QUEEN KATHY RRORS THE PLOT OF HIT NEW NETFLIX SERIES
Chess star reveals how she became British club champ and went to Russia to take on world’s best players
She was the young schoolgirl who became one of the nation’s top chess stars, travelling to Russia to take on the world’s best and playing against boys and men.
But this isn’t a snippet from hit new drama series The Queen’s Gambit – it’s the real life story of Kathleen Hindle, from Glasgow.
Kathy, now 72, was a trailblazer for girls playing chess in Scotland. She became the first Scottish Girls chess champion before going on to become the Scottish Ladies and British Club champions.
She took up the game at secondary school, went on to marry a professional chess player and has spent her life not just playing chess around the world but teaching the game to others.
She hopes the new Netflix drama – starring Anya Taylor-Joy as a young orphan who becomes a prodigy in the male-dominated chess world of the 50s and 60s – wi l l encourage a new generation of young players to take up the game.
Kathy, who played under her maiden name of Patterson as a girl, said: “I first started playing chess in very much the same era as The Queen’s Gambit is set. I know what it felt like to be a young girl walking into a usually smoke-filled room of men to play chess.
“Even when I was starting out, there were so few girls that it was boys I would play against. They didn’t like losing against a girl. I often thought they worked harder to win.
“But it was often those games where you weren’t perhaps given the respect you should have been given that I enjoyed winning most.
“Like the young chess player in the show, I wasn’t a girly girl. There’s a scene where she is given a doll and she throws it away because all she wants to do is play chess. I remember being
given a doll and I did the same – only I threw it out the window.
“Like her, chess was my passion and it has been all my life.”
Kathy, who grew up in the Gorbals, was a pupil at Bellarmine Secondary School when she learned that a chess club was being set up by a new teacher at the school who played chess internationally.
Kathy said: “I was sitting in a French class when there was an announcement over the tannoy saying one of the maths teachers, Gerald Bonner, was setting up a chess club.
“Anyone interested was allowed to get out of class a few minutes early, so a group of us went along. I’d never played chess before. I’d never even seen a chess board. But Gerald Bonner was a really good chess player and teacher.
“Right from the beginning, I enjoyed playing and wanted to learn more.”
Mr Bonner took the most talented youngsters at the school to a chess club in the centre of Glasgow. Kathy, who now lives in Norfolk, said:
“In those days, you didn’t need to put the word ‘men’s’ in front of ‘chess club’ – they were all filled with what in my eyes were old men.
“This club was in what I think was a tea room in Sauchiehall Street. There were two of us girls who went along – we were 60s girls – so you can imagine the reaction we got.
“I don’t think it went down too well with all men. mprove is st just as ve won.” the men there but they were all gentlemen.
“It helped push us. The best way to improve is to go through the games you have lost just as much as going over the games you have won.”
In 1966, Kathy, then 17, won the first Scottish Girls Championships, which were held in Dundee. She also won the British Girls Championships.
Just months later, she was invited to take part in a display match against Russian chess grandmaster and world chess champion Mikhail Botvinnik.
She said: “Botvinnik was very famous He came to Scotland for a simultaneous
display, where he played against a room full of all these men in suits and me, with my Dusty Springfield-inspired hair. I was the token girl. “I don’t remember much about the game – I was so in awe. I know I was beaten.”
Later that year Kathy was one of two Scottish girls invited to Moscow to play in a three-week international competition against girls from countries including Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Cuba.
The competition was the first of its kind, with the aim of finding the girl chess champion of the world.
Kathy said: “We were the f irst girls invited behind t he I ron Cur tain to play chess. We had to have bodyguards. We
would be out on the street in our skinny rib jumpers and miniskirts and there would be all these ladies in black shawls coming up to us wanting to touch our clothes.
“Chess-wise, we were no match for the Eastern Europeans, who were taught how to play at chess camps from a very early age. But it was quite an experience.”
Kathy married her husband Owen in 1968 after meeting him at a chess tournament in Sunderland. The couple had two sons – Mark and Keith – who they would take with them to chess tournaments across the world. Countries they visited to play chess included Israel, Malta, Switzerland and Argentina.
Kathy said: “In 1978, the Chess Olympiad was taking place in the same venue where the World Cup football final had just taken place in Argentina.
“I was playing top board in the Scotland team when I was handed a telegram. These were usually from the Scottish Chess Association
wishingshing us all the best. This one was different – it instructednstructed the team that players were not allowedowed to remove their shirts on the field of play. We didn’t. Clearly, the telegram from the SFA had arrived too late.”
Kathy, a former history teacher, spent her working life setting up chess clubs for youngsters in schools wherever she taught.
She continued to compete throughout her working life but, having retired, her chess games are now mainly against her husband.
She said: “Programmes that feature chess don’t usually show chess players in the best light but The Queen’s Gambit is showing what an exciting game chess can be.
“Young players today are so good – both boys and girls – and it’s thrilling even to watch them play.
“Anyone who watches The Queen’s Gambit and is interested in learning more about chess should give it a go.”