Undated note (early 2005?) from Bob Meadley to Geoff Foster concerning the material herein Geoff, this completes your requests but there is a lot more here that you may wish to access with regards to various problems. As you can note from the manuscript collection on most problems there are references to other sources including Jim Jones massive solutions work which he carried out for me in 1979/81. I guess from this you can appreciate his feelings with major work done here and with Goldstein and nil in the public domain. To the above obits the first long one is from 1952 Chess World, the next is from The Problemist May 1952 and the last from BCM August 1952. You raise a good point about his joint compositions and Fred Hawes included a section in his obit. You will agree I’m sure that the relationship between Fred Hawes & O’K was a wonderful friendship. True, I don’t think they met very often just like Whyatt & Goldstein but distant friendships can be just as fulfilling. Certainly mine with John van Manen & Ken Fraser kept me sane from 1975-2000 when John died and I continue to this day with Ken. Norma and I have met Ken in recent years-2001 and we may go to Bleak City again this year to look at the M. V. Anderson correspondence which Ken has arranged. Back to O’Keefe, I have a lot more notes that were prepared in handwritten form for the Chess section following the biography but it would be unreadable He was very much involved in the pickaninny theme and appears to have been vindicated according to Hawes. But as you can see, one needs access to the Melbourne Leader column to flesh it all out. I think his meeting with Benjamin Glover Laws – B. G. Laws the great British problemist and editor of the Chess Monthly & BCM problem columns for decades – was a true highlight in his life and it even was repeated in An English Bohemian the ACW Christmas Series book on Laws. I include it on the next pages. They were a terrific group-the problemists of that era and whilst today we might have an email club, this band of composers/solvers – I don’t know who was the leader – was up there with them. I suspect C. G. Watson was the ringleader and a strong solver and composer in his own right using the pseudonym Lethe. O’K’s was Spectator and I do have half a page from a letter written to Alex Goldstein that Alex kindly sent me showing some of the O’K prose. And he signed it Spectator. He must have written terrific letters. They all got together and produced the first problem book in Australia called The Dux. (I will include it as a scan.) One might speculate as to why he thought he was a spectator rather than a player. Perhaps Alex Goldstein was right when he wrote that the good Dr was more a dabbler than serious about problems. After all Goldstein was a giant in his own right and he should know. My view is different as I’ve told you but I do have lots of correspondence from Alex including his comments to the majority of the O’K problems and his justification for his view. That I guess you may wish to see one day along with Jim Jones solutions. He certainly had a vigorous correspondence with Frank Ravenscroft as well and sadly I did not flesh that out in my visits with Frank. So many years after O’K’s death and Frank’s – yet there was only 7/8 years between them and Frank lived (1881-1968) during which time he had a forced spell away from chess problems due to his wife and daughter who did not like the time he spent with them. But Frank gets into The Dux as F. R. Smith. In reading Frank’s letters to me 1965-68, I’m again sad to say that O’K hardly gets a mention but that’s because I never asked for a pen-picture. Frank’s letters over many decades were destroyed by the family. One of those clean-ups women have when they dislike what their loved husband or father does as a hobby. O’K has a hospital surgery in the great St. George hospital named after him as well as that lane which ran behind his home. He was a terrific personality as the GPs were in those days. Dr. Ben Haneman, now deceased, vouched for that. Haneman gave his collection of nearly 2000 books on Don Quixote to the State Library of NSW. Yes, a quixotic gesture but the hobbies of very busy people are truly amazing. Chess problems fitted in well with O’K. You can picture how it started at University when he wanted a spell from medical books. Mind you I was amused to read his comment that studying openings was a tough form of mental drudgery. Could that not be compared to problem themes? Well, not in O’K’s opinion.