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Last update: Friday June 3, 2005 9:44
A month after his 85th birthday Michael Bent died in hospital of severe injuries sustained in a motorway accident in which, fortunately, no one else was involved.
Michael, Mike to his friends, was unique. He had probably composed more endgame studies than all other British composers put together. At the moment of writing 842 have been identified as published, world-wide, with hundreds more still in his hand-compiled work-in-progress notebooks. Mike admitted that the quality was variable, so that the collection The Best of Bent, published in 1993 with the meticulous assistance of Timothy Whitworth, has to be the most accessible source of his output: 72 of the 288 selected won tourney honours, competing in international events on level terms with leading composers. But the competitive instinct, though usually present, was less prominent than the pleasure Mike derived from composing, whether for himself or for us. For instance, he almost never entered his published work (in the obligatory five copies) for the triennial FIDE Album series in pursuit of an international title. He edited the British Chess Magazine's monthly studies column for a full ten years in his own light style from 1975, and he contributed several articles for EG international quarterly. His achievements won recognition in a BCF President's award.
Mike was well aware that the twentieth century had left him behind: he never considered acquiring a computer, academia was a closed book, and foreign languages were not his forte, so the few non-English books on his shelves were gifts from admiring fellow-composers. But he wrote plentiful amusing verse with ingenious wordplay for any private audience, could generally solve The Times crossword, and his versatility did not stop there: his familiarity with the pikes, fells and tarns of the Lake District were a byword to those fortunate to have stayed in the Bents' Langdales time-share, he ran half-marathons, and was a keen and successful tennis player. After war service he was for a time a rubber planter in Malaya. He could turn his practical hand to anything, and he loved puzzles of all kinds. The Bents' garden -- Mike's wife Viola was the brain behind it -- was opened as a showpiece of many a village fete. They welcomed and entertained guests with unforgettable hospitality in the cottage they lived in for half a century on the edge of Inkpen Common, to the west of Berkshire's Newbury and not so very far from Watership Down. Viola survives him. They had no children.
John Roycroft, London