11389. An
alleged Mieses v Post position (C.N. 11378)
C.N. 11378 had a reference to Kurt Richter’s book Der
Schachpraktiker, and below is an excerpt from
pages 95-96 of the fifth edition (Hollfeld, 1998):
Hans-Georg Kleinhenz (Munich, Germany) sends the
following from page 11 of the 1/1951 Deutsche
Schachblätter (edited by Richter and with Szabó as
a contributor) in an article entitled ‘Für und wider
den Glossator’:
11390.
Hastings, 1954-55
Olimpiu G. Urcan (Singapore) has obtained permission
from the Keystone Pictures archives for two photographs
of Vassily Smyslov
(Hastings, 1954-55) to be reproduced here:
Another shot of Smyslov and Unzicker was on page 169 of
CHESS, 8 January 1955:
Page 184 of the 22 January 1955 issue of CHESS
had an account of these press reports by Ralph Hewins:
Daily Express, 5
January 1955, page 5
Daily Express, 7
January 1955, page 5.
J. Hudson and A. Spiller participated, respectively, in
the Major Section, Premier Reserves and in the Premier
Reserves ‘A’, each obtaining 3½ points (BCM,
February 1955, page 69).
11391. Withers
v Justice
Eduardo Bauzá Mercére (New York, NY, USA) draws
attention to an 1844 game published on page 291 of the Chess
Player’s Chronicle, 1845 (volume six) and, with
two brief notes, on page 37 of The Bristol Chess
Club by J. Burt (Bristol, 1883):
1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 d6 3 d4 f5 4 dxe5 fxe4 5 Ng5 d5 6 e6 Nh6
7 Nc3 c6 8 f4 g6 9 h4 Be7 10 h5 Bxg5 11 fxg5 Nf5 12 g4
Ng3 13 Qd4 O-O 14 hxg6 Nxh1 15 gxh7+ Kxh7 16 Nxe4 dxe4
17 Qxe4+ Kg7 18 Bd3 and wins.
Our correspondent comments that after 18 Bd3 no mention
was made of the possible line 18...Rf1+ 19 Bxf1 Qd1+ 20
Kxd1 Nf2+ 21 Ke2 Nxe4 ...
... with an extra piece against three pawns, although
computer analysis suggests that the game should still be
won by White.
11392.
John Cochrane (C.N. 11102)
From John Townsend (Wokingham, England):
‘The Royal
Parks website makes it possible to search the
burial register of Brompton Cemetery, and an image
of the burial entry of John Cochrane shows that he
was buried there on 8 March 1878. The address
recorded was 12 Bryanston Street, Bryanston Square,
and his age was given as 77, whereas 78 was
specified in the death indexes of the General
Register Office. The website also provides a link to
an aerial view showing the location of the grave.
Does a memorial to Cochrane exist?’
11393. US
accounts for the 1935 Olympiad
Particularly detailed information regarding the US team
is on page viii of Book of the Warsaw 1935
International Chess Team Tournament by Fred
Reinfeld and Harold M. Phillips (New York, 1936):
At the time of the Olympiad, the cover price of the American
Chess
Bulletin and of Chess Review was $0.25.
11394. Reinfeld
on annotating
On page v of the 1935 Warsaw Olympiad book mentioned in
the previous item Fred Reinfeld wrote:
‘As I have occasion to analyse upwards of 500 games
during the course of a year, my judgment tends at
times to assume a routine or dogmatic character, and
for this reason I found Mr Phillips’ unwillingness to
take anything for granted, and his painstaking search
for hidden resources, particularly invaluable.’
11395. A
Pleci story
From an article by Jeremy
Gaige, ‘The Ethics of Chess’, on page 106 of Chess
Review, April 1961:
The story is related on, for instance, pages 82-83 of The
Chess
Scene by David Levy and Stewart Reuben (London,
1974):
No source was given, naturally, but the ease with which
anyone can fill space with such stuff is demonstrated by
this extract from a ‘Round the Chess World’ article by
G. Koltanowski on page 77 of CHESS, 14 October
1935:
The episode was also related on page 18 of Najdorf:
Life and Games by T. Lissowski and A.
Mikhalchishin (London, 2005). The conclusion:
On the strict basis of authoritative accounts, and
ideally with the game-score, how can the incident best
be summarized in a brief paragraph?
11396.
The altar of topicality
‘One cannot but deprecate this tendency to sacrifice
good work on the altar of topicality ...’
That comes at the end of a short book review by Harry
Golombek on pages 82-83 of the February 1955 BCM:
Golombek had high praise for Euwe’s book on the
Candidates’ tournament, Schach-Elite im Kampf,
on page 165 of the May 1955 BCM.
11397. Lasker v
Capablanca in 1906
Yandy Rojas Barrios (Cárdenas, Cuba) raises the topic
of the 1906 rapid transit tournament at the Manhattan
Chess Club, New York referred to by Capablanca towards
the end of Chapter II (page numbers vary) of My
Chess Career (London, 1920):
A reference to the tournament on page 35 of the
February 1907 American Chess Bulletin was shown
in C.N. 10421:
From page 8 of the Chicago Tribune, 20 January
1907:
On page 100 of The Unknown Capablanca by David
Hooper and Dale Brandreth (London, 1975) the semi-final
pairings against Davidson and Delmar were given the
other way round:
A later report on page 5 of the New York Evening
Post, 23 January 1907:
No earlier item in the Evening Post
specifically on the December 1906 tournament has yet
been found.
An assessment of Lasker and Capablanca was provided by
Walter Penn Shipley on page 9 of the Philadelphia
Inquirer, 20 January 1907:
Mr Rojas Barrios notes that in secondary sources the
tournament which brought together Lasker and Capablanca
in December 1906 is sometimes misdated April 1906, one
example being page 28 of El ajedrez en Cuba by
José Luis Barreras Meriño (Havana, 2002):
The source indicated (page 11 of the book on the
Havana, 1966 Olympiad) had given no date for the rapid
transit tournament:
As our correspondent also points out, the April 1906
event was at the Rice Chess Club. From pages 61-63 of
the April 1906 American Chess Bulletin:
See too page 309 of our book on Capablanca.
C.N. 6077 noted that the remark by Lasker about
Capablanca’s freedom from error, mentioned in the two
Cuban books above, was supposedly made after their
ten-game rapid transit match in Berlin in 1914. See Fast Chess.
11398. George
Henry Mackenzie and James Parker Barnett
From John S. Hilbert (Amherst, NY, USA):
‘Olimpiu G. Urcan and I are working on a biography
and game collection of George H. Mackenzie; although
it is unlikely to be published for several years, we
have already collected over 1,000 of his games.
When drafting material about Mackenzie’s play in the
United States in the first few years after the Civil
War, and in dealing with his opponents, we ran across
an article
about Dr James Parker Barnett. Your
readers may like to see our draft account, which comes
after a description of Mackenzie’s first-round match
with Stanley at the 1866 New York Chess Club
tournament:
“His most trying challenge met, Mackenzie faced Dr
James Parker Barnett in the second round. His
opponent had the benefit of Worrall resigning to him
in the first round without a game played, although
Barnett would have been favored to win against
almost anyone. Six years older than Mackenzie,
Barnett was born and raised in New York City. A
product of the Morphy boom, he started playing
publicly in the late 1850s, when he was living and
practicing medicine in Brooklyn. In 1860 he made it
to the final round of a chess tournament at the
Morphy Chess Rooms, but lost to the now dead James
A. Leonard. Absent from chess during the war,
Barnett returned with the 1866 New York Chess Club
tournament, and went on to play offhand and
tournament games at the Café Europa and Café
International later in the decade and into the
mid-1870s. Hazeltine, after Frank Teed told him of
Barnett’s death in 1886, remembered Barnett from his
earliest days, writing that Barnett ‘possessed the
happy combination of a lively imagination and
unflinching courage, coupled with perfect suavity of
manner whether victor or vanquished. Consequently,
his game was at once strong, steady and brilliant’.
Mackenzie himself believed, according to Alexander
Sellman, that at one point Barnett was ‘one of the
strongest players of the country’. [See endnote 1.]
Barnett received his college degree from the
University of the City of New York in 1848. He
graduated from Dartmouth Medical College in 1854.
His academic road, impressive as it was, was neither
smooth nor easy, although not because of any
academic failing on his part. Barnett was one of
three children of James Barnett, Sr, a self-made
businessman who made his fortune along New York’s
East River supplying metal services for the packet
ship companies. Barnett’s mother was Eliza Beaumont,
also from New York. In October 1850 Barnett was in
his third and final year at Columbia School of
Physicians and Surgeons when he was grilled by his
professors over his racial background, as
allegations had been made earlier by a
never-identified ‘Southern gentleman’ that Columbia
harbored ‘colored students’, naming among them
Barnett. Barnett was expelled subsequently by
Columbia for failure to disclose his African ‘blood’
at the time of his application. Barnett’s father
hired the grandson of John Jay, a well-known
abolitionist lawyer and Columbia graduate, to
represent the medical student in his appeal against
expulsion. According to Barnett, Sr, his son was in
fact of mixed Native-American and White ancestry,
which explained his darker complexion. This,
however, hardly explained why the younger Barnett
was apparently unaware of any such Native-American
ancestry.
What few facts remain are not in favor of the elder
Barnett’s allegation of his son’s supposed
Native-American ancestry. Barnett’s sister Malvina
married a prominent black abolitionist and
physician, the first to hold such a degree. In
addition, although unbeknownst to Columbia, the 1850
Federal Census as well as the 1855 New York State
Census identified Barnett and his family as Mulatto,
although later censuses marked them as White.
(Census records at the time reflected a highly
suspect, subjective classification, as the census
enumerators were left to their own devices for
assessing race.) In any event, the appeal was
futile, as Columbia had no intention of relenting.
The faculty and trustees, however, seeking to end
the litigation, offered to examine Barnett, and
subsequently found him fit to practice medicine. His
degree, despite his tested competence, was
eventually blocked by the Regents of the University
of New York on the technical, and exceedingly
hypocritical, grounds that he had failed to satisfy
a lecture requirement that, in fact, he had been
barred from completing. This dismal conclusion did
not end Barnett’s career, as he went on to earn a
medical degree from Dartmouth and practiced medicine
in the greater New York metropolitan area for the
rest of his life, respected by his friends and
colleagues.” [See endnote 2.]
Endnotes:
“1. See Mason, p. 296. ‘possessed the happy
combination …’ New York Clipper, March 6,
1886. ‘One of the strongest players …’ Baltimore
American, April 18, 1886. See also Leonard,
Hilbert, pp. 34-37.
2. Barnett’s full name and degrees appear in the General
Catalog
of Dartmouth College (Hanover, New Hampshire,
1890), pp. 127, 178. The detailed and compelling
history of his fight against expulsion by Columbia’s
medical school appears in the article
‘Blurring the Lines: James Parker Barnett, Racial
Passing, and Invisible Early Black Students at
Columbia University’ by Ciara Keane (accessed June
17, 2019).”
A small sketch of James Parker Barnett is on page 172
of Brentano’s Chess Monthly,
August 1881. Below we reproduce with permission a
photograph of him forwarded by Dr Hilbert and owned by
the Cleveland
Public Library:
11399.
Alekhine’s date of birth
Pages 20-21 of the
21/1972 issue of Shakhmaty
As mentioned in C.N.s 4719, 4739 and 5782 (see When Was Alekhine
Born?), a clear copy of Alekhine’s birth
certificate is sought.
The opening paragraph of our feature article:
Alekhine’s birth-date is often given as 1 November
1892, but we are aware of no authoritative book
published in the past 20 years or so which deviates
from the ‘established’ date of 31 October 1892
(Gregorian calendar); this is the equivalent of 19
October 1892 in the Julian calendar, the gap in the
nineteenth century being 12 days, and not 13.
Writers still go astray, and below is the poor start to
a section on Alekhine on page 78 of The Big Book of
World Chess Championships by Andre Schulz
(Alkmaar, 2016):
Regarding the final sentence, no discernible purpose is
served by mentioning what Alekhine’s father ‘is supposed
to have lost on one occasion’.
11400.
Draw offers
On the subject of draws,
C.N. 2549 (see page 359 of A Chess Omnibus)
quoted this remark on Rubinstein by L. Steiner on page
54 of the March 1961 Chess World:
A claim about Emanuel Lasker’s practice appeared in ‘My
Encounters with Lasker’ by Ossip Bernstein on pages
202-204 of the July 1955 Chess Review:
11401. Keys and
key-moves (C.N. 5294)
From Robert John McCrary (Columbia, SC, USA):
‘On pages xxix-xxx of volume one of A
Treatise on the Game of Chess (London, 1808) J.H.
Sarratt introduced his “critical and remarkable
situations, or ends of games”, writing:
“These situations will not greatly improve
amateurs, unless they attempt to find out the method
of winning without looking at the solution; the
author has therefore deemed it eligible to insert
the situations in the first volume,
and the solutions in the second: and
he earnestly recommends amateurs to seek diligently
for the proper moves, without having recourse to the
key: the improvement which they will derive
from adhering to that system will amply compensate
them for their trouble.”’
Our correspondent also draws attention to the word
‘key’ on page 65 of volume six (1845) of the Chess
Player's Chronicle:
Below are the chess citations for ‘key’ and ‘key-move’
in the on-line Oxford
English Dictionary:
A reference will be added in Earliest Occurrences of
Chess Terms.
11402.
Carlsbad, 1929
An article by Louis Max on pages 40 and 92 of Social,
October 1929 has been submitted by Yandy Rojas Barrios
(Cárdenas, Cuba):
Apart from obvious factual errors, the article is
notable for its heavy pro-Capablanca slant.
11403. Dutch
players (C.N.s 5408 & 5416)
Rod Edwards (Victoria, BC, Canada) draws attention to
Adriaan Plomp’s article
about B.W. Blijdenstein, which identifies him as
the player active in London in 1859-61, as well as Dutch
events in the 1870s, whereas the participant in
Amsterdam, 1851 was W.J. Blijdenstein.
11404.
Cased image (C.N.s 6018 & 7390)
This picture was also discussed on page 37 of the
October 1993 Chess Life by Frank Skoff, who
concluded that it did not feature Paul Morphy.
11405. A
Countess from Hong Kong
Olimpiu G. Urcan (Singapore) has acquired permission
from Mondadori for us to reproduce a photograph taken
during the shooting of the 1967 film A Countess from
Hong Kong:
Marlon Brando, Charlie
Chaplin, Sophia Loren
11406. Frank
James Marshall
‘The name of Marshall is associated with the
unexpected in chess. No-one, not even Morphy, has won
more brilliant games, many of them brought about from
most unpromising looking positions.’
Source: page 58 of Modern Master-Play by F.D.
Yates and W. Winter (London, 1929).
11407.
Lasker v Schlechter
A paragraph about Emanuel Lasker on page 97 of A
Short History of Chess by H.J.R. Murray (Oxford,
1963):
The writer of these references to 12 games, instead of
ten, in the 1910
Lasker v Schlechter match was B. Goulding Brown.
The quoted remark about ‘charming an attack out of
nothing’ was on page 218 of Lasker’s Chess Magazine,
August-September 1906, in a note to Schlechter’s 29...c5
against Rubinstein, Ostend, 1906:
Position after 29 Nf2-d1
11408. Threats
‘We can gain nothing in chess except by means of
threats.’
That observation is on page 69 of How Not to Play
Chess by E. Znosko-Borovsky (London, 1931):
A dissenting note appeared in a book review by Charles
De Vide on page 73 of the April 1932 American Chess
Bulletin:
11409.
G.H.D. Gossip
On the question of whether G.H.D. Gossip’s second
forename was Hatfield or Hatfeild, an extensive
contribution from Neil Hickman (Hardingham, England) has
been added to our feature
article.
11410.
Alekhine in the Second World War
A wild claim on page 96 of Le grand livre des
échecs by Camil Seneca and Adolivio Capece (Paris,
1977):
‘Quand la Seconde Guerre mondiale éclata,
Alekhine, étant naturalisé français, fut appelé sous
les drapeaux et engagé dans les services secrets,
surtout parce qu’il parlait et écrivait parfaitement
dix langues!’
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