David Rowson recounts a visit to Kingston by the great José Raúl Capablanca in 1919, two years before he became world champion, and shows two of the games he played in a 40-board simultaneous display
Like most chess clubs, Kingston from time to time invites leading players to give simultaneous displays. Last summer, for example, our newly entitled grandmaster (then still an IM) Ameet Ghasi, defeated all his challengers, and other strong club members, such as Peter Lalić, David Maycock and Vladimir Li, have performed almost as spectacularly.
Much of Kingston’s remote history (ie pre-the 1970s) is obscure, as few records have survived, but some accounts of past simuls do sometimes emerge from research or are even recalled by the participants. In 1975 Leonard Barden gave an exhibition as part of the club’s centenary celebrations, and the scores of the draws achieved by the two Bills, Waterton and Booth, are on the club website.
Decades before that, in 1934, the London Evening News reported that R P Michell, the club president, “is giving a simultaneous display on the condition that the loser of each game shall make a contribution to the funds. Mr Michell, too, will ‘pay up’ for every game he loses and also for his share of every drawn game … Another display on similar conditions will be given by Mr R N Coles, the club secretary.”
It is not known how much members had to contribute to play against the starriest simultaneous performer in the club’s history, but whatever it was, it must have been worth it for the experience, as the player in question was José Raúl Capablanca (pictured above). Although still two years away from winning the title of world champion from Emanuel Lasker, he was already generally considered to be the strongest player in the world. The club was then known as the Thames Valley Chess Club. The event took place at an unrecorded venue in Kingston on 29 October 1919, and the results are included in this list of Capablanca’s simultaneous displays by the British Chess Magazine.
If these figures are accurate, it seems that the Kingston players performed better than most of Capablanca’s other opponents, though the record of the first group of Dubliners is the most impressive. What was it like to face Capablanca over the board? A report about the Guildford event in the Surrey Times for 7 November 1919 describes him as having “a quiet unostentatious manner. During the progress of the games he rarely spoke to an opponent. Before making a move he invariably glanced at his opponent as if reading his thoughts.”
Edward Winter, on his Chess History website, quotes from the December 1919 Chess Amateur: “Unusual interest was aroused amongst Kingston chess players when Señor Capablanca, the world’s champion [sic], paid a visit to Kingston under the auspices of the Thames Valley Chess Club … Prior to the play, Señor Capablanca was entertained to dinner by the committee, the Rev. Father O’Sullivan, vice-president, occupying the chair…”
Father O’Sullivan, who was the Catholic parish priest of New Malden and the chess correspondent for the Tablet, distinguished himself by drawing with Capablanca. This was the game:
Father O’Sullivan’s 22 November 1919 column in the Tablet reported: “At a simultaneous (40 boards) display given by Capablanca last week, under the auspices of the Thames Valley Chess Club, Father Morgan, of Ashford, Middlesex [Edward Winter gives his name as Reverend W Morgan], put up an excellent fight [as Black]. The game went over 40 moves. After White’s 15th move, the position was as shown in this diagram:”
So it appears that two of the participants in the simul were priests. In the same report Father O’Sullivan is probably referring in a covert way to himself when he writes: “I shall be able to give next week a lively and highly interesting game which a Southwark Catholic drew recently with Capablanca. The game will be given with many notes, which should be of great help to novices and players of moderate strength.” However, as Edward Winter notes, this game was not published in the Tablet at the time. It did eventually appear in the chess column written by Father O’Sullivan’s successor, D M Davey, on 20 August 1949.
Sadly, I have been unable to discover anything more about Capablanca’s visit to Kingston in 1919. When we host Magnus Carlsen or Gukesh Dommaraju at the Willoughby Arms in the near future, we will make sure to preserve all the scores of the games.
David Rowson, Kingston A captain in the Thames Valley League
