Stevenson Memorial — Southsea 1949

◇Three visiting masters at the top

Rossolimo finished unbeaten with eight wins and two draws. Pachman scored 8½ and Tartakower eight, taking the first three places. James Macrae Aitken followed on seven and won the Southern Counties Chess Union championship. Harry Golombek’s tournament book records every round’s results and discusses the games from the main tournament and other sections of the congress.

◇Counting the games that were played

The published Swiss ledger contains 139 scored pairings. Charles Jackson and John Poole entered in round two, with no score for the first round. The London Chess Bulletin table, as transcribed by BritBase, marks Pratten–Woodthorpe in round one as a default. That leaves 138 games actually played; the original tournament book records the same scored result without a default suffix.

The native Southsea label contains fifty records. Burges–Clissold belongs to Major A, as Golombek explicitly states beside that score, and is excluded from this memorial collection. The remaining 49 records match the main-event ledger. Searches across the published pairings, player aliases and nearby source labels found no additional native memorial score. The 89 unavailable played games do not change the official final results.

◇Names, rounds and a surviving opening

The original score headings identify Henry Holwell Cole by his initials H. H.; two native scores had instead named the distinct Harold Godfrey Cole. A third score’s Miss H. Heaton is Mary Henniker-Heaton. Exact per-game guards restore these identities while preserving their moves, dates and results. The original book contains the complete scores of both Cole games and Henniker-Heaton–Pachman.

O’Hanlon–Woodthorpe was played in round two, despite its native round-three tag. Its event membership follows the published round; the source game keeps that original tag. The score preserves the opening through 13.exf6, after which Golombek reports that White won. No unrecorded continuation is supplied.

All 49 native mainlines agree with the later BritBase comparison. That comparison draws heavily on the same tournament book, so it is not claimed as a separate independent move witness. Every native date remains 1949.??.??. The full official Swiss result table is available in the linked sources; the incomplete archive is not used to calculate a substitute final ranking.