I was born in 1950, growing up with what would today be diagnosed with autism, dyspraxia and ADHD. Long before there was any understanding of the concept of neurodiversity, I was physically and emotionally abused by my father at home and bullied at school.

But I was accepted within the world of chess and have always known that without chess I would have had no sort of life. Which is why I’ve spent the past 50+ years helping children play chess.

I spent 30 years running the country’s most successful children’s chess club, but eventually realised that chess was now being promoted for extrinsic rather than intrinsic reasons. Neither the low level primary school chess clubs nor the increasingly professionalised world of competitive chess for young children would have helped me.

I wanted to promote children’s chess clubs based on community and friendship rather than producing prodigies and champions, which were accessible to all children, whatever their background. I wanted to write books of the kind that would have helped me back in the 1960s. And so the Chess Heroes project was born. If you share my views, come and join me.