Once again special thanks to The Bedford & County Record for it’s sumptuous reportage of how things once were. A predilection of modernity across the globe is to think we are better off now than we were before -progress they call it. But is it cumulative with all things? I thinketh not. Look at those fine Bedford folk before the outbreak of WW1, and the evenings of games they had in each others’ company. They knew which side their bread was buttered on, that’s for sure. Want to read on?
That’s the way to do it, is it not? But can we learn anything from how things once were before the advent of the Bedfordshire Chess Association formation and the Bedfordshire league? Although they were formed for the purposes of competitive chess locally, regionally, and then nationally, are the chess clubs that formed afterwards any better than the ones beforehand? Clubs created only for chess rather than games evenings, which functioned as chess clubs for chess only. Does it need to be asked why we no longer have games nights in clubs with more than one game on offer and couldn’t we ask whether chess sections could be housed within them if necessary? Is moving with the times always for the best? Must this involve selecting a venue cheap, empty and soulless rather than one accommodating and geared towards entertainment? Draughts and billiards have lost their popularity but chess has not, why is that? It seems to me that the clubs they used to play chess in were, generally speaking, more pleasant than what we have today, and that’s progress is it?
Mark. J. McCready
McCreadyandChess 
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