MARK RUBERY CHESS

According chess historian Leonard Reitstein the first regular chess column to be published regularly appeared in the Kimberly newspaper, the ‘Griqualand West Independent’. It was titled rather cosily ‘Our Chess Column’ and was edited by one Abraham Michael from 1882-1885. The Pretoria News has had an important role in disseminating chess news throughout its pages down the years, launching its first chess column in 1911. The column benefited by having a newspaper editor who was a leading Pretoria player in the 20s (much the same as the Johannesburg Star had D. Accone in the 80s and 90s). The demise of the chess columns in the Johannesburg papers some years ago (fortunately reversed) has a definite historical precedent. The following was written by the editor of the British Chess Magazine in 1939: “The hostility of the average editor towards chess is notorious, and nowhere is that hostility more marked than in South Africa. The history of chess columns in the Union has been one long record of suppression. A column springs up, puts forth tender shoots, blossoms to the intense delight of the chess horticulturists, and then is trodden down by the undiscerning hoof of some philistine editor or other. It would almost seem the dislike of the devil for holy water or the Spanish Inquisition for the heretic, or the Turk for the Armenian is nothing to the dislike of the run of editors for the greatest of all games”.