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Great Grandma’s Wooden Horses by Russ Mollot
It was in April 2004 that I happened to be in Interlaken,
Switzerland, on business, and saw a large group of men playing chess in a
park. It was some sort of tournament for which the first place winner,
by tradition, wins a kiss from the mayor’s daughter. As the current
mayor only had 3 sons, I had to presume that the cash prize was the only
incentive. But, back in the USA, where could I find those long-lost papers? My elderly mother, by then in a nursing home, did not know; but she mentioned that my sister had kept the old 78-RPM phonograph records from the old homestead. Perhaps she had also kept other old stuff. Thus began days of searching through carton after carton of “artifacts” stored in my sister’s garage. On the third morning, I was rewarded not only by finding the by now crumbling envelope, but also the original 78-RPM recording of “Wimoweh” (a.k.a. “In the Jungle”) by The Weavers! Anyway, with the greatest care, I removed the contents of the envelope. There were a few pages of notes and six score sheets, four
so badly weathered as to be almost unreadable. I sent them all to my
friend Terry at Shippensburg University (in Pennsylvania) for translation.
With help from some of his chess friends they were able to piece together
parts of one game, and nearly all of a second game. They were unable
to read much at all from the other score sheets. Thus, it seems, the game that they reconstructed is one that took place over a chess board one afternoon in 1907, in Oostende, Belgium.
A famous master, Jacques Mieses, had the White pieces against the great Znosko-Borovski (Snosko-Borowski)! As all but one of the other old score sheets were Mieses’ games, I presume that we were holding the very piece of paper on which Jacques Mieses recorded this amazing victory! The game is, according to Bilguer’s tome, known as either a Damenspringerspiel (Queen’s Knight’s Game) or the Wiener Partie (Vienna Opening), and played as follows: J. Mieses vs Znosko-Borovski
The other game that was only partially readable came from a score sheet that was severely damaged and was clearly not in Mieses’ hand. The names of the players are not filled in, but several things are apparent to the several experts whom I have consulted: the game was played during the Oostende, Belgium tournament, although it is not certain that it was one of the officially scheduled games (i.e., it may be an “offhand game”.); from the many scrawled notes (mostly unintelligible), it belongs to an Englishman; the opening is most unusual, but the middle-game style resembles that of Pillsbury. There is some speculation that this crumbling sheaf of Eaton stock holds a game between some unfortunate Flemish expert and the mysterious D. Pillsbury, the younger brother of the more famed master. There are many ink smudges, a couple of holes in the page, and what appears to be dried oatmeal on the paper. Nevertheless, most of the missing moves may be deduced from the context of the moves that remain readable. I hope to complete the work of unraveling the mysteries contained in this frail document, and perhaps present the game, with fresh commentary and modern insights, sometime in the future.
What if that old box of carved wooden chess pieces was given to her by Mieses at the Oostende tournament? She was, after all, in Flanders, which is an area encompassing much of Belgium! Could those just possibly be the very same pieces once used by Jacques Mieses to defeat Eugene Znosko-Borovski nearly a century ago? Unfortunately, I will never know the answer. |
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It was as a
small child, perhaps five years old, that I first saw the chess pieces.
They were carved wood, and I was fascinated by the interesting shapes –
particularly the horses! My grandmother told me that they had been
given to her mother by some stranger when she was traveling in some country
that Grandma called Flanders. I often played with those old wooden
pieces, not realizing the amazing game that they were created for.
Years later, when I joined my high school chess club, I
searched for those wooden pieces, but they were not to be found. I
told my mother about them, and she led me to a small wooden cabinet in the
cellar. In a drawer were a tin box of buttons, a envelope of yellowed
papers, and the wood box with my well-beloved chess pieces! I still
have them today, and it was when handling a black horse that the idea came
to me for this little story. You see, the envelope in that cabinet
held a sheaf of papers with the most peculiar symbols and numbers, which,
not until last year did I realize were old-style chess notation in German!
Anyway, I am straying from the point of this little aside,
which is that on looking over the shoulder of the nearest player, I saw on
his score sheet those very symbols which I’d thought so cryptic long years
before! You can imagine my excitement. I could hardly contain
myself, and looked eagerly forward to returning home.
The really amazing
discovery came a couple of days later, when Matthew, a member of the local
chess club, found the complete score of the second game in an old copy of Bilguer’s “Handbuch des Schachspiels” (the 1922, fifth edition)!
