Stewart Dalby Spending it
The tantrums and antics of some modern chess masters are nothing new, it would seem. Histories of the game tell a story, possibly apocryphal, that the earliest recorded enthusiast in Britain was the Viking King Canute (1016 to 1035).
It seems that Canute quarrelled one day when playing Earl Ulf, who upturned the board. So resentful was Canute that a couple of days later he had the earl murdered while he was in church.
Much later Napoleon was reduced to fury when he was beaten not once but three times by the Kempelton automaton – ostensibly a robot, a prototype of the computer – also known as the Turk.
The automaton was the brainchild of Wolfgang von Kempelton, an Austrian mechanic and inventor who toured around the courts of Europe.
But the automaton turned out to be a fake; there was a human being inside. It was bought by an American collector and disappeared in a museum fire in 1926.
Chess is thought to have originated in India more than 1 000 years ago, although at various times its provenance has also been ascribed to Persia, China, Russia and even Ireland.
From the earliest times chess sets have been a representation of war devised by the king and his advisers and waged by pawns as infantry. Through the ages, though, there has been an infinite variety of characters and characterisations.
Napoleon was known to be a player but probably not a collector. He and his marshals were the models for chess sets, with Napoleon as king and marshals Ney and Massena as bishops and the duke of Wellington as the opposing king.
In India, where chess sets were made for export from the 18th century onwards, craftsmen in Madras and Jaipur specialised in carving and painting ivory and horn figures depicting Indian princes versus East India company sepoys.
Religions have also been used as models with early French sets carved with Christian images such as the adoration of the magi. In the post- revolutionary Soviet Union some sets have cheery faced peasants ranged against evil-looking capitalists.
In 1994, a South African chess set portrayed the main players in the first democratic elections.
Chess sets, as well as coming in all shapes and sizes, have also been made in a vast range of materials – wood, ivory, pewter, precious metals like gold and silver, porcelain including Meissen, Doulton, Wedgewood, ebony, amber, ivory, Barleycorn bone and glass.
Some of the most famous chess pieces in Britain, the 78 items from seven different sets found on the Isle of Lewis in 1831 and now housed in the British Museum, are made of walrus ivory and thought to be 12th-century Scandinavian.
Because of the constant rule changes, chess had, by the middle of the 19th century, become such a complex operation that even the best players had a difficult time identifying the pieces. It was only then that an English master, Howard Staunton, produced a design for the standard set we know today. The sets were made by the firm John Jacques and these pieces are usually known as Jacques Staunton.
Luke Honey, a pieces and ephemera specialist at Phillips auction house, says the Stauntons are the benchmark among collectors.
They are not necessarily the top of the range, though. Honey says: “Chess sets can start at a few rands. But if you are talking about antique sets and pieces then you are looking at a minimum of between R1 000 and R1 500 for a 19th-century boxwood and ebony playing set, or a Barleycorn bone set.”
The Staunton sets are now in demand. “The cheapest you would get a Staunton for now is R3 000. This would be for a standard boxwood and ebony set. They can rise to about R90 000 if made of ivory.”