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:
I had only been ordained a month or two and was still finding my feet in my title parish and my way around the area. I had not got round to joining a chess club or anything like that, when I saw in Church Times a mention of the Clergy Correspondence Chess Club. I wrote off to Tim Partridge (then Secretary) and duly received my season’s pairings and a move from my first opponent. Then I got one from someone else. I replied that I had already started playing X and would play him next, only for him to reply that I had to play all the games at once. Now either Tim had not explained that (sorry, Tim!) or I had simply not read it, but suddenly here I was facing 8 games of chess against four opponents. However would I cope? A trip to Barnsley to invest in some miniature chess sets duly followed and I was introduced to the delights of multiple games. With other competitions I joined in later I once had 16 games going simultaneously, small beer for the dedicated CC addict I know, but quite enough for me!
I enjoyed getting to know some chess playing clergy this way, and by playing games over the phone got to know a few of you better. Occasional holiday visits to other parts of the UK enabled me to meet one or two in person, but it was our first congress at Ecton House (to celebrate the Club’s 20th birthday in 1987) where I met many more of our members. We repeated this with another Congress in 1992 for our Silver Jubilee, but sadly have never had sufficient interest to run another.
Apart from our internal games, members of the Club have taken part in BFCC individual tournaments and we have had a number of friendly matches against other clubs. For several years we took part in the BFCC Club Championship, and though we were outclassed by the bigger clubs, we did once win the Ratings Prize.
Technology has affected chess as it has other walks of life. I look back at some of our old magazines and see the difference in presentation that modern word processors and printers have brought about. And now we are even considering offering the magazine electronically to those who can receive it this way. The use of computers to assist in analysis has changed correspondence chess for ever, not necessarily for the better. Most of our players now transmit their moves by e-mail (by looking for an alliterative name for the Club Ivor avoided the use of ‘postal’ which would have required a name change by now), thus avoiding the vagaries of our somewhat haphazard postal system that nevertheless once kept a single window envelope in use for a whole game between Tim Partridge and David Nye, making some 78 journeys between them without getting lost or irreparably damaged!
I have been a member of CCCC for 28 of its 40 years, and Secretary for about 25 of them. I am not the longest surviving member by any means (that honour currently lies with Gordon Geddes, the only surviving founder member), and certainly not one of the strongest players, but my time in the Club has given me much pleasure.