A History of Junior Chess in Sussex
To find out more about the history behind some of our trophies, click here. Brian leaves the story at a low point.......junior chess in the county was revitalised through efforts made by Crowborough Chess Club in the 1990s, emerging as the SJC we know today. If anyone reading this was involved at that time and would like to contribute to bring the story up to date, we would really like to hear from you - Contact Us.
The earliest known school match in this country was played by correspondence between Brighton College and Shrewsbury School in about 1849. There was in fact little emphasis on junior chess in Victorian England. Inter-school matches were virtually non-existent for most of the time and if you were a promising young player, your best chance of advancement was to join a chess club which had mainly adults in it. In 1906 Henry Butler, who was one of the early pioneers of the Sussex Chess Association, presented a cup for school teams in Sussex, though it is unlikely that there were many entries at that time. An important breakthrough came in the early 1920s when the Hastings Chess Club began to arrange annual boys’ tournaments. Players came from far and wide to play in these junior events and after about ten years of these competitions they became known as the British Boys Championships. In 1922 the Wilson Cup was presented to the Sussex Chess Association by an anonymous donor in memory of the chess career of William Wilson, a strong Sussex player. This was to be contested by the older boys in Secondary Schools in Sussex, while the Butler Cup was to be fought out by a younger age group. In 1933 junior chess in Brighton received a remarkable stimulus. Col. Sir William Thomas Dupree, Bt., who had died in March of that year left a sum of large money to be divided amongst under 21 chess players in Brighton and Portsmouth. The first prize for the Brighton competition was £100, a very large sum of money in those days. World War II probably retarded the growth of junior chess. Some chess clubs survived the blackouts and the risks of bombing, but a lot of the players were of an older generation with the young men being conscripted for the Forces. The groundwork for a future boom in junior chess came in the years following the cessation of hostilities. In both Brighton and Hastings inter-schools leagues were started and in 1949 Sir Clarence Sadd, the president of the Sussex Chess Association presented a trophy for an individual Sussex Junior Championship. Chess in Sussex schools now flourished like never before and the county team was soon benefiting from an influx of promising young players. In 1948 Varndean Grammar School won the McArthur Cup. Although at that time the Brighton and Hastings chess clubs were not permitted to field their strongest players in the competition, this was nevertheless a remarkable achievement and one that has not been repeated. The success of junior chess in the county continued through the 1950s and into the 1960s. If one was a young Sussex player in the 1960s, one could play in the Hastings Congress from the end of December to early January, the Bognor Congress at about Easter and the Eastbourne Congress at about the time of the August Bank Holiday. As well as the local junior chess leagues there was also the national Sunday Times schools' competition, which several Sussex schools used to enter. In 1963 Hove Grammar School won the event in which a few hundred schools nationally used to participate. After about two decades of great success in junior chess in the county the 1970s was a decade of decline. Local schools leagues became affected by the creation of large Comprehensive schools. As there were fewer schools, there were now fewer games in the schools’ competitions. There was, however, one bright spot in the creation of a Sussex Primary Schools Championship for under-11 pupils in the mid 1970s. There was little sign of general improvement in the 1980s, though in 1987 Paul Watson, Paul Selby and Ian Mclean started holding annual Sussex U-18 and U-14 championships over a Bank Holiday weekend at Dorothy Stringer School in Brighton. At first these events were very well supported, but the number of entries had been greatly reduced by the end of the century when it was decided to give the Crowborough junior advisers the chance to bolster the competitions. About the same time the Dupree Tournament came to an end in Brighton. The original prize money had not been greatly updated to take into account the rise in the cost of living and a decline in entries eventually led to its cessation. It is understood that the local council sought at the end to divert the funds to another purpose. © Brian Denman 2009 |
We
are indebted to renowned chess historian Brian Denman for providing this
potted history of junior chess in Sussex up until the late 1980's. Many
of the names he mentions live on today - the Butler Cup, Sadd
Cup and Wilson Cup are still awarded annually as part of our inter-schools championships.