Stewart Reuben wrote: ↑Mon Jul 26, 2021 3:44 pm
Yesterday's Sunday Times. Dominic Lawson's piece in the main section of the newspaper started with the events in Trafalgar Square.
I came across nothing on TV covering the event, although it was heavily boosted Friday. Perhaps there weren't enough scandals.
Dominic Lawson's article yesterday was very interesting:
"More than 6,000 followers of one of the world’s most popular sports crowded into Trafalgar Square last Sunday. Fortunately for them, the authorities had cleared away the detritus of the previous weekend, when intoxicated football fans, purportedly watching the Euro 2020 final on a giant screen, clashed with police.
On this occasion no police presence was required. There were no scenes of violent disorder. But then the sport being played and watched was chess. It was the final day of ChessFest, a three-day open-air celebration of the 64-square battleground in London and Liverpool. The organiser was Chess in Schools and Communities, a charity that has taught the game to more than 250,000 pupils in the state educational sector.
I participated in the event too, entering the Decode Chess Rapidplay, held in a gigantic marquee. My opponents over six rounds constituted an intriguing and, I think, characteristic demographic. Three of them were, like me, sixtysomething white men. The other three were children: a 15-year-old girl and two boys, both aged 11. But here’s the thing: the girl was British east Asian and the boys were British south Asian — that is, from Chinese and Indian family backgrounds respectively.
They were all enchanting; and I was touched when the girl — my first-round opponent — spontaneously exclaimed, “I love this,” as we began. As with the rest of us, this was the first time she had been able to play in an over-the-board event since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, during which time the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit had spurred a chess craze.
I first became aware of the exceptionally high rates of participation by youngsters from the British-Asian community in 2015 when, as president of the English Chess Federation, I presented the prizes in the under-nine section of the national championships. I could hardly fail to notice that the winners were almost all from families of Indian or Chinese origin. The gold medallist that year was Henry Yu.
That event lasted a week; obviously, it was necessary for at least one of every participant’s parents to accompany their child throughout, giving up precious holiday time to do so. I thought that was wonderful. But many would resentfully dismiss them as pushy parents.
There is, in this country, little appreciation of the value British-Asian families place on study and academic excellence. In this context it is unsurprising that, as the former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission Trevor Phillips pointed out in a Times column headlined “The ethnic question we’re too scared to ask”: “Last year Chinese and Indian-heritage Britons took home higher pay than white people, earning 23.1 per cent and 15.5 per cent more per hour respectively.” The Chinese excellence in the educational sector is unaffected by poverty: as I have noted previously, Chinese boys and girls eligible for free school meals do every bit as well as those who are not so poor.
Chess, too, is a great leveller. A plastic board and pieces can be bought for less than a tenner. No social capital distorts outcomes: chess is even a bit savage in sorting out the best from the rest, regardless of status — as well as encouraging logical thought through play at an early age. This seems to appeal to the British-Indian and British-Chinese parents. As one person involved in the Chess in Schools and Communities programme remarked to me: “They want their children to be resilient and mentally tough. They tend to think in Britain they may be at risk of going soft, and that the system here doesn’t provide enough of what chess competition can in that respect.”
This was also the message of the book How Children Succeed, by Paul Tough, published in 2012 to great success and no little controversy. Its subtitle was Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character; one of its chapters was based on the exploits of IS 318, a state school in a poor part of New York that triumphed over countless more affluent establishments in the national junior high school chess championships (an achievement portrayed in the documentary Brooklyn Castle).
Tough’s agenda was similar to that of Amy Chua, whose 2011 book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was a deliberately provocative defence of the intense work ethic instilled by Chinese-origin parents, contrasting it with what Chua saw as the American style of putting children’s happiness and “self-esteem” before everything else. The British middle classes are similar to their US equivalents in this respect, yet it can hardly be said that shielding our darlings from the toughness of the world has made them extraordinarily happy. Or more resilient.
The cultural difference came out clearly in a poll a few years ago conducted by the Hong Kong-based British bank HSBC. In particular it showed that while a minority of Indian parents saw “happiness in life” as the most important goal for their children, well over three quarters of British parents chose that. The majority of Indian parents had “successful career” as the thing they most wanted for their offspring; among British parents this was the choice of only 17 per cent.
Now, chess-playing is a highly unlikely career — the parents of the children I played at last week’s chess festival understood that. But they also knew that the head of Google, Sundar Pichai, who slept on the floor as a child in a Madras home without a refrigerator, played chess in that modest dwelling; and that the first software he wrote was a chess program.
The first of all chess programs, TuroChamp, was created by Alan Turing in 1948. He is, rightly, more celebrated for his work at Bletchley Park as one of the breakers of the Nazis’ military codes. What is less well known is that among Turing’s colleagues on this mission were virtually the entire English chess team of the day. Arguably it was those sometimes dismissively referred to as nerds who did more to bring forward the defeat of the Nazis than British brawn.
There is a moral in this today. Sport England operates under a royal charter and receives funding from the relevant secretary of state under the Physical Training and Recreation Act 1937: this arose from concern in government circles that our young men should be in good shape for any future military conflict. Yet the UK is one of a tiny minority of states that do not recognise chess as a sport. While physical sports receive about £250 million a year from Sport England, chess gets not a single penny; but now, more than ever, national success — and security — depends on our wits, not our muscles.
So I was encouraged that on the eve of last week’s ChessFest the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, Oliver Dowden, sent a message of support, describing chess as “both a sport and a cultural pursuit” and declaring that “every child should have the opportunity to learn chess”. That would be a strong move."
