The royal game, or: Rishi to the rescue
Last month I succumbed to my inner pre-teenage girl and permitted myself the extravagance of watching the new Barbie film in my local cinema. To my astonishment, a pink chess set appeared in Barbieland — with pink-clad Barbies playing chess by a pinkish piscine. This is not the only implausible location for chess which I have recently observed, for it seems that giant chess will also be imminently appearing on the lawn of Number 10 Downing Street.
Since becoming Prime Minister last year, Rishi Sunak has tried to persuade the nation to embrace its (usually largely invisible) brainy side. The next move, apparently — in significant part due to the efforts of the indefatigable impresario Malcolm Pein — will be a most laudable initiative to persuade the nation’s youth to take up chess.
This endeavour is doubtless cognate with the PM’s desire to insist that study of mathematics continues until the end of school years — a proposal that was not universally popular. Speaking for myself, I would have had no fear of being forced to continue with maths until the bitter end since, as I demonstrated in my column about Genius in Physics, I was superbly well equipped to grapple with the intricacies and demands of achieving skills connected with the higher strata of numeracy.
The PM plans to announce proposals to build interest in our game, not only by expanding instruction in schools, but also by means of installing at least 100 new chess tables in public parks. The announcement is due at a ceremony featuring an oversized chess set on 10 Downing Street’s hallowed turf.
Much more significantly , the Prime Minister will earmark £500,000 in funding for the English Chess Federation. This grant will help to send teams to international tournaments. It would be the first time the UK Government has financially backed our national chess squads.
A third unlikely place for chess to be found is in the basement of London’s Tate Britain. The gallery contains a statue of Queen Elizabeth I playing chess, with 16th-century galleons as pieces, against the Spanish King Philip II.
At the close of the Victorian period, the sculptor William Reynolds-Stephens devised innovative electro-depositing techniques, as he felt sculptors “should be fully acquainted with all the processes of production”. His A Royal Game, 1906–11, one of the early purchases made for the Tate with the Chantrey Bequest, is fashioned from electro-formed copper, carved wood, decorative semi-precious stones and a host of various metallic coatings. Representing Philip II of Spain playing chess against Queen Elizabeth, with plenty of Armada symbolism, it was designed as a rousing allegory for the buildup of naval tension with Germany in the first decade of the 20th century.
Anti-British animus was growing rapidly within the German Empire at that time, as was pointed out presciently by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of A Study in Scarlet, the first of many Sherlock Holmes stories. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle cited chess clearly only once, describing skill at chess as “the mark of a devious mind” in the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Retired Colourman”. The Great Detective also dined twice at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, the traditional home of British chess, and the haunt of such greats as Wilhelm Steinitz and Howard Staunton. Indeed, a famous chess board and pieces, used by the most prominent 19th century chess champions, including also the American Meteor, Paul Morphy, can still be seen, in pride of place, at the head of the main staircase in Simpson’s — that is, if Simpsons ever reopens after its “temporary” Covid induced shutdown. An auction of Simpsons otiose memorabilia at the start of this month, does indeed augur well for a likely relaunch.
Furthermore, the “Immortal Game” of London 1851, one of the most brilliant chess victories of all time, was played on Simpson’s sacred ground. Not to mention that I regard Steinitz, whom Sir Arthur must have seen at first hand, also being a regular denizen at Simpson’s, as the physical template for the irascible Professor George Challenger in Conan Doyle’s Lost World adventure.
As evidence of Conan Doyle’s attitude to the war, here are some words from Holmes himself in the 1917 story, His Final Bow, where Holmes turns to espionage:
“There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less and a cleaner, better stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”
Sir Arthur’s attitude to the war seems, from the tenor of this passage, to be one of stoic acceptance, rather than enthusiastic celebration.
When World War had broken out in 1914 Sir Arthur did his best to enlist in the army, justifying his application with the words: “I am fifty-five but I am very strong and hardy, and can make my voice audible at great distances, which is useful at drill.” His offer was declined but that in no way deterred Sir Arthur from contributing to the war effort in every way available to him. In fact, he had already been highly pro-active in prophylactic defence of his country, well before war had even broken out.
In particular, Conan Doyle had developed a powerful instinct that conflict was coming after a certain 1911 car rally event in which he had personally participated. That year he had been an entrant in an International Road Competition, patronised and sponsored by Prince Albert William Henry of Prussia, younger brother of the Kaiser. Described as “The Prince Henry Tour”, this was a race designed to test the quality of British automobiles against their German counterparts. The race route led the participants from Hamburg, Germany, across the continent, to London.
Conan Doyle and his wife, Jean, had signed up to form one of the British driving teams. Each of the ninety cars involved in the contest was accompanied by a military observer from the opposing squad. Conan Doyle was alarmed by the overtly hostile attitudes of many of those German observers, overhearing much confident talk from them concerning the inevitability of war.
The British triumphed in the overall Prince Henry competition, but most of the British participants came away with the reluctant, but firm, conviction that war between Germany and Great Britain was perilously near.
An identical conviction about the inevitability of war against Germany was expressed by British officers, such as Neville Harvey, who had participated in the Kiel naval regatta of 1914. The peaceful protestations of the German officer corps were universally, if privately, dismissed as entirely hollow by Harvey and his British compatriots.
Alarmed by what he had learned from the Prince Henry Tour, Conan Doyle decided to investigate German military literature. He quickly arrived at the insight that two novel technologies, the submarine (or U-boat) and the aeroplane, stood out as potentially crucial factors in the next war against a rival Great Power. He was, in particular, acutely concerned about the threat of U-boats blockading food shipments and vital supplies to Britain.
Conan Doyle went on to endorse the concept of a cross Channel Tunnel, as a way of protecting Britain from this maritime threat. Burrowing between France and England, the tunnel, Conan Doyle argued, would ensure that Britain could never be isolated from the European mainland during wartime and would offer the prospect of much increased tourism revenues during times of peace.
Convinced that this subterranean resource was a necessary precaution, Conan Doyle eventually opened up his idea to the public in his favoured format of a story. “Danger! Being the Log of Captain John Sirius” duly appeared in the July 1914 edition of the Strand Magazine. The narrative dealt with a conflict between Britain and a fictional nation, self-evidently Germany, but thinly disguised as Norland. This potent foe was able to inflict defeat on Britain by exploiting a tightly organised fleet of submarines, armed with the relatively new weapon of the sea-borne torpedo.
Unfortunately, Conan Doyle’s dire predictions were largely ignored, at least by the British Government. It took years for the Admiralty to resurrect the convoy system (already used in the Napoleonic Wars but since abandoned) as an effective deterrent to submarine attack. German officials, however, were later quoted as saying that the idea of the submarine blockade had only entered their strategic thinking after reading Conan Doyle’s own warnings against such an eventuality.
How much of that statement was truth, and to what extent it was propaganda, designed to cause conflict, confusion and recrimination within Britain’s press and governing echelons, is not known.
Meanwhile, in German intellectual circles, the inevitability of conflict seemed to have been widely regarded, not as a subject for warnings and defensive preparations, but, in sharp contradistinction, as a refreshingly liberating, dithyrambic event — one, in fact, devoutly to be wished.
“War! It was purification and a relief which we felt, and an incredible hope.” Thus wrote Thomas Mann about the onset of war, in the autumn of 1914 in his essay “Thoughts in Wartime”. According to Mann, war was the best thing that could happen to Germany because the “old”, civilised world, “crawling with vermin”, was at its end. Four years later, in his Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, Thomas Mann continued to assert that the war had ignited revolutionary optimism: it reinforced belief in “the human being”, in an “earthly empire of God and of love, and an Empire of freedom, equality and fraternity”.
There can be little doubt concerning the enthusiasm of German intellectuals and artists in general when the First World War broke out. Ernst Toller, for example, wrote, referring to the first month of the war, “We constantly live in a chauvinist glow. The words ‘Germany’, ‘fatherland’ and ‘war’ are magically attractive to us”. Even the usually restrained sociologist Max Weber opined gushingly, in a letter of 28 August 1914, “this war is great and wonderful”.
The chess statue was a timely reminder of Elizabeth and her patriotic speech to her troops at Tilbury. Considerable doubt has been placed on the authenticity of this oration, but recent scholarship indicates that it was almost certainly genuine.
On the day of the speech, August 19, 1588 (the anniversary of which falls in a fortnight’s time), the Queen left her bodyguard before Tilbury Fort and went among her subjects with an escort of six men. Lord Ormonde walked ahead with the Sword of State; he was followed by a page leading the Queen’s charger and another bearing her silver helmet on a cushion; then came the Queen herself, in white with a silver cuirass and mounted on a grey gelding. She was flanked on horseback by her Lieutenant General, the Earl of Leicester, on the right, and on the left by the Earl of Essex, her Master of the Horse.
The version that is most widely considered to be authentic was found in a letter from Leonel Sharp to the Duke of Buckingham. Sharp had been attached to the Earl of Leicester at Tilbury during the threatened invasion of the Armada and he later became chaplain to Buckingham. Sharp wrote: “The Queen the next morning rode through all the squadrons of her army as armed Pallas attended by noble footmen, Leicester, Essex, and Norris, then Lord Marshal, and divers other great lords. Where she made an excellent oration to her army, which the next day after her departure, I was commanded to redeliver all the army together, to keep a public fast. No man hath it but myself, and such as I have given it to”. It was published in 1654 in a collection titled Cabala, Mysteries of State.
Here is the full text of the Queen’s address:
My loving people.
We have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery. But I assure you, I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people.
Let tyrants fear. I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects; and therefore I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust.
I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm: to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.
I know already, for your forwardness you have deserved rewards and crowns; and We do assure you on a word of a prince, they shall be duly paid. In the mean time, my lieutenant general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject; not doubting but by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over these enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.
This week’s games consist of a modest homage to Barbie’s favourite colour, a win by Manhattan Chess Club champion , Albert Pinkus, from a simultaneous display given by the mighty world champion, Alexander Alekhine. In the second game the ruler of the Chess empire strikes back.
Albert Sidney Pinkus (20 March 1903 in New York City – 4 February 1984 in New York) was an American chess master and writer, sometimes described as the Indiana Jones of the chess world. His main career was as an explorer of remote regions, from which he brought back curiosities. In 1932, he embarked on a series of ten expeditions to the jungles of British Guyana and Venezuela to collect zoological and botanical specimens. In 1939, he returned to New York to work on Wall Street as a stockbroker, at which time, a decade after defeating Alekhine, he resumed his chess career.
Raymond Keene’s latest book “Fifty Shades of Ray: Chess in the year of the Coronavirus”, containing some of his best pieces from TheArticle, is now available from Blackwell’s . His 206th book, Chess in the Year of the King, with a foreword by The Article contributor Patrick Heren, and written in collaboration with former Reuters chess correspondent, Adam Black, is in preparation. It will be published later this year.
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