Stuart Staveley

We are sad to report that Dr Stuart Staveley (Vice President of the EBU) has passed away.

John Williams who knew him well has written the following obituary:

I arrived at the EBU in Thame in the Spring of 1978, charged with taking over from Stuart Staveley as Executive Secretary of the EBU.

The EBU had recently established offices at 15B High Street, but part of the operation – the trading department – was located in the Staveley private household across the road at (I seem to remember) No. 81. Stuart was assisted – some might say ruled – by his wife Ann, who acted as Assistant Secretary. Certainly it was Ann who took all the phone calls from Harold Franklin during the day and night-time, and by and large did his (i.e. Harold’s) bidding.

I had a few precious months with Stuart while he tried to school me in the mysteries of management of the EBU. He was a careful and punctilious manager ("look after the pennies" was his byword), and this was entirely in keeping with his other role as a part-time lecturer in classical history at London University. Stuart was the ultimate academic. He deplored and despised anything that wasn’t correct or traditional in the modern world. He insisted on spelling Yugoslavia with a J.

Stuart was a founder of Aylesbury Bridge Club, where he took me to play with him soon after I arrived. Naturally, I had to learn the Blue Team Blue Club book from cover to cover – the most rigorous and structured of bidding systems – at 24 hours notice in order to do this. (When we played, every system bid in the book seemed to come up, and I got them all right, much more by luck than judgment, which Stuart accepted without comment.) He was a fine technician at the bridge table, though Ann regarded him as far too passive in the bidding.

At this time Stuart and Ann were looking towards retirement in Scotland (though Ann was already ill and sadly didn’t survive long in their remote highland cottage).

Stuart had set himself the task of writing a book on the history of punctuation in the English language – perhaps not destined for best-seller status – and this kept him occupied for a good time.

He didn’t lose his bridge contacts, remaining as Secretary of the International Bridge Press Association for some years. He had accepted a role as a Vice-President of the EBU (though he never attended meetings) and made occasional appearances at European and World events in a press role.

The last time I saw him was at the World Teams Olympiad in Maastricht in 2000, when we shared a table at the final dinner, and he had some cutting things to say about substandard fancy cuisine. He was accompanied, I recall, by his “new” wife, also called Ann – which somehow seemed entirely fitting.

Stuart was in many ways the founder of the modern EBU. He will be remembered fondly and with enormous respect by all who knew him.

Tournament Focus - Issue III

The third issue of Tournament Focus, written especially for our tournament player, is now available to read on-line.

In each issue, we hope to provide you with information on our future events, updates from the Tournament Committee, and articles of interest to our many tournament players.
Since the past two editions, members have commented that the newsletter was very hard to read as a PDF, so we have worked on creating a new on-line version for you to enjoy. We hope you enjoy the new look!

We look forward to your feedback and ideas for future contributions and articles in our next newsletter which will be hitting your inboxes in February 2010.

• Read here

Members Travel Insurance Offer

In association with the English Bridge Union, AIS Direct are pleased to provide a range of insurance products at competitive rates that are available to members and their families.

EBU Members taking out a policy before 31st December 2009 will enter a Prize Draw for a FREE policy renewal in 2010 - the winner to be announced in January 2010.

For more information, please view our own travel insurance website, here.

Laws Flow Charts

The L&E have produced some flow charts of common laws which we hope TDs will find useful.

■ Flow Charts

Paper Master Point processing at Aylesbury

From April 1st 2010, no paper master points issued will be accepted by the EBU, unless dated before then, and within the stated validity, with all updating being done from then onwards electronically. This will mean that the days of collecting small pieces of paper and then sending them to Aylesbury for us to count and manually update will be over.

However, we are about to enter a time of substantially increased work pressures at the Aylesbury office as we work to implement these and other IT system changes, and this may result in delays in processing master point claims.

We would therefore ask members who have paper master points that they wish us to put on their records to follow these requirements of submission to us carefully:-

1. Please use the correct forms. Note that the master point year ends on December 31st.
2. Please count your master points as requested and fill in the forms properly.
3. to see if your claim has been processed, click here. Enter your EBU number where requested; click on your rank to see individual registrations. Please allow at least four weeks for your claim to be processed, before contacting the office.

We will of course ensure that all paper master points are updated before we produce the results for the 2009 Master Point competitions. Due to the work pressures previously stated, there may be a delay in the final results. If that happens, apologies in advance!

Simultaneous Pairs Event Policy from April 1, 2010

EBU, WBF and EBL Simultaneous Pairs will only be open to affiliated clubs.

BGB Simultaneous Pairs events will attract a surcharge of £1 per player for ALL BGB sessions played in unaffiliated clubs. As for the Children In Need simultaneous, Overall Master Points will only be awarded by ECATS to EBU members in unaffiliated clubs if the results are uploaded electronically to ECatsBridge with the EBU number of such members included in the file in the correct format. These will subsequently be uploaded to the EBU by ECatsBridge once the overall results are known and the Master Points will be credited accordingly.

All other licensed simultaneous events are being reviewed and a policy will be announced in early 2010.