The independent home for discussions on the English Chess scene.
https://ecforum.org.uk/
The Sunday Referee has perfected its gallant gesture of last year by getting Dr. Alekhine to annotate the book of the games in its Masters’ Tournament. The compilation is worthy of a contest which was one of the strongest ever held in London. It is a pity that it had to be marred by the absence of Mr. Yates, the reigning British champion, and the only home-grown player with a respectable record against Dr. Alekhine, who won it just a little too easily.
While all this was printing, a table-leg became wedged against a gas-pipe, and an epoch ended in English chess. There will never be again anybody like Yates.
He would sometimes refer to himself, gaily, or at least with the appearance of gaiety, as “the last of the strolling players”; but I don’t mean only that. His was a many-sided and a subtle mind which, although it chose to manifest only one facet of itself, and that in miniature only, to the public at large (whether from dislike of the market-place or just sheer laziness nobody could ever make out), was one of the rewards of life to the little group of his friends.
He took to chess comparatively late, and the game, sufficient though it grew, was probably little more than a makeshift symbol at first, a kind of mascot. He would have preferred, one felt, to have moved things on a larger board. Wherever in the world there might be a precarious stress, or a delicate balance, of forces — in the day-to-day waverings of home politics, dominion trade or international affairs, in the progress of agriculture or manufacture, in the machinations of money, the curiosities of the law, or any intricate movement of human intelligence or stupidity from Manchukuo to Bolivia — there some part of his attention would be engaged. He watched over the round earth like a god-father, distant and vaguely monitory, but kind; and as the day wore on he would become gradually bowed with the weight of the world’s newspapers, accumulating in his pockets, He delighted in the techniques of all games, in testing and savouring what might be called their underlying dynamic reality, and had theories about them all, spelling-bees and Rugby football, golf and pelota. If they were exotic, impromptu or peculiar, so much the better. It is not so many weeks ago, alas, that he took part for the last time, under a grilling sun, throughout the whole of an afternoon, in a strenuous local version of snob-cricket. Those who were fortunate enough to be there are not likely to forget the flitting of Yates with his bowler-hat (irremovable in the open air), fifty, frail, short-sighted, out of condition, transparently and hurriedly judging speeds and distances by efforts of will, but nevertheless somehow making scores; or brooding benevolently on the methods of ballistics but (he was, after all, and before all, a Yorkshireman) not infrequently holding catches.
The average Chess player is apt to incline to a harmless but senseless monomania; and Yates had a fastidious dislike for personal contact with narrowness or stupidity or even ordinary officialdom, although he was not above an impish chuckle when he had shaken them off. The solemn chess-players he answered according to their solemnity — and their chess-playing; and thus it happens that, the confiding newspapers, with one or two exceptions, in collaboration with the pundits, chess secretaries, chess delegates, chess editors and half the host of honoraries, have already managed to get put abroad the picture of the pseudo-Yates, a nice, poor, feeble little chessman. Thus:
Mr. Yates lived for chess. He had no other interest in life. I never heard him talk of anything else. Life for him was played out on the squares of a chess-board.
I must hasten to add, in common fairness, that the gentleman who communicates this description goes on to remark with great justice:
He lived alone in his room at Bloomsbury, and his only income was derived from articles on chess. Recently I believe he has been very poor. Every day he could be seen playing chess, sometimes at one of the big clubs and sometimes in smaller places, where he would play anyone for a shilling stake.
Perhaps I should further add that our informant is none other than the Secretary of the British Chess Federation, which exists to encourage chess in the United Kingdom.
E. G. TWITCHETT