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Yorkshire Chess History |
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Contents: |
1900-01: County Matches |
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< 1900 Roses Match – 1901-02 County Matches Northern Counties Championship, Final played at the Hotel Metropole, Leeds, on 23/03/1901, over 25 boards.
Yorkshire and Lancashire had been playing matches against each other, on and off, from 1871 onwards. By the turn of the century the match had become established as annual event, but did not form any part of a broader competition.
1900-01 was the first season of the Northern Counties Chess Union’s inter-county team championship for which Albert Edward Moore of Manchester had donated a “County Championship Challenge Trophy” which took the form of a silver cup.
All four counties with county chess associations had entered the first competition, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cumberland and Cheshire. The Durham and Northumberland county chess associations didn’t come into existence until 1925 and 1930 respectively. “Cumberland” was in fact formed as a combined Cumberland and Westmoreland association. In terms of local government, Cumbria as a single county, Cleveland, Humberside, Merseyside and Greater Manchester were of course not to come into existence for about another seventy years.
In round one Lancashire had beaten Cheshire, and Yorkshire had been due to play Cumberland, but the latter withdrew.
Lancashire comfortably won this first final of the contest for the Northern Counties Championship, but did not qualify for the English Counties Championship as the British Chess Federation did not yet exist and so neither did the English Counties Championship.
World Champion Emmanuel Lasker and Isidor A. Gunsberg were present at the match, and Lasker served by doing on-the-spot adjudication of games left unfinished at the close of play. (He was said to have adjudicated half-a-dozen games, though seven games were recorded as adjudicated; one position may have been trivial enough to be adjudicated by the captains.)
The report of the match in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph of 25/03/1901 said the Lancashire team was “the strongest that has ever represented the County Palatine.” and went on to lament the absence of certain Yorkshire players (whose presence one suspects would not have reversed the outcome). The Telegraph write-up concluded: “At the close of play the teams dined together as the guests of Leeds Chess Club, and subsequently the cup was presented to the winning team by the donor.”
(@ denotes games decided by adjudication)
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Created 06/05/2013 |
Copyright © 2013 Stephen John Mann |
Last Updated 06/05/2013 |