TTT31. Summer 2023

The Rise and Fall of a Table Tennis Superhero
By Graham Frankel
George Yates is one of the unsung heroes of English table tennis. His name may
be known to anyone who has been involved in the sport for more than 30
years, but few will be aware of the massive impact he made, not as a player,
but as the longest-serving editor of the ETTA magazine Table Tennis News.
His achievements were acknowledged with various awards in his lifetime, and
in obituaries when he died in March, 2000. Now, almost a quarter of a century
later, those awards and tributes will have been largely forgotten. I hope this
will provide a timely reminder of his outstanding contribution, and a fresh look
at how his era as editor came to a rather sudden and premature end.
Ground Floor
Born in Chorley, Lancashire in 1921, George Yates left school in his early teens to join British Rail, clocking up
44 years’ service before retiring. It is unlikely he ever had any training in writing or journalism, acquiring those
skills by practice. By the end of the 1940s he had married and moved to Bolton, which would be his home for
the rest of his life. There is no record of his playing career, but in the early 1950s he became secretary of the
Bolton League, writing regular match reports for the Bolton Evening News. It took a while for his alternative
career as a journalist and editor to take off, but in 1961, at the age of 40, he joined the Lancashire County
Association and took on the job as Press Secretary of the Lancashire & Cheshire League. This was the start of
his long association with the official ETTA magazine, as he began contributing county reports.
Five years later, he would become editor, but there is something of a mystery surrounding his taking on this
position. Readers of Table Tennis were given no warning of the magazine’s dramatic transformation in the
summer of 1966. The final edition of the 1965/66 season, published in May, contained no hint of what would
happen during what must have been a busy summer for the ETTA.
The final edition of Table Tennis and the first edition of Table Tennis News
Harrison Edwards, who had been editing the magazine for almost 12 years, simply vanished from the scene.
He didn’t only disappear as editor, but apparently from the sport – without any further mention in the
revamped magazine. George Yates’ appointment, replacing Edwards as editor, was similarly played down in
his first edition, published as usual in October. Not a word was said about him, other than his name appearing
Table Tennis Times 31: Summer 2023
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