Check Mate in the Stacks

Here are a couple of 18th century chess books from down in the 'cage' area of the stacks, two of the earlist works on the noble game. The History of Chess is from 1765, and the author's name (the Rev.Mr Lamb) is handwritten in an ink which has long since faded to brown. This seems to be a property of certain writing inks. I remember seeing Mervyn Peake's notebooks for the Gormenghast books in the British Library, and his handwriting had similarly faded from black to brown. The appended author is in fact Robert Lambe, and his book is one of the earliest histories of the game. It is highly sought after by enthusiasts, and a copy sold at a 2019 auction for £600. Lambe, an Anglican priest from Durham, was also the author of the ballad The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh, which drew on local Northumbrian folklore. His History of Chess was one of the books pulled from the stack cage shelves by a curious Robin Ince, as you can see in Adventures in Exeter, episode one of his Bibliomaniac series.

The second book is Chess (not Chefs!) Analysed: Or Instructions By Which a Perfect Knowledge of this Noble Game May in a Short Time be Acquired by A D Philidor, published in 1862. This is one from the collection of Lady Lockyer (Mary Lockyer if you were on less formal terms), bequested to the library upon her death in 1943 (I suspect the Lamb may well be too). François-André Danican Philidor. Philidor was considered the greatest player of his age, and this was regarded as the essential manual for many a year. He was also a popular composer of comic operas, and had sung in the royal choir of Louis XV as a child. It was probably this association which led to him being put on a banned list during the French Revolution, forcing him into exile in England in 1792 where he died 3 years later. The name was immediately familiar to me from my favourite film, Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death. In this, the foppish French 'conductor' of our hero Peter, noting that he is a keen chess player, remarks 'I often have a game of chess with Philidor. The greatest master of chess who ever lived. A Frenchman, naturellement. Come along and I'll introduce you'. Peter is not fooled by this blatant attempt to trick him into accompanying the conductor to heaven, and mispronounces the French master as 'Philimore, or whoever he is', probably just to wind the conductor up. Philidor would have been the conductor's contemporary, given that he 'lost his head' in the 'so called glorious revolution'. Philidor was friends with a number of famous contemporaries, including Voltaire, Rousseau and David Garrick, the most renowned actor of the age. His frequent visits to England to play chess against those who came to London from all over the world (including Benjamin Franklin, one of the American founding fathers) marked him out as a true cosmopolitan, and thus a character ideally suited to take his place in Powell and Pressburger's film, in part an argument for internationalism and against narrow minded provincialism (it was written by a Jewish Hungarian immigrant to England in the 30s, after all). This level of detail and multi-layered reference goes to show what a superb writer Emeric Pressburger was. A Matter of Life and Death, and other Powell and Pressburer films too, continue to reveal further riches every time you watch them.

Unfortunately, the library does not have a copy of the 20th century Russian chess master Alexander Alekhine's book My Best Games of Chess 1924-37, which the conductor 'borrows' from Peter (and you can see him reading it in the still below). Again, chess is symbolic of internationalism here. We do have a couple of books about Alekhine and his famous moves, though - a 1949 volume by Fred Reinfeld entitled Unknown Alekhine 1905-1914, and a 1973 title by Richard Geoffrey Eales called Alekhine's Defence. Alekhine died in 1946, the year that A Matter of Life and Death was released. In a way then, the scene in which his book flutters back down from heaven into Peter's pocket stands as a rather lovely tribute.