniors competed against grandmasters.
By 1978, when England won the World Student Team Chess Championship at Mexico City ahead of the USSR, and a group financed by Lloyds Bank performed strongly at Lone Pine, the golden generation was on the way to the Olympiad silver medals achieved in 1984, 1986 and 1988.
Adams lived in Cornwall, far from the major chess centres, so Barden arranged for a Devon organiser, Ken Butt, to stage an annual Lloyds Bank under-18 international tournament in Plymouth.
By the 1980s the "English Chess Explosion" was in full swing, but Barden took a lesser role due to having to care for his mother, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease.
According to Chessmetrics, Barden's best single performance was at Hastings 1957–58, where he finished fourth behind Paul Keres, Svetozar Gligorić and Miroslav Filip, scoring 5/9 (56%).