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Gerry Wilson
John Gerard Wilson (always referred to as 'Gerry') was born in Glasgow in 1952. He died in 2001, aged 49. The following obituary notice appeared in Scottish Chess 177, December 2001.
Scotland's chess community has lost several of its leading organisers this year through death. The loss of Walter Munn, David Wallace and Jim King was followed last month by the death after a short illness of Gerry Wilson, at just 49. Gerry had succeeded in several different spheres of chess activity - at club, league and national level.
He was the current President of the Glasgow Chess League. He was well known as an arbiter and was an active member of the Scottish Chess Association's [now Chess Scotland] Arbiters' Committee.
He acted as an arbiter at the Glasgow Chess Congress on occasions over the past 15 years and constantly over the past 8 years, although he was never a member of committee, preferring to get on with the job working at the congress. He pioneered the use of computers to assist arbiters, make draws and produce results lists. He will be remembered for his impish sense of humour and took a delight when making the draw for the next round of a tournament if he could obtain a bizarre pairing of names, eg. King v Cong.
He did extensive research on the history of the Richardson and Spens Cups and the Glasgow League, much of which now appears on the SCA [CS] website...His untiring enthusiasm for the history of chess in Scotland and his attention to detail has helped create many archives which will now exist and remain of interest for future generations of Scottish players seeking to understand their heritage.
One of his contributions nationally was to edit the SCA's magazine, Scottish Chess, and I can do nothing better than quote from his successor Alex McFarlane's first editorial in 1982:
"Without any disrespect to Gerry's predecessors (Percy Davies, John Glendinning, Peter Watson and, in a temporary capacity, Walter Munn), he has established the magazine as an integral part of the Scottish chess scene. In his seven years as Editor from June 1975 to April 1982, he has taken the publication from an ink duplicated magazine of irregular production into the more professional printed bi-monthly of today."
My personal recollection of Gerry goes back to the days of ink duplicated magazines, when the SCA duplicator was located at Gerry's house and used for most SCA publications. Enjoyable times!
We send condolences to his family.