40 years ago, as I write this, I received a phone call that was to change my life. My friend Mike Fox had been commissioned to write a book about chess trivia and asked if I would like to co-author it. The first and longest chapter of The Complete Chess Addict, as it would become,… Continue reading

Here’s young Charles Masson Fox at home with his family in 1871. You might want to admire his father Howard’s bespoke shoes. Perhaps they were custom made by a local cordwainer: a skilled craftsman producing leather footwear for the gentry, for families like the Foxes who would have been well known throughout the community. I’d… Continue reading

Rita Fox, whom you met last time, was, assuming Charles James Fox was her biological father, not the only member of her family with an interest in chess. Let’s first go back to her great grandfather Joseph Fox. He had a brother named Richard, whose great grandson Hugh Courtney (or Courtenay) Fox had some problems… Continue reading

In the heady early years of the Ladies’ Chess Club in London, back in the mid 1890s, their teams were often headed by the F Squad: four players whose names all began with that letter. They usually played Mrs (Louisa Matilda) Fagan on top board, followed by Miss (Gertrude Alison) Field, later Mrs Donald Anderson,… Continue reading

You know the story, of course. It comes from Shaw’s play Pygmalion, but was made famous by the Lerner & Loewe musical My Fair Lady (by the way, I can strongly recommend John Wilson’s recent recording). The story concerned Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower seller (like Lonnie Donegan and Leonard Barden, her old man was… Continue reading

Let’s return to the 1913 British Championships in Cheltenham. A couple of months after the event, the prizes for Brilliant Games were announced. Here’s the prize winning game from the Ladies’ Championship, won by Miss Hutchison Stirling. (Sources vary on whether Hutchison was part of her surname or her middle name.) [Event “British Ladies Championship… Continue reading

Come with me, if you will, to the beautiful island of Barbados, noted particularly, to many of us, for its record in producing world class cricketers. Having previously been captured and then abandoned by the Spanish, the first English ship arrived in 1625, taking possession of the island in the name of King James I.… Continue reading

Here, taken from the ECF Facebook page, is US chess legend James Sherwin (92) taking on English prodigy Bodhana Sivanandan (10) in the recent UK Open Blitz Qualifier in Cardiff. Two players with an 82 year difference in their ages. Back in the 1970s it was a regular trope every year at Hastings and the… Continue reading

I’ve written in the past how, back in the 1930s, chess was used in a variety of ways to help those with a range of disadvantages. We visited the Royal Star and Garter Home for Disabled Ex-Servicemen in Richmond, where chess was popular amongst the residents. We travelled to Leicester to meet the members of… Continue reading

It’s time to return to Twickenham and meet the man who was the President of the second Twickenham Chess Club from its foundation in 1921 to his death in 1927. Dr John Rudd Leeson was, as you’ll soon discover, a significant member of the Twickenham community. He was born in 1854 in London, the son… Continue reading