Bourne End Chess Club

The following snippets are from Alan Cox's History of Chess in Buckinghamshire, written in 1982 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the BCCA.

Edward Ruddle included the following item in the Summer 1971 issue of the Association's newsletter:

"I should like it to be known that there is a Bourne End Chess Club who are thinking of entering our club competition, maybe next year. Meanwhile club captains might consider offering friendly matches. Their secretary, Mr. F. G. Day, tells me that they are not very strong as yet. "

How many members reading that foresaw the impact which Bourne End was to have on the County Chess scene? Fred Day now continues the story:

"Bourne End Chess Club was formed by a small group of enthusiasts shortly after the opening of the new village community centre in 1967. The first secretary, Arthur Passant, who still plays in the club teams, had been a member of the old Marlow Club after the 1939/45 war.

With new members joining the club in the late 1960s the club started playing friendly matches and entered a team in the second division of the Bucks League in 1971 finishing fourth out of ten. The team captain was Ray Bott, author of 'Chess for Children' etc, and other members were Fred Day, secretary, and Henry Woodward, treasurer.

The Fischer/Spassky World Championship took place before the start of the next season and Bourne End, like most other clubs, benefitted with a sudden increase in members, and in 1974 two further teams were entered in the newly formed Third Division of the Bucks League.

The new members included George Parker who became secretary in 1976 and who has since made important contributions to the Bucks County Chess Association as its chairman and in representing the County on SCCU committees.

The club continued to grow in numbers and to increase in playing strength and now runs five senior teams spread through the three divisions of the Bucks League. The first team has been a close contender for the League championship, finishing second in 1978/79 and 1979/80 and third in 1977/78 and 1980/81 under the leadership of Ray Bott and Roger de Coverly.

Junior chess has always been a feature of the club activities and the club now runs three teams in the Bucks Junior League. Important contributions in this area have been made by Evelyn Bott, Ray's wife, through her teaching of chess in local schools, which has provided an apparently endless stream of interested youngsters. The juniors have been fortunate also in having mentors like Bert Hankin, Michael Buxton, Roger Buzzard and John Callow.

Bourne End also initiated the '45 minute' one‑day congress in the county. Held on the Saturday before Easter, the Congress is now a regular annual event. It is organised by George Parker with assistance from Laurence Mullen, Peter Rose, Dave Thomas and other club committee members already mentioned.'

It is worth adding that Bourne End's second team won the Third Division championship in its second season (1975/76) and was runner‑up in Division Two and promoted to Division One in 1977/78 and in 1979/80, although on each occasion it was promptly relegated again in the following season. Nevertheless this is a remarkable achievement for a club so young, and its encouragement of juniors makes it seem certain that it will one day achieve its ambition of winning the Club Championship.

From the same publication, Arthur Passant reminisces...

In 1939 when I first came to Buckinghamshire its County Chess Association was still in its infancy. I was aware of only two active clubs: High Wycombe and Slough, though earlier it appears the 1938/39 Counties Year Book listed an additional two: Marlow and Lane End.

The country was already at war. Few spent their days studying the Ruy Lopez, but at the same time the odd game was a welcome diversion and soon I was to get a chess club started at the Slough Community Centre. We even had our own miniature league consisting of six firms from the Industrial Estate plus the Slough club. And William Winter came down to give a simultaneous as did C.H. Stacey, Sussex top board.

In 1946 1 moved to the Marlow area and, assisted by one or two Borlase masters, revived the Marlow club. We were fortunate in having the solid support of C.H. Reid, one‑time president of the Bucks Association, ex‑judge and member of London's Imperial Club.

I left the County in 1949. Soon afterwards the Marlow club expired. Numbers had been falling and presumably I was one of the last straws.

Then for twenty years I played little serious chess, though the records will show that I once played second board for East Wales v West Wales at Swansea! And I also turned out occasionally for Maidenhead when I returned to Bucks in 1954. At Maidenhead I met a strong player named Strauss who told me he had recently won the Bucks individual title. Also I renewed my acquaintance with H. Benedictus, a regular county player in the immediate post‑war period, and a former Marlow Club member.

But I played less and less and just when I thought I had seen the last of chess clocks, Bourne End (where I was now living) in 1967 built itself a community centre. Since there was a modest interest in a proposed chess club I became involved once more. We started with eleven players. Three or four were novices. The remainder, alas, were without club experience, though we did have a promising Borlase boy named Roger de Coverly. But with such meagre resources the outlook was bleak. And when reluctantly I was obliged to leave the club after three rather barren years it seemed that only an entrepreneur of Alex Niedzwiedzki proportions could save the day.

However I rejoined four years later surprised not only to find that the club still existed but that it flourished. All the founder members were gone but the membership had increased dramatically to close on fifty. What was more, dedicated enthusiasts like Fred Day, Ray Bott and George Parker had emerged to sustain the momentum. Bourne End had made it!

Perhaps even more surprising was the fact that half of this intake were children. These, I suspected, were victims of chess fever contracted at the time of the Spassky/Fischer furore ‑ the first wave! Some of them were already little Karpovs as I discovered to my discomfort when I played a diminutive Matt Rose, and again in a match against Slough second team when I came up against another one ‑ Byron Jacobs. To coin a phrase, a new era had arrived. I can recall only one youngster in the old days who caught my eye, a teenager who played for Amersham ‑ P.J. Oakley ‑ who went on to win the British Correspondence Championship in 1958.

If the early days produced no prodigies at least we had our memorable characters. I remember with affection such figures as H.L. Senior, A. Hammond and A. Pavey of Slough (not forgetting the young lions: Bramley, Harwood and Burgess) and E.G. Seymour, H.T. Reeve (no stranger to Hastings), R. Hutter and A. Hart (whose untimely death shocked us all) of High Wycombe.

Hammond was a pre‑war county top board. He came late to chess and set about the game in earnest, engaging as tutor none other than the world's top woman player, Vera Menchik. He possessed what may well have been the finest collection of old chess sets in Britain, later taking them to New Bond Street where he opened a chess shop. He once showed me an elephant's foot. "A rook' he said genially, batting not an eyelid. Regrettably, my equilibrium deserted me and I failed to ask a few obvious questions.

Pavey, like Senior, was a genuine old‑timer brought up in the mighty Lasker/Steinitz days. Bright as a pin, he never failed, when playing, to give the impression that there was far more to club chess than just winning, though it must be said that as the game progressed the impression weakened. He was one of the first old Bucks players I met, late in 1939.

Hutter was rather an imposing gentleman who died soon after the war. A native of Austria, where he had once been a radio personality, he maintained a cheerful disposition which did not quite conceal the disorientation of the refugee. He was one of the strongest players in the county and only recently did I discover that he had once been a member of Hampstead, the number one club in Britain at the time; also that he helped in the preparation of the 1939 Griffith and White edition of 'Modern Chess Openings'.

Wesley Gammon, Mike Fryer, Eric Bramley and I appear to be the only playing survivors from the war years, Eric Bramley taking the honours. Top board for many years, it is fair to say that his enthusiasm has contributed to Bucks's graduation from a minor to a major county. And his name comes first to mind when nostalgically looking back over the last forty odd years. In fact one is tempted to dub him King of Buckinghamshire chess and wish him a protracted reign ‑ unchecked, of course.