School head was a grand master – of chess
BOB JONES tells the story of a long-serving Black Country headmaster and one of the great figures in 20th century chess
YOUNGER players may, in their reading, have come across the term ‘kipping’ from time to time and wondered what it meant. Is it a noun, a verb or adjective? And where do those historic Staffordshire clubs, Walsall Kipping and Wolverhampton Kipping, fit it?
To start at the beginning: the founder of this section of the Kipping dynasty was James Stanley Kipping (1822-1899), who had a remarkable chess career in the middle of the 19th century. He was, in his prime, one of England’s leading amateurs and crossed swords with most of the greats of the Howard Staunton era, Adolf Anderssen, Henry Thomas Buckle, Bernhard Horwitz and Johann Löwenthal, et al. When the greatest of them all, Paul Morphy, visited the UK in August 1858 and in Birmingham took on eight opponents blindfold, James Kipping was chosen as one of the eight and was the only one to beat the legendary American. Two other games played by Kipping against Morphy were included by Löwenthal in his Morphy’s Games of Chess (1860).
James Kipping then dropped out of top level chess, preferring to play friendly games in local clubs, in Manchester, and indulging in his other hobby of doing chemical experiments in the back kitchen. In fact, in chess circles he became a forgotten man, to such an extent that when, in 1875, a local chess journalist wrote an article lamenting the deaths of so many great British players, he included Kipping in the list, unaware that not only was he still alive, but had another 15 years of life in him.
Although James worked all his life in the Manchester branch of the Bank of England, it was not a love of banking that passed to his heirs, but his twin hobbies of chemistry and chess.
First of all, his passion for chemistry was taken up by his son, Frederick Stanley Kipping (18631949), who married Lily (née Holland). Frederick quickly became an outstanding chemist specialising in the exploration of organic silicon compounds which ultimately found universal applications as synthetic rubber, water repellents, hydraulic fluids, and greases, underpinning many of the developments in applied science in the 20th century.
In 1897 he was appointed Professor of Chemistry at University College, Nottingham, and elected to the Royal Society at the age of just 34. He was one of the truly great chemists of his generation, and his obituary in the Royal Society’s magazine runs to 38 pages.
If Frederick inherited the chess gene from his father he hadn’t time to develop it, but it passed on to his first born, Cyril Stanley Kipping (18911964). Cyril attended Nottingham High School before going on to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he obtained first class honours in both parts of the Natural Sciences Tripos. In 1914 he took up his first teaching post at Weymouth College. After the war he went to Bradfield College, Berkshire, before taking the post of second master at Pocklington School, Yorkshire, where he taught chemistry.
Yet alongside this fulltime career, Kipping ran what must seem like to many a full-time career as a chess problemist. His first chess composition was published in 1907, aged 16, and nine years later his output had risen to 300, at which point he found himself in something of a dilemma.
Conscripted
By 1916, while at Weymouth, there was the distinct possibility that, at any moment, he could be conscripted into the army and likely meet the same fate as the 20,000 killed before breakfast on day one of the Somme.
Fearing for his legacy to the chess world, he took the trouble of publishing, at his own expense, all his work up to that point in a book entitled simply 300 Chess Problems.
In the event, Kipping was not called up to serve in the trenches, which may have been due to that fact that at every school he taught in, he also ran an officer training corps.
The main alternative to the British Chess Magazine at that time was the Chess Amateur, founded in 1907. Its problem editor was the popular and humorous Philip H. Williams, but in 1922 he died suddenly at the age of 49. Kipping needed little pressing to take on the post, and he built up considerably the problem side of the output and it took over an increasing number of pages each week.
However, the magazine was struggling financially. Cyril took over as General Editor, and towards the end appealed to the readership for donations to keep the magazine going, explaining that he was funding it mostly out of his own pocket.
In 1924, while at Pocklington, he published a booklet, The Chess Problem Hobby, intended as an introduction for beginners, with definitions of terms.
At the same time, Staffordshire County Council were planning to create a Boys High School in Wednesbury, and it opened in 1924 with Kipping appointed its first Headmaster at the age of 32. The fact that he was simultaneously starting a prestigious school from scratch while struggling against the economic tide to keep a national magazine afloat bears testimony to his prodigious work ethic and will-power. The magazine eventually ceased production in June 1930 and Kipping later reflected that it was one of his biggest disappointments.
In 1932 Kipping took over as Editor of The Problemist, then organ of the British Chess Problem Society, which he continued until his death. His enthusiasm for the game led him to make chess a timetabled subject in his school, with the aim of teaching concentration, logic, competitive spirit, self esteem, etc., and as
such stirred quite a bit of interest in the wider press. Kipping set the bar high as throughout the 1930s the British Boys’ Championship, held annual at Easter in Hastings, there were usually between one and three Wednesbury players among the 15 or so players.
His leisure pursuits were not only cerebral, however, as he was a keen and competent tennisplayer, like his father, and his interest in football and cricket both at national and school level was always evident.
In 1938 he published another booklet, The Chess Problem Science, which took the beginner on to the next stage ... and the war broke out. Clubs shut down as towns and cities everywhere, including Hull, Exeter, Coventry and Liverpool, were blitzed in a concerted effort to break the spirit of the British people. Not only did it not achieve that aim, but had the opposite effect, boosting the resolve of the populace not to be cowed or intimidated. And chess was a small but fine example of this.
For instance, early in 1942 my father cofounded the Cannock Chase Chess Club, which took the Wolverhampton and District League by storm, thinking nothing of driving in a couple of Austin 7s past all the bomb damage to play their first matches, and winning the league in style against unprepared opposition, who, in turn, decided to get back into serious action with immediate effect. In 1942 the Kipping Chess Club was founded by A.E. Parsons, with CSK as its president. Its second yearbook (194344) noted that the Walsall and Wolverhampton clubs had both adopted the Kipping name, to honour the man, and to give them a little added kudos. Chess was definitely being revived, not curtailed.
With raw materials and manpower for leisure activities both in short supply during the war, Kipping put in herculean efforts, The second Kipping Club yearbook records: “With the aid of some ‘borrowed’ branches of trees, the Headmaster has made at least 40 chess sets, admirable for play and far less confusing and tottering than many sold in the shops.”
Appreciation
Old boy Tony Pointon recalls that “Throughout the war Kipping kept the sports facilities going himself, including four football pitches, a cricket square and two tennis courts. He cut the grass, made a rotating cricket scoreboard, and personally paid for a pavilion to be erected.” Another former pupil. Graham
Whistance, summed him up in five words: fearsome, funny, dangerous, eccentric and clever, with a short paragraph justifying each one, and C.P. Vale has posted a full and affectionate appreciation online. Trevor Mcfarlane, wrote in to say that as a pupil he used to take a school chess team on the bus from Walsall to Wednesbury (they never played away matches in any sport), for four consecutive years, and he remembers his first visit, being met at the gate by Kipping himself.
“Dressed like a tramp with uncleaned boots, he wore his trousers at ‘half mast’ and had a limp university tie dangling from a greasy butterfly collar, the type not seen since the thirties. In subsequent years, I had to be sure to explain to my team that the man due to meet us was indeed the headmaster and not the gardener. The next morning I was called to my Head’s office, and I fear for what I might have done wrong, only to be told that Mr Kipping had phoned to say ‘how impressed he was on how I had managed the team in such an exemplary manner.’ That just about encapsulates the contract between the outer and inner man.”
There was no doubting CSK was a controversial figure in educational circles. Standing 6ft 3in tall and with a glower that could stop a charging bull, he intimidated everyone at first sight, parents, pupils and most of the staff; he knew it and used it to his advantage. However, beneath that carapace lived a fine scholar who cared for his pupils, and once, one by one, they realised that, they had a great respect and admiration for him for the rest of their lives.
Late in life he received several awards from FIDE (World Chess Federation) for his career in chess problems; International Judge of Compositions (1957), and International Master of Chess Composition (1959). He would certainly have been awarded a Grandmaster title, had it been created before he died in February 1964, leaving over 7,000 chess problems to be remembered by.