Mr. Rosenbaum's Chess Picture. Part 4: Flog It

Here we are, back on the case of the telegraph match painting, featuring no less than 47 portraits of London chess clubbers of the 1870s - you can find out who they all are in this earlier episode. 

We are following the reports in The Chess-Monthly of its unveiling in 1880 and, as we are about to find out, its expeditious disposal.

©National Portrait Gallery

When the painting was revealed at the séance at Dr Ballard’s residence on the 30th October 1880, one would suppose that the feeling among the assembled London chess fraternity would have been that it should find a decent home within their ranks. But as any, and all, of those gentlemen would have fancied installing in pride of place over their mantelpiece, how then should the sale be fairly arranged, and how should they make sure that, in so doing, Mr Rosenbaum’s marathon exertions would be properly rewarded?

The conventional recourse would have been to a private auction, but that might have given an unfair advantage to those well-heeled members with the ready means. It would also set one colleague against another, and leave to fate the ultimate sum realised, risking red faces all round. Surely a more reliable, and egalitarian, mechanism had to be devised.        

The Chess Monthly explained what would happen...

 “Mr R. also exhibited autotype proof copies, retouched by himself, in monochrome, size 25 inches by 13, of which only 40 will be published at £5 5s. each. Other copies will shortly be published at £2 2s, £1 1s and 5s each. The picture will raffled among the subscribers to the 40 £5 5s. plates – id est, each purchaser of a copy receives a free ticket in the raffle”.

…which was fair enough. Fair enough, that is, for anyone who could get their hands on the five guineas necessary. That's a cool £500 at today’s prices: a lot for a raffle ticket by any standard, even if you got a sort of Victorian-style photocopy thrown in. However, as long as all were sold it would provide Mr R a tidy reward for his toil, and honour would be satisfied.

“Considering that the picture, without reckoning that the three years’ labour, cost Mr. R. close on £100, this arrangement met with so much satisfaction that already over 30 names are on the list, and that it is therefore very probable that before another fortnight elapses, and the ultimate possession of the picture decided, the last copy will be allotted.”

As indeed it was. By the day of the raffle, the 3^rd December, five weeks after its unveiling at Dr Ballard’s, all the copies had been sold, the raffle tickets had been thereby allocated, and Mr Rosenbaum would have grossed (by simple arithmetic) at least 200 guineas (that’s £25K, or $40K, today), handsomely covered his costs, and be paid for his labour. Capital.

The picture had been on display at Simpson’s and by four o’clock everyone was foregathered at Mr Gümpel’s residence in Leicester Square for the raffle. In a proper and business-like manner a committee had been constituted to determine the procedure for the draw, and very ingenious it was too:

 “Instead of the usual method at raffles –  thirty-nine blanks and one win corresponding to the forty names of the ticket holders – Mr Cubison suggest a simple and more interesting mode of procedure, which was accepted, viz, to draw only the names, the name drawn last to be the winner.”

This provided for lengthy and tantalising fore-play during which all would be on tenterhooks, amid feverish and mounting tension, until the fortieth, and successful, name was climatically released from the hat: exquisite gratification, deliciously delayed, satisfaction guaranteed. Compare that with the dull fare of so many village fêtes the length and breadth of the land where you had to make do, after a perfunctory rummage, with a first-dip quickie.  

And so the fun began.

And for some it fizzled out, and prematurely… 

“..Dr Ballard senior headed the thirty-nine unfortunates while his dutiful son followed the lead soon afterwards.”

…but let's leave the gents at it for the moment. While The Chess Monthly prepares to tell us who won, reflect on the fact that, as we mentioned last time, there is no mention of the ladies having been invited to the party. Indeed, not one has appeared thus far in this series (save for one from across the pond who has occasionally joined us in the comments box, and is most welcome). But the mention of the Ballards (confusingly both father and son were "William") does, however, give us the opportunity to introduce a modest corrective. The host, Dr Ballard Junior (1848-1933) - you can see him trounce Bird, on an off-day, here - had a younger sister: Louise Matilda (1850-1931).       

Louise Matilda Ballard Fagan,
from her obituary in BCM 1931. 

Better known under her married name of Fagan, she was a strong player, good enough, as her obituary explained, to come second to Mary Rudge in the Ladies International Tournament of 1897, and to win a club tournament against 12 chaps in India (she had married an Irish Bombay Lancer), playing her games elsewhere as she was banned from the premises (membership was, as is now familiar, strictly “men only” and rules are rules).

She was, so the BCM said in 1897, "a prominent worker of the Women's Emancipation Union...she is a woman of broad sympathies and profound convictions...and is a member of the Fabian Society". And indeed here is a record of her Fabian Society membership from 1890. Note that the address is 26, Manchester Square, the Ballard residence, where the painting had been unveiled ten years previously. 
    

This all makes a refreshing change from the politics of the other company that we have kept in this series. In the game below she chews up an unfortunate male of the species, George Richmond, in 1897 (maybe).

   

By the way, back at the Fabian Society, notice that five of those 16 names are female - not 50%, but a good deal better than the typical chess club of the day whether in India, or England. And there's a nice footnote: you may have heard of illustrator Walter Crane (whose name appears near the top of the same list), well here is his contribution to chess in art, an illustration for The Tempest, published in 1893, sadly too late for Shakespearean scholar Howard Staunton to enjoy.

Enchanting. 

Now, where were we...

Back at the raffle. Where, even if your name was pulled out of the hat early in the proceedings (the fate of both the Williams Ballard) there was still hope of a satisfactory outcome by way of a wager on the eventual winner: 

“…selling and buying chances and some brisk betting were freely indulged in, and kept up the excitement.”

The final moment was near: 

“Thirty-six names being drawn it was curious to note that the holders of the four remaining were absentees thus giving a flat démentie to the proverb “les absents son toujours tort.” This time they were right. The last two rivals were Mr Hirschfeld and Mr Thursby"

From The Chess-Monthly  

and, yes, it was…

                          ...Mr Thursby who “carried off the coveted prize.”

So, J.O.S.Thursby Esq., not yet twenty, and still a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, was informed by “wire” of his prize, leaving the remaining gentlemen smiling paternalistically, one imagines, at the good fortune of the young whippersnapper who, having the spare cash for a ticket (should we be surprised: he was an ex-Etonian) had won the raffle, even though he hadn’t been present and, more galling still, even though he wasn’t in the painting.

You’d need a drink after that, and The Chess-Monthly coyly reported that a dozen of the gents trooped back to the Divan for a “little dinner party” - its two editors (Hoffer and Zukertort) chief among them, and we can suppose that Mr R, with 200 guineas in his back pocket, was called on to pick up the tab.  

But what of John Ormerod Scarlett Thursby: the lucky winner? We have a lot to thank him for, as we’ll find out next post, but in the meantime ponder this: there is a reference in the above account that is worth your pause, viz: 40 "autotype proof copies, retouched...in monochrome" were made of the picture, sold at 5 guineas a piece, and possibly a number of cheaper ones as well. So, it is reasonable to ask: do any still exist? And if so: where might they be now? Could it be that somewhere, in a bottom drawer or library basement, some might be awaiting discovery?

In fact: does one hide, at this very moment, in the depths of your Club’s equipment cupboard?

Go. Look. NOW!


Acknowledgements etc.  
Thanks to Giles Wright, Membership Officer at the Fabian Society, for his generous assistance; and to Sarah Beth for some Mrs Fagan hints.  
Illustrations to Shakepeare's Tempest by Walter Crane 1893 is on-line here.  

See the three earlier (and subsequent) episodes via our  History Index

Chess goes to the movies: Star Wars

[WARNING: This post contains spoilers]

Alfred Hitchcock said that the difference between an American film and a European film is that a European film can open with a shot of clouds, cut to another shot of clouds, and then cut to a third shot of clouds. If an American film opens with a shot of clouds, it must cut to an airplane, and if by the third shot the airplane hasn't exploded, the audience is bored.

Denny Martin Flinn, How not to write a screenplay (Lone Eagle: 1999)

OK, first things first. It's Star Wars. Forget that A New Hope cobblers. It was Star Wars when I saw it at the Chelmsford Odeon in 1977 and it's Star Wars now.

Second, the fact that Star Wars (see?) opens by making the audience read a yard and a half of preamble not withstanding, Flinn clearly has a point. Films, especially mass market movies like Star Wars (see??), tend to get on with it. There's rarely any flab on them. Not even the bad ones.

Which rather begs the question of what the minute and thirteen seconds of chess that you see above is doing in there. In Saturn 3 the chess is essential to the plot, in The Thing it's about character development and in Blade Runner it's both. So why is that scene in Star Wars (I think I've made my point) if the chess neither enriches the story nor tells us something we didn't know about one of the characters? The answer comes in the phrase, "a bit of business".

Bollocks to Snickers

The story so far:-

It is a period of civil war. Grand Moff Tarkin (Dracula) and Vader (The Green Cross Code man) have just destroyed Alderaan whilst tricking Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) into revealing the location of the rebel base. The Death Star is about to trap the Milenium Falcon in a tractor beam and Obi-Wan (Alec Guiness) is using a spot of light sabre training to teach Skywalker (Mark Hammill) about The Force.

Clearly the interaction between Luke and his mentor needs to be there.  It sets up the big finale where Farm Boy switches off his computers and fires a couple of missiles up the Death Star's back passage using nothing but The Force for guidance.

The chess, though, is an completely different kettle of sci-fi. It doesn't advance the plot one little bit and the audience has long since discovered that C3PO is a prissy, pompous scaredy cat and that a wookie is not to be messed with. Why bother with it at all? Why not finish the film one minute earlier? Because while the chess in Star Wars isn't strictly necessary it is needed.

What's important about the scene is not the chess per se, but the humour (or light relief, at least) that flows from it. The laughs, such as they are, sit between the downbeat mood left by the destruction of Alderaan and the drama that will follow with the capture of the Falcon. They also break up what would otherwise have been the rather dry passage of exposition that explains the concept of The Force to the audience.

If the chess gives the film an emotional texture it wouldn't otherwise have, it also provides a signpost to the viewer. If they actually read that stuff at the beginning like George Lucas asked, they'd remember that this is all happening "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away", but the chess scene reminds everybody that the Star Wars universe is futuristic even if it's not of the future.

We see a game that is recogniseably chesslike and yet it's not chess. It's got a chequered board, yes, but it's round and not square and the pieces move all by themselves. They even fight.  These little snippets really help sell the movie's premise, and are all the more important given that Skywalker's barnet stamps Star Wars as absolutely, positively, made in the 1970s.

The Star Wars films have suffered a great deal of fiddling over the years, not to everbody's pleasure. Despite all the changes, however, the importance of the chess scene remains its lack of significance. It meant nothing but gave the film that something extra. Thirty-five years on, a little of our favourite game still goes a long way.







Chess goes to the movies
Chess goes to the movies: Saturn 3
Chess goes to the movies: The Thing
Chess goes to the movies: Blade Runner

Wookie and robot at the board

Hairy Luke

Money

What links:

• the Bishop of London?
• a former Conservative Chief Whip and Vice-Chairman of the BBC?
• a leading Councillor and former Mayor of Hammersmith and Fulham?
• the former lead vocalist of the Flying Lizards?
• a former chairman of Watford FC?
• a dining room at the House of Lords?
• a posh office on the Kings Road in Chelsea?
• an end terrace in Stoke Newington?

Crowded By Space

A large part of my anthropology degree has involved getting to grips with theories of landscape. I'm currently in the midst of dissertation considerations and I reckon I'll probably do something related to that august arena. Possibly the landscape of sport. Possibly the landscape of chess. But would it get the laughs?

Sean Hewitt launches e2e4 Jutland

The vast majority of sports have a set space for their arenas. Any architectural considerations are thus given over to how best to accommodate spectators. Formula 1 tracks - at least nowadays - are designed with a mixture of safety and entertainment in mind. Widowmakers like Nordschleife and the extended Hockenheim and Spa will never see F1 action again; they were products of an era when racing was pure and when no thought was given to practicalities. As long as there were cars, asphalt and a tubby bloke in a pork pie hat waving the chequered flag, the event would take place. It's not for me to say whether this is a good or a bad thing.

Never to be seen again

The Taylor Report was an extremely important development in the lineage of football. All-seater stadia have a lower capacity than terraces and offer a completely different experience for the crowd. Take Molineux for instance; their Kop was once capable of holding 30,000 people. The entire capacity of the current stadium is 31,700. It's not for me to say whether this is a good or a bad thing. Indeed, Lord Taylor himself said that standing accommodation isn't intrinsically unsafe.

What about chess, then? How can we assess the current suitability of venues? How do they speak to us? How do we react to them? 

As a kid, I remember playing in little classrooms, uncomfortably packed to the rafters. Nobody gave a crap about Foucault. From what I've heard, the early 4NCL experience wasn't too dissimilar. But something's changed. Somewhere, someone said no. Somewhere, someone said "Oi! Do me a favour!". 

Fings ain't wot they used t'be

And now we're all over it! The success of the e2e4 tournaments owes itself to our hunger for space. It's a traditionally petit bourgeois principle, and perhaps reflects the overwhelmingly middle class player pool within chess. Certainly more so than within football, where surveys like these reveal just how many people struggle to keep up financially. 

Of course, the difference is that chess, as a physical entity, isn't aimed at the paying spectator. And it's unlikely that it will be any time soon. Though I quite like the idea of Wood Green and Guildford casuals chasing each other around Wokefield Park.

But is this a good or a bad thing? It's not for me to say.

Mr. Rosenbaum's Chess Picture. Part 3: AWOL

We are investigating Antony Rosenbaum’s chess painting of 1874-80, in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, and now hanging at Bodelwyddan Castle in North Wales.

©National Portait Gallery

It is a composition of 47 portraits, plus extras. We saw who they all were last week when, and with the help of The Chess Monthly’s contemporaneous account of its unveiling (on 30th October 1880), we noted some of the wry incident that the artist had also introduced into the picture. It is not merely a stiff posing of the chess great and the good, or stuffed shirts as we might say these days. No, it is a staging of Cecil B. DeMille proportions showing Team London engrossed, in the main, in an inter-city consultation match of three games, with a fair bit of by-play off the board. And on that particular point, note that the three positions Rosenbaum has put in are all entirely reasonable ones, as one would expect from a chess in artist.

In the first diagram Bird and Blackburne et al (top left in the picture itself) are playing the white side of a Ruy Lopez (perhaps the opposition will tease them with 3...Nd4). In the second Steinitz, Zukertort and friends (top right) have got themselves on the black side of some kind of a Vienna Gambit (an oblique reference to the 1872-4 London-Vienna telegraph match, maybe; or even an imprecise rendering of the game given last week). The third diagram is the position in the foreground of the picture, and is a few moves into an ancient Allgaier Gambit. No new-fangled English 1.c4 anywhere, as in the above-mentioned telegraph match in which Steinitz and Potter were the main men for London - they are near neighbours at board two.  

This third game seems to be several tempi ahead of the others. Note also that not one of the professional chess heavyweights is attending this board. Perhaps this is suggestive as to the evolution of the painting itself: i.e. this may have been the centre piece of the stalled 1874 effort, when Rosenbaum essayed a composition with a few (well, 18) of his chums, intended as a competition prize in the City of London Chess Club (as said the first Chess Monthly report).  As he amplified the scope of the work during the later years of its gestation, he might then have added the other boards to accommodate the big boys.                  

Rosenbaum also put in some historical references along the back wall, which shows again that he knew his chess. This is how The Chess-Monthly put it:

“On the wall hang two pictures, portraits of Morphy and Anderssen; faint medallions with busts in relief represent, or assume to do, Ponziani, Lolli, Stamma, and others, at least Mr R. challenges any one to disprove the fidelity of the likenesses”.

Morphy wasn't yet dead (not until 1884), but as he had never been resident in London he seems only to merit a portrait (at second remove) on the wall rather than one in the body of the kirk, and it looks to me as if it was copied from this image of Morphy playing de Rivière in 1858. You can even just make out the chess set.
  

Anderssen (dead in 1879) gets the same treatment and - as you are now going up the wall  - note that The Chess-Monthly was slightly askew with its list of the “faint medallions”: they are in fact, when read left to right: Evans, Lolli, Stamma, Salvio, Phildor and Staunton. Ponziani is nowhere to be seen. Staunton had died in 1874; had he managed to put it off for a few more years he might also have been on the floor in person rather than on the wall in spirit.  

Up at the back there are also “placards with the conventional club notices and comical inscriptions” as the commentator put it. Once again Rosenbaum shows his sly sense of humour;  one might say at his own expense. One of the “placards” alludes to some bad blood in London chess circles of the period in which Rosenbaum was himself one of the main players: the formation of a breakaway, and short-lived, “West End Chess Club.”  The “placard” is an “in memoriam” notice for that "late" club (as it had been referred to in The Chess-Monthly in February 1880) and he placed it beside himself on the wall. More of this later when we put Rosenbaum under the microscope.

There is also another intriguing touch – seen better when examining the picture in the flesh (with a torch) – just to the right of Gümpel (he is standing in the back row). 

Under a magnifying glass it looks very much like a reproduction in miniature - a picture within the picture - of this:

It is the illustration that Gümpel used in his book of  “Mephisto. Exhibited at the International Theatre Exposition Universell, Paris 1889”,  and as it was copied by Rosenbaum in 1880 it must therefore pre-date the expo itself by almost ten years. 

So Rosenbaum honours the inventor of Mephisto by slipping in a facsimile of an illustration of his automaton, in full devilish regalia, just adjacent to him. And this raises the intriguing possibility that in this beneficient society of gentlemen where business and chess interests must have commingled to mutual advantage, Gümpel might have commissioned Rosenbaum to originate the Mephisto illustration we see above; and moreover, Mr R. might have created it before its insertion, in copy-miniature, on the wall. Possibly Gümpel's book itself might have a clue as to who created the image, and when, and settle the point.    

There are several of Mephisto’s victims in the painting. Indeed at the unveiling of the infernal contraption in 1878 Colonel Minchin,  Hirschfeld, and William Norwood Potter (1840-1895) were defeated by it, and several of the others in the painting lost subsequently, at some time or other, including Rosenbaum himself.  

It is well established that Mephisto's chess brain power was mainly provided by Gunsberg in its early days. He operated from a room adjacent, communicating by way of some electrical wizardry of early vintage. As a consequence he would have had to be absent from the assembled company. So, perhaps the omission of Gunsberg himself from the picture is deliberate, and another little joke by the artist. Not so much Red Devil as Scarlet Pimpernel: Isidor Gunsberg always seemed to be somewhere else.

Reported Missing 1

That apart, it is odd that Gunsberg is omitted – as is another significant figure (and another of Tim Harding's Eminent Victorian Chess Players) in the chess politicking of the time, the Rev Arthur Skipworth (1830-1898), though his rival power base was in the provincial chess scene out of London. Another prominent player, Amos Burn (1848-1925), doesn’t appear either, but, as J.H.B. notes in his 1926 BCM obituary for Burn’s death in 1925, after his tournament victory in 1876 (at Cheltenham) Burn didn’t re-appear on the domestic chess circuit until 1883, presumably because his business interests took him abroad. What with Rosenbaum’s illness until 1877 it would seem that Burn out-of-sight put Burn out-of-mind, and thus Burn out-of-picture. BTW in the obit J.H.B. mis-dates it to 1882.

Reported Missing 2

Another omission from the party was one J.O.S.Thursby esq., possibly on account of his youth - he was born in 1861, and was student at Cambridge in the very late 70's and 1880. By then he had already made his mark on the chess scene, and was destined to make an even bigger one, as we will find out next time.  

The Missing Persons Bureau may also like to post the absence of others: "Fighting Reverend" Charles Edward Rankin (1828-1905) (the "most saintly" of them says Tim Harding); and Lord Randolph Churchill (1849-1895), in connection with whom "saintly" isn't the first word that springs to mind. Students of this period of chess history will no doubt be able to nominate other significant AWOLs.            

The Chess-Monthly’s first account of the painting’s career (“first” because there was another, subsequently) mentions Zukertort’s blindfold display at the end of the afternoon..

At about four o’clock Mr Zukertort commenced his blindfold performance in the same room. He played simultaneously eight games against Messrs. Belajeff, Gumpel, Mann, Minchin, Salter, Shaw, Tinsley and Warner. The single player had to surrender to Messrs. Minchin, Warner, Shaw and Belajeff – the latter we compliment on his successful reappearance in the Chess world. The other four games were won by the blindfold player.

In his column in BCM in October 1980 “One Hundred Years Ago” R.N.Coles gives one of Zukertort’s wins sans voir – against Samuel Tinsley; you can play it through below. Not knowing the then whereabouts of the painting, Mr Coles wondered “if [Rosenbaum's] picture survived or met as sticky an end as Sutherland’s portrait of Winston Churchill.”  Winnie, of course, was the son of the above-mentioned Lord Randolph. 

Reported Missing 3 

Was Mr Coles implying that Rosenbaum's portraits were as unflattering as Sutherland's effort was alleged to have been - by Mrs Churchill anyway? She trashed it. Whatever. As we now know: Rosenbaum's gallery of mug-shots survived.

We can't finish this episode about missing persons without mentioning what must be staring everyone in the face about Mr R's painting: the fact that staring back is not one female. Nowhere. Not as a chess player.  Not as a guest on the arm of a gent. Not even in a serving role (even the waiters are men). These days that would be considered, and rightly, nothing short of scandalous. But that was then. And as this is now, we'll try and do something about it, next time.

Acknowledgments
Gunsberg image from Chess Archeology, sourced from The Games of Gunsberg's Chess Matches with Tchigorin and Steinitz, p3, 1891, (Morgan's Chess Library, book 8).
Burn comes from the book of the 1895 Hastings Tournament, on line here.
Churchill's Portrait (1954) by Graham Sutherland from Gallery of Lost Art
Thanks to Batgirl, for the use of the Mephisto image, and for her Mephisto intelligence.  
Morphy - de Rivière comes from Wikipedia Commons. It was published in L’Illustration, journal universel, probably 25 September 1858, according to Winter's Chess Note 7604.
The telegraph match is covered in Tim Harding's Correspondence Chess in Britain and Ireland, 1824-1987. 
pub McFarland (2011)

Link to earlier episodes, and those subsequent to this post, via the blog's History Index

Chess goes to the movies: Blade Runner

[Warning: This post contains spoilers]

We're heading back to the picture house today and returning one last time to our early '80s science fiction theme. After Saturn 3 (1980) and The Thing (1982) we have Blade Runner, another film which is exactly three decades old this year.

White to play

Anderssen-Kieseritsky, 1851

Sebastian (& Batty) -Tyrell, 2019

Queen to bishop six, check. Knight takes queen. Bishop to king seven, checkmate. That sequence must have set bells ringing for an awful lot of chessers.

Is the position in Blade Runner exactly the same as the one reached in the famous Anderssen-Kieseritsky encounter? Since film makers love ornate chess sets to precisely the same degree that real players loathe them, it's hard to tell. It's obviously pretty close, though, and identical position or otherwise it's a great scene.

What we have here is a rare example of chess as exposition. The game is used as a plot device, not to foreshadow a theme that will emerge in the final act (as in Saturn 3), but rather as a way of moving the story forward.

Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) needs to end up on a roof giving his big "Attack ships on fire ... tears in rain" speech. To find his way there he's going to have to meet Tyrell (Joe Turkell) and the script brings the two of them together by having Batty intervene in a game of correspondence chess that the speccy capitalist is playing with a genetic designer and toy maker, J. F. Sebastian (William Sanderson).

A marvellous little scene, and yet I wonder how it comes across to somebody who hasn't seen the whole film.  I suspect that to fully appreciate the clip at the head of today's blog you really need to have watched every one of the 76 minutes that precede it.

Batty is a NEXUS 6 Replicant. A 'skin job'. A robot designed to look exactly like a real human whilst being stronger, more agile and at least as intelligent as the engineers that created him.  More human than human is the Tyrell Corporation motto.

Immediately before Batty and Sebastian go to meet Tyrell we see them together with Pris (Daryl Hannah, also an android) in J.F's apartment. Replicants aren't allowed on Earth, but as a designer J.F. is not interested in the law. He just wants to see what these machines can do. Pretty soon Pris is fishing an egg out of a pan of boiling water with her bare hands and Roy is sitting at a chessboard.

Sebastian explains that he is playing a game against Doctor Tyrell. "He's a genius", Sebastian says, explaining that he's only ever beaten him once. Batty takes a brief glance and pushes his queen forward. "No. Knight takes queen. See? No good", Sebastian tells him.

Anachronisms, we have a few. There's the use of descriptive notation* and in the earlier scene we see Batty capturing the queen with a knight placed in the centre of the board and not from it's home square where it appears to be on Tyrell's set. We could also ask ourselves whether a chess genius is likely to be surprised by a mate in one and question whether a player like Sebastian would ever have reached the kind of position where Batty could launch his (Anderssen's) spectacular coup.

Still, as drama for a mainstream audience it works. An out-of-the-blue queen sacrifice that turns a losing position into a winning one: that's what non-players think genius at chess is. What's more, it's a really rather subtle sequence. That Batty was right all along is never explicitly stated. You have to be one of us to see that he was**.

A great scene then and without a doubt, my favourite of the little run of sci-fi films with chess scenes that came out thirty years ago.  Have you been wondering why there were so many, all in a row, though?

Well, the fact that popular culture of the early 1980s was chock-full of chess references can be put down to the fact that we were kings in the 1970s. That science fiction was a such a hot subject for movie-makers back then?  That, I think, we can trace back to the film we'll be looking at next time.






* see Dave Ewart's comment to the original CgttM
** Blade Runner is a film notorious for its mistakes. Here, I think, we have an error, but one that rarely gets mentioned in the blooper lists. Replicants are supposed to be only "at least" as intelligent as their creators. In the chess scenes Batty displays a proficiency at chess over and above that of Tyrell who is supposedly a "genius".




Chess goes to the movies
Chess goes to the movies: Saturn 3
Chess goes to the movies: The Thing

Roy Batty

Pris

Sebastian, Pris and Batty

Sixty Memorable Annotations

#13: Chris Ward - Simon Williams, British Championships 2004

6 ... d6

The Classical Dutch is a pretty rare bird these days. According to Jan Pinski's 2002 book on the opening (Classical Dutch, Everyman £14.99), I am just about the only top player who would consider playing it. If so, it is in need of new advocates because I abandoned it years ago. Having said that, it is only a little dubious, rather than plain unsound. Furthermore, few White players are familiar with its subtleties.

Nigel Short, The Sunday Telegraph (15th August, 2004)

A little dubious? Nige's assessment of the Classical Dutch is both pleasingly reminiscent of Ford Prefect's opinion of Earth and just as true today as it was when he wrote it down eight years ago.

"Mostly harmless"

First of all there's his counter to the idea that the Dutch is just trash. Hardly. The GingerGM's results with the opening are simply too good. His victories over British Champions - Joe Gallagher (2001) and Chris Ward (2004) - and the steady flow of wins notched against 2600+ opponents - Mikhalevski (2003), Agrest (2004), Ivan Sokolov (2006) for a start - a testament to the fact that the Classical Dutch is not going to be refuted outright.

Secondly, White players aren't usually familiar with the position at the head of today's blog. Short is still bang on the money there.

It's particularly so for club chessers, but also true at the highest levels, it seems. Witness Nakamura punting an IFE against Williams after observing his destruction of erstwhile World Championship Challenger Boris Gelfand at the European Club Cup. 7 Nc3 Ne4, 8 Nxe4 might be generally accepted as the most testing line in the Classical Dutch, but, like Gelfie before him, the current twelfth best chesser in the world just didn't fancy it.

Outdated, although I wouldn't mind picking up a copy for my collection.

Not for the £9 amazon want for it second hand, mind.

And yet, we must admit that the Classical Dutch is not likely to be turning up in a World Championship match any time soon. It is a little dubious. Only a little dubious, for sure, but a little dubious nonetheless.

If you're planning to win in twenty moves against a 2700 Super-GM you'll need a monumental hack that is closer to "incredibly iffy".  In most circumstances, though, "a little dubious" is plenty good enough. I've never forgotten that it was Nigel Short who told me that.

Sixty Memorable Annotations Index 42

What Do You Do, Son?

What do you do?

I don't know, but I know, I do it every day

The Bonzo Dog Band

Hooray for amateurism. Especially amateurism that means Colchester United get dumped out of the FA Cup. If you think that's unfair of me, consider that I'm a Wycombe fan. Beating the pros is the stuff of folklore and can cause delusions of riding a Lambretta. Check out the bloke on the left in the above snap.

Now, I've already touched on the issue of pseudo-professionalism within chess, and I'm not going to readdress it here. Instead, as I've said, let's celebrate those who, for whatever reason, don't compete full-time but can still mix it up at the top. Let's celebrate those who are achingly talented but have different priorities.

Congratulations to Luke McShane. England No. 1.

Mr. Rosenbaum's Chess Picture. Part 2: Who's Who

We are delving into the story (in eight weekly episodes) of Anthony Rosenbaum’s chess group-portrait. He started it in 1874 with just 18 sitters, then abandoned the project and, what with illness and other distractions, could only resume a few years later, then raising his game to squeeze in a dizzying 50 or so characters. He signed it off "A Rosenbaum 1880" in the bottom left-hand corner. There's a lot to discuss, and for this episode we'll stick to the subject matter of the painting. 

At its unveiling in 1880, before an invited audience from the London chess world, the following caption was provided, according to the The Chess-Monthly: “A match by telegraph, suggestion for the future”. This, surely, must have been appended with the artist’s approval, suggesting that it might serve as the painting’s official title – and suitably uplifting that would be too, in keeping with the spirit of that burgeoning scientific and entrepreneurial age; something that is missing, one feels, from the rather pedestrian, if literal, “Chess Players”, as it is so-named by the National Portrait Gallery.   

The story in The Chess-Monthly continued:

"The scene represented is an ideal match by telegraph, London playing against three cities in different parts of the globe. The moment chosen is the arrival of the message containing the move, which is handed by the commissioner to the hon. sec. of the Universal Chess Club."

And indeed you can see the liveried footman in the foreground (fourth from right) passing the chit to the outstretched left hand of the red-bearded chef de parti, across a phalanx of four other gents. 

© National Portrait Gallery
Click on this, or any image, to enlarge

Here the The Chess-Monthly's commentator has enthusiastically entered into the spirit of the occasion and allowed himself a flight of fancy: there appears to have been no such outfit as the “Universal Chess Club,” at least I have been unable to find a mention of it in Sergeant, for example, or even elsewhere in The Chess-Monthly which was assiduous in reporting the chess goings-on of the time. If then it was, as it appears, a conceit, perhaps it was at Rosenbaum's instigation: it wasn’t just play by telegraph he was envisaging, but one big world-wide-web of chess players, all joined in universal association. It was his utopian vision of the chess future, and all the more pertinent given the then "unfortunate state of disunion in metropolitan Chess circles" as The Chess-Monthly put it. We'll come back to that as Rosenbaum himself wasn't merely an innocent bystander in the messy business alluded to. 

But: "unfortunate state of disunion in...Chess circles" - that's more unwittingly prescient than they could ever have imagined. Do they mean us?
   

The “match by telegraph” tag encourages the speculation that Rosenbaum’s inspiration for the mis en scène, way back in 1874 when he first started his project, might have been the telegraph match between London and Vienna that had concluded in the March of that year. But even if so, he was not, as his composition developed, depicting that contest slavishly: they played only two games (London 1.5 – 0.5 Vienna), not three as shown. 

The Chess-Monthly takes us through the personnel man by man, though (as we noted in the first part of the series) it didn’t offer assistance by way of an illustration or reproduction of the painting. It painted a picture with words as if its readers were already familiar with the appearances of the players ... 

"The first game, commencing from the left of the spectator, is conducted by Messrs. Macdonnell, Lowenthal, Bird, Blackburne, and Mason, attended by Messrs. Clarke, Thomson, Walrond, Gastineau, Pearson, Kunwald, and Rabbeth;" 

But as we are not - familiar, that is - 130 years later, here are some helpful illustrations*, and this is the "first game":

"the second, on the right, by Messrs. Hoffer, Steinitz, Zukertort, Potter, Horwitz, surrounded by Messrs. Gümpel, Coburn, Ballard, jun., Mackern, Rosenbaum, and Murton;" 

And here it is:

"the third game, in the centre foreground, is played by the Rev. W. Wayte, Lord Dartrey, Messrs. Minchin, Salter, and Wyvil. The rest is filled in by Messrs. Eccles, Wagner, Vyse, Lord, Walker, Chapman, Hirschfield, Tinsley, Cubison, Woodgate, Greenhough, Day, Studd, Ballard sen., and Donnisthorpe." 

Et les voilà:

As you can see, Rosenbaum has clustered the chess heavyweights (e.g. Bird, Blackburne, Steinitz, Zuckertort) around games one and two, in the second row. Grouped around game three in the foreground are various officer-bearers and VIPs from St. George's Chess Club, one of the two principal London chess clubs of the day, the other being the City of London CC members of which are also dotted around, as are various chess movers and shakers (from both clubs) who frequently crop up in the accounts of the period. Making up the numbers are lesser lights, who were stalwarts of the chess scene nonetheless. 

This series of posts can't investigate in detail all of these characters, and anyway the strongest chess-wise have been generously treated elsewhere, for example in Tim Harding's latest book Eminent Victorian Chess Players. We will, though, in later episodes, stop and have a close look at one or two of the others who particularly catch the eye, and we'll comment briefly on some others in passing. 

For the moment let's put in a word for one of the unsung heros of the chess scene: they who, then as now, may never raise their game above "club strength" but on whom depends the very strength of their club. Stand up Mr Murton (over on the right of game two), as much as your 90 years will permit, and Happy Birthday! Yes, Mr Murton was four-score and ten on the 23rd October 1880, a week before the unveiling, and was honoured with a dinner by the City of London CC. In 1883, recalling that happy event, the Rev. MacDonnell (left, game one) paid tribute to him, in his Chess Life Pictures, thus:

"[Mr Murton is] to me...a seemingly very ordinary mortal [who] may seem to be a hero...not eminent in chess, but by his integrity, his straightforwardness of character, his unselfish love of chess throughout a long series of years, he has gained the esteem, the admiration, and even the affection of his brother-members..."            

Prettily put; and so say all of us.  

Back now with The Chess-Monthly, which continued its droll commentary on the action, and incident, in the painting: 

"The attitude of most of the gentlemen mentioned expresses curious expectation of the telegram just arrived and to be opened by Mr. Minchin. Mr. Day especially seems to look very attentively for the move, whereas Messrs. Cubison, Greenhough, and Studd express by their quiet demeanour confidence in their ultimate victory. Mr Donnisthorpe is pretending to read the score, but we think, with due respect he is looking at the gorgeous silver tray in front of him, embarrassed which of the splendid crystal decanters to choose. Mr Hirschfield has evidently been reading the CHESS-MONTHLY, which he is putting down temporarily in order to attend to the game." 

And here we can make our own bit of mischief : Wordsworth Donisthorpe (1847-1914) (he himself used only one 'n') - a wonderfully exotic figure, he's in the front row, extreme right  - is, more likely, musing over his latest libertarian tract denouncing the State and all its Works; and Mr Hirschfield (1840-1896) - black-bearded and business-like, front tier, far left - has been admiring the dividend at his own start-up: the Kœnigsburg Tea Company. Indeed most of the gents would, don't you think, have been keeping more than half an eye on the serious business of their professional, commercial, clerical, and even political, interests while they applied the lesser part to the conduct of the game at hand.   

We can also detect in that little foreground vignette, where the note is handed across, some infelicity in the posing of the figures that betrays the incremental, not to say accidental, accumulation of portraits in the painting.  

We can't overlook that the commissionaire impolitely ignores several gents one of whom, by Jove, is an Earl - he's the shortish cove in the middle - in order to offer the move to the untitled Mr Minchin, the occasion's Master of Ceremonies. Lord Cremorne, by then elevated as The Earl of Dartrey, must decidedly have expected to enjoy the benefit of precedence and to be the first to accept the note; indeed he is positioned as if he might have been ready to claim his privilege, but is then passed over somewhat discourteously. Adjacent to the footman Mr Wyvill casts the poor chap a dirty look, and Mr Woodgate, next along, double takes at the impertinence. The explanation for this lapse in etiquette might be that Rosenbaum had to wedge in his portraits as each subject came to hand. The Earl may have been dropped into the painting centre-stage front as befits his status, but the action proceeds as if without him. Frankly, he might just as well not be there. 

In the next episode we will have a look at some characters who, in fact, really aren't.    

For a little chess, and to finish off, let's go back to the London - Vienna match of 1872-4, interrupted and prolonged by a play-stopped-play break caused by the main players trooping off to the 1873 tournament in Vienna (by coincidence), occasioning one of the longest adjournments in chess history.  Here is London's victory, gained after opening with a grateful nation's favourite move: 1. c4.

More in a week's time. 

Acknowledgments etc

*The labelling of the individuals in the painting is based on the key in the NPG Archive, which I have assumed to be contemporaneous with the painting. This facsimile key was reproduced in Chess in 1993, and will appear in a later episode.

The coquettish Wordsworth Donisthorpe has attracted his fair share of interest in recent years (of that he would, no doubt, have been well pleased). The most recent example is here. We will gaze upon him, in all his pomp, in a later post.

For a full account of the London - Vienna match and games, with comprehensive annotations ancient and modern,  see Tim Harding's articles here and here. 

MacDonnell, G. A. Chess Life Pictures (1883)

Sergeant, P. W. A Century of  Chess History  (1934).

Access all episodes of this series (forward and back) via the History Index.

Short Of Knowledge

56 people entered my UCL pub quiz last night. 56 people were given this question:

"Which English chess Grandmaster challenged Garry Kasparov for the World Championship in 1993?"

56 people didn't know. 56 people upset me.

The stats make grim reading

I suppose a few of the participants wouldn't have been born when the Savoy hosted our Nige's finest hour but, for the entire room to be devoid of interest, that surprised me. 

Having said that, no team managed to identify a screen capture from Café de Flore, one of the most significant films from 2012, so perhaps it was just an anomalous bunch in attendance.

I guess we won't know for sure how representative tonight's findings are until a relevant topic comes up on Pointless, that pillar of collective consciousness. However, for now, Nigel Short is very much our pointless friend.

Photo: Jan Lagrain for ChessVibes

Nigel Short Index