A five-times national champion, Barnes’s place among this country’s greatest players is secure. Yet he was something much more than that.

A maverick and a one-man publicity machine, few would doubt that he is the most charismatic personality that table tennis in Britain has produced, certainly over the last 50 years.

“A complete one-off – a product of the 1960s,” says his friend and former England and Essex team-mate Stuart Gibbs. “At that time, you had George Best, Alex Higgins and then Chester and I think they all became bigger than their sports."

“County matches in Essex at venues holding 6-700 people used to be sold out the season before when Chester was playing and people would queue for hours to watch him because you never knew what would happen next."

“When he walked into a room, it was like the show had arrived and everybody would look. If anyone got close to beating him in a tournament, the play on the other 20 or 30 tables would stop to see what
was happening.”

At the height of his fame Barnes said that he would be World Champion if a sportsman’s talent was measured by the publicity he could generate. John Clarke, an emerging county player during the 1960s, says simply: “Chester Barnes was an entertainer; someone you would pay to watch.”
Barnes was the first – and perhaps only – table tennis player to surround himself with an “entourage”. It included his own manager and even photographer. By the age of 22 he had written an autobiography, featured on prime-time television, appeared regularly on the back pages of the national newspapers and even made it into Sports Illustrated (the leading American sports magazine) alongside the likes of Muhammad Ali.

Amazingly, Barnes only started playing table tennis seriously at the age of 12 when he was the ‘boy of the week’ at a Butlins holiday camp. Under the tutelage of the former international Harry Venner he became England’s youngest ever senior champion at the age of just 15. By the time he was 16, he was brash and confident enough to issue a statement prior to the 1963/64 English Championships predicting that he would go through the tournament without losing a single set.

When he did win the title for a second successive year (he dropped one set), he issued another statement saying he would never play for England again unless the selectors ranked him number one in the country. They did; but throughout much of his career Barnes found himself in dispute with officialdom.

Diplomacy was never an option and his views on those running English table tennis were recorded in his book More Than A Match. “I suppose they take on the job to satisfy an inner urge to control other
human beings,” he wrote, adding: “All I had ever wanted to do was get on with playing the game, but at the same time keeping the freedom of speech and will that is supposed to be the birthright of every British citizen.”

His honesty, of course, only enhanced that popularity. “Even now, I could arrange an exhibition with him playing and I would sell 1,000 tickets tomorrow without any trouble at all,” says Gibbs. “I don’t think you could say the same about any other table tennis player.”

The chances, however, of Barnes every publicly picking up a table tennis bat again would appear to be something around zero. He has forged an extremely successful career as a race-horse trainer at the stables of the 15-times champion trainer Martin Pipe and has no further involvement in
table tennis.

He turns 60 next year and when I telephoned to see if he would talk about either his career in table tennis or horse-racing, he politely declined. “Someone called Syed has phoned me before and I told him exactly the same thing,” he said.

Barnes’s refusal to speak about table tennis probably only deepens the aura which surrounds him. It is 40 years since the peak of his success but, after Desmond Douglas, he is probably still the sport’s most famous name in Britain. Tales about his antics continue to be recounted to this day.
There was the time that Denis Neale was forced to dive off the high board at Crystal Palace after losing a bet as well as the English singles final to Barnes.

He was also known for an ability to beat Butlins holiday-makers with a frying-pan as a bat as well as his joke-telling while playing.

“Essex had never won the county championships and I remember we were playing Surrey in the final,” recalls Gibbs, “it was 4-4 and Chester was playing the deciding match. He won the first, lost the second and went 11-3 down in the third. Our coach shouted at him to stop larking around. Chester turned around and, so that everyone in the hall could hear, he said, ‘You don’t think I’m going to lose to him do you? I’m just dragging it out so that the crowd get their money’s worth’.” Barnes, of course, went on to win.

On another occasion Barnes had been banned from an international fixture but still turned out to watch his team-mates

Although capable of defending, Barnes’s strategy was simple and remains just as relevant today. “You must think, eat, breathe, sleep and dream attack-attack-attack, no half-measures,” he wrote in his 1969 autobiography.

As well as being dominant domestically, Barnes made his mark on European and World table tennis.

In 1966 he won the Dutch Open and also reached the quarter-finals of the European men’s singles at Wembley. At the previous year’s World Championships, he won 18 out of 22 matches in the team events and was ranked 16 in the World. But he was denied the chance to play in the European Championships of 1968 after being banned by the ETTA for missing a match earlier in the season against Holland. Venner believes that Barnes became too sidetracked by all the “fun” he was creating to completely fulfil the talent that could have made him challenge the world’s top players

“The thing with Chester was that he might lose to a lower player but also beat the highest player in the world,” says Gibbs. “He had a confidence about him and he didn’t think he was beatable. That was his
downfall although he also won a lot of games because of who he was. I’ve seen him 20-16 down in the fifth and the opponent just freezing against him. People were frightened of him – it was like the effect Ian Botham had when he played the Australians at cricket.”