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KES Chess A Team 1968-1971 |
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Contents
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Mark Vincent Lodge 20/07/1953 – 30/10/1995
Great Grandfather James Lodge
Mark Lodge’s patrilineal great grandfather, James Lodge, and James Lodge’s son, James Joseph Lodge, were born in Dublin to a Roman Catholic family. Great grandfather James Lodge and his family moved to Sheffield around 1874. The family consisted of the following:
* Yes, they shared their birthday!
The family moved around considerably, residences on dates of various events being as follows:
Great grandfather James Lodge was employed as a printer. The 1881 census recorded his brother, another Joseph Lodge, this one born 1854/55, Dublin, living with the family and employed as a compositor, presumably at the same place of work as his brother. Great grandfather James Lodge died in April 1887 and was buried in the Roman Catholic part of Sheffield’s City Road Cemetery in a poor grave wherein one adult was already interred. After James was added to the grave, one further adult and eight infants who had died later in 1887 at age s up to 4 years. The grave appears to be behind a derelict fenced-off small derelict building which must have been a Roman Catholic chapel in its day. James’s widow, Cecilia, with five children, the eldest being 14 or 15 years old, would be way too poor to furnish for her husband his own grave.
Grandfather James Joseph Lodge
It was grandfather James Joseph Lodge, aged 14 or 15 when his father died, who, after initially working as a buffer, started his own cutlery business, reportedly in 1901. The business is mentioned in White’s 1905 directory as “Lodge James, cutlery manufactr”, one of eight small businesses housed at 47 Eyre Lane in Sheffield city centre. According to White’s 1911 directory, the cutlery business was one of six located in walking distance from home at 70 Trafalgar Street. Thereafter, the business moved to various sites in turn, ending up at Cambridge Works, 216 Solly Street, which eventually got converted to student accommodation.
Cambridge Works affords a clue to Mark’s middle name. To quote Harman and Minnis’s updated version of Nikolaus Pevsner’s work as related to Sheffield, of Trafalgar Works, “ . . formerly the works of James Lodge [James Joseph’s son], cutlery and electroplate manufacturers. The front block is pre-1850 . . . . . . . On the right, St. Vincent’s Presbytery (now Provincial House), 1878, by M. E. Hadfield & Son must have dominated what was a poor, largely Irish neighbourhood.”
Pursuing this lead, we find White’s 1911 Directory listed on Solley Street the following: St. Vincent’s Catholic Church; Very Rev. John Conran cm, priest St. Vincent’s Young Men’s Roman Catholic Club; John O’Hara, steward St. Vincent’s Catholic Boys’ & Infants’ Schools St. Vincent’s Hall St. Vincent’s Girls’ Institute; Mrs. P. J. Benson, president and living in court 37: Conran Very Rev, John cm (R. C.) and nine ordinary R.C. Revs.
There is also the fact that, of James Lodge’s children above, George Joseph and Mary Agnes were baptised at St. Vincent’s Catholic Church, as also were James Joseph Lodge’s children Thomas, James and Mary Margaret. (The above Cecilia junior alone was baptised at St Marie’s, then Sheffield’s central RC church and since 30/05/1980 an RC Cathedral.)
This was the environment into which Mark’s father had been born. So, was Mark’s middle name just a coincidence or taken from St Vincents Catholic Church?
Incidentally, St. Vincent’s Church was used as a venue for chess matches, presumably by SASCA, in the early 1970s. I remember playing there, with a bucket on the floor collecting water dripping from the roof, against Father O’Hagan who presumably facilitated such use of the church. (The church has its own Wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Vincent%27s_Church,_Sheffield.)
James Joseph Lodge died on 08/06/1936 at 357 Crooksmoor Road and was buried on 10/061936 at St Michael’s RC Cemetery, Rivelin.
Father James Lodge
James Joseph Lodge had two sons and a daughter. The sons became directors of the cutlery firm, but Thomas Lodge (b. 25/11/1909, Sheffield; d. 16/02/1997, London) became a prominent radiologist. That left the younger son, James Lodge (b. 06/05/1912, Sheffield; d. 09/10/1969, Sheffield), Mark’s father, to carry on the family business.
Mark was born on 20/07/1953, presumably in Sheffield, but a registration of his birth is elusive. Mark started at KES form 1(1) in 1964. He told me once that his family ran a firm manufacturing surgical instruments, though the firm’s wider business transpires to have embraced the more usual cutlery products. (His parents may have been directors solely of the surgical instrument part.)
Mark’s father died on 09/10/1969, reportedly at the 16th green of the Dore & Totley golf course, whereupon his mother appears to have remained in sole charge, at least of the surgical instrument part of the family business. His father’s death must have occurred soon after Mark had started the year he was to take his A-level exams. How many people were aware of the death is unclear, but I (Steve Mann) was unaware at the time. The removal of an element of paternal guidance may in part have contributed to Mark’s subsequent cheating in team chess and later misdemeanours unrelated to chess which resulted in a court case reported in the Star, followed sooner or later by Mark and his mother’s removal to the London area, perhaps being taken under the wing of Mark’s uncle Thomas.
As a chess team captain as KES, Mark repeatedly cheated in various ways. The season 1970-1971 appears to have been Mark Lodge’s last season as a KES team captain. Indeed, one source says that in the match where the KES team included an Abbeydale player (Trevor Fernley), KES was defaulted for fielding an illegitimate player. If that were the case, then one might expect the chess master (Mr. Bell) to exclude Mark from the club. In a 1973 KES school magazine, Adrian Belton of form 7M stated in a Chess Report, “The 1971/72 season finished with KES 'A' winning the Sheffield Junior League for the 6th successive season under the able captaincy of P. R. Burley, and also retaining their Yorkshire Schools Champion title!” So, Mark Lodge seems to have gone from KES chess in1971.
Mark continued playing chess in Sheffield, most noticeably fielding a team in the I. M. Brown Shield (Yorkshire league division 2) the team strongly resembled a KES B team but called Sheffield II.
From 10th to 12th of December 1971 an event incorporating a number of sections was held in Islington. In one of four 7-player all-play-all events there are recorded as being one “M Lodge” and also a “J Fernley”. Allowing for a “J” for “T” typo, these look like Mark Vincent Lodge of KES and Trevor Fernley of Abbeydale. “M Lodge” played also in the Amateur Championship (U190). It transpires he was not yet resident in Islington, so presumably his mother had already moved down there, and he was staying with her, or maybe be was staying with his uncle Thomas.
He continued running the KES B/Sheffield II team right up to 06/12/1975, missing only the odd match here and there. However, he vanished from the team mid-season, and the team assumed an almost entirely different composition. This mid-season disappearance may have been due to work or another circumstance which had arisen. The assumption is that he (probably) moved to Islington at this stage.
His mother died in the Islington registration area on 27/03/1992 leaving an estate reportedly valued at £141,236, which, as an only child, MVL presumably inherited?!
Mark’s death in 1995 was reported verbally to me to have been in a free-climbing accident, free in the sense of having no safety harness and ropes. I assumed at the time, not then knowing the family had decamped to the London area, that this meant he’d scrambled up a steep rocky area somewhere local to Sheffield, such as Derbyshire, lost his grip and fallen to his death. However, since it transpires he died in Islington, it seems likely the accident was at an indoor climbing wall on the Islington area, and he’d scrambled up without first attaching the safety gear, though maybe the climbing accident story is wrong.
Mark died aged 42 on 30/10/1995. At the time of his death, he was recorded as an analyst programmer who had died at Flat 31 Whitby Court, 25 Parkhurst Road, Islington, N7 0SU. So, if the story about a climbing accident is true, then he wasn’t killed immediately. He was cremated in Islington, then his cremation remains were conveyed to Sheffield and were interred on 10/11/1995 in his parents’ grave in Section A of the Roman Catholic area of Abbey Lane Cemetery, in grave number 401. A plan at the entrance to the cemetery identities where Section A is, though the graves are not marked with their numbers.
In many graveyards a number of graves have fallen into a sorry state, especially with their headstones having fallen over. The Lodge grave is one such dilapidated grave.
The headstone (24” wide, 21” tall) would originally have been upright with stone posts either side. Headstone and posts have at some time fallen over. Whilst the posts have vanished, the headstone remains and is at least now face up and readable. (Cement on edges shows how things were originally.) The bevelled stone edging and its cubic stone corners have been displaced, but are still there.
Whilst Mark’s parents are detailed on the original headstone, Mark’s details were added on a smaller stone (16” wide, 11¾” tall) which will have been lain flat on its back and so is now more or less where it would have been originally.
The first photograph shows the present state of the grave.
The second photograph is a close-up of the now-flat headstone.
The second photograph is a close-up of the smaller stone.
The inscriptions read as follows.
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