08/01/2025
It is with great sadness that we acknowledge the passing of Arthur Pomeroy on 7 January 2025
Arthur was the Wellington Chess Club's club captain and committee member, an NZCF Councillor, a national selector, an arbiter, strong player and all-round stalwart, and most importantly, a friend. We will all miss him.
Bill Forster writes:
''Arthur has been very ill in recent months. He faced his situation with great courage and good humour. RIP Arthur.
Arthur played his first New Zealand Championship in 1973 and his last in 2017. His best performance was in Dunedin 1975, 6.5/11 alongside Sarapu and Sutton and behind only Garbett, Fairhurst and Cornford.
He was very proud of being in the NZ top 50 for 50 years.
He was a great club man, showing up every week at the Wellington chess club for decades, and answering the call when needed for thankless administration work.
As a chess player Art was a positional player, a man of principle. If he had his chance every white game was a Lopez or an Open Sicilian, every black game a Najdorf or a Kings Indian. He didn't waver from these choices at all over 50 years.
He was an extraordinarily cultured man. A professor of classics at Victoria University, author of a standard text book in his field along with many other publications. He was a gourmet, a connoisseur of sophisticated music, film and literature. He had no other family in New Zealand, but instead he had a very supportive group of similarly cultured friends. I got to know some of these people as they gathered around Art in recent months, and they were in awe of Art's wide-ranging knowledge of esoteric subjects and fields, the weirder the better. When I mentioned to this group that Arthur was an expert in the Najdorf Defence, even as non-chess players they recognised that with its exotic name it sounded like exactly the sort of specialised, sophisticated, wonderful thing Arthur would devote himself to.''
