Welcome
Club Information:
CHESS Minister!:
CCCC Championship:
The Club publishes a magazine entitled ‘CHESS minister!’ 3 times a year to keep members in touch.
If you are interested in joining us, please contact the Secretary:
The Club publishes a magazine entitled ‘CHESS minister!’ 3 times a year to keep members in touch.
If you are interested in joining us, please contact the Secretary:
If you were involved, the bare scores bring back memories of triumph and defeat, inspiration (occasionally), blunders (not a few), solid logical play and some of the opposite. The whole range of chess emotions make the figures alive. If you were not present, then figures mean little, so I thought I would try to put some flesh on the bones and try to convey some of the feeling of what it was like at Ecton.
The house is a very gracious vicarage built in 1787 in a golden brown Cotswold sort of stone, and converted with the addition of a bedroom wing into a retreat house and conference centre. Ecton is a very beautiful little village, with many old houses and cottages, a Bakehouse Lane and a Blacksmith Yard. There is a fine old church with a deep-toned ring of six bells, useful to encourage concentration on practice night when playing a match! It is a quiet place, restful and at peace with itself.
So we arrive one by one from many miles apart on the warm Monday evening in June. Five of us met at the last Congress so we knew one another not just as voiceson the end of a telephone or cunning opponents at the destination of a postage stamp. Some surprises in the folk we have not met. I had an image given by an opponent’s play of size and youth quite overthrown by the gentle smiling face of a person of about my own not-so-few years in age. While the champion in appearance quite matches up to his vigorous style of play! By the end of the Congress all will have become friends.
Supper in the gracious dining room, a cup of coffee, and then to the first battle. Calm the nerves! Make a mistake in the opening. Why do I play this game? Oh dear! Well, keep going. Make the best move now. That’s a powerful move he has made. What shall I do? Knight there is best. Why has he done that? Now I can swap off and at least be equal. He tries too hard in an equal position. I gain a pawn. Is there a trap here? No, I can protect the King with that Rook move. I gain another pawn. Now even this foolish one can win. Joy!
A look at the other game still in progress. Put the scores down. Then the two of us, no longer opponents, go off for a good long walk down to the river, chatting about chess and families and countryside. This clerical gathering never seems to get into the usual boring clerical talk. So back by ten o’clock and early to bed.
The days are marked, apart from the chess games, by times spent sitting outside the house in the pleasant garden with interesting plants to discuss, walks across the fields, a visit to the church, and each day before lunch a Eucharist in the quiet chapel, a Eucharist which somehow holds together our little fellowship, all the other members of the club and our daily work and living. After the last game of the day there is the Three Horseshoes where Bank’s Bitter:
“Does more than Milton can / To justify the ways of God to man.”
There is a great good humour about the whole event. To win is fine, to lose a pain. But to take part and to enjoy the logic and artistry of chess, even if the other chap has more of both than oneself, is what pleases above all. I felt it was neatly summarized by the comment made to David Hulme, our Kasparov, by the one who did not often win, “You are the champion and I am the Atlas – the two most important ones here!” Another epigram that caught my fancy was, “Adam was a chess player – he lost a piece and gained a mate.”
The aims of Ecton House were summarized by the Warden in his welcome as ‘holiness and happiness’. This participant certainly left on Thursday feeling I had experienced both, having a lot of fun and also some genuine refreshment and renewal. Many thanks to Bruce for arranging the congress so well.