Hub of Australian Chess
The
club was only two years old in 1868 it accepted Adelaide chess club's
challenge and the first inter-colonial telegraphic chess match was
played. Two years later came the first match between Victoria and New
South Wales. The contest between NSW became the chess equivalent of the
Oxford v. Cambridge boat race. The club was responsible for all
telegraphic matches with other states until 1938. When Rosenblum in 1926
entitled his history of the club Seventy years of Victorian Chess he was certainly not guilty of conscious exaggeration.
For
most of its first 70 years the club was the governing body of chess in
Victoria, but between 1878 and 1890 it faltered. In trying to boost
membership the club made the mistake of opening the door to whist
players. The result was very nearly fatal. By 1883 Melbourne faced
extinction and a new body, the Victorian Chess and Draughts club was
formed and flourished. The first Australian championship tourney took
place in Adelaide in 1887. Next year the tournament was held in
Melbourne as the Centennial Congress arranged and conducted , not by
the Melbourne club alone, but by the Melbourne and Victorian clubs in
conjunction. On 13 October Chief Justice Higginbottom opened the
Congress with a speech praising the rule of law in chess. In 1888 the
Victorian chess club - its name no longer mentioned draughts, which had
disappeared - won a match against Melbourne after drawing one and losing
another the previous year. Melbourne won the fourth and final match in
1889. In 1889 the new club suggested an annual tournament for the
Championship of Victoria and actually conducted a tourney for the
Championship of Melbourne. The winner was R.L.Hodgson, a member of
Melbourne, and he induced the club to move to better premises, at the
Vienna Cafe, in 1890. The club's handicap tourney of 1889 had been most
successful. Melbourne had revived. For the next 50 years the Club would
again speak for chess in Victoria.
It
was the club that instituted the Victorian championship in 1891 and
conducted it until 1939, when the Victorian chess association took over.
In 1892 the Club established the Junior championship of Victoria. The
tournament had nothing to do with age and its name was altered in 1908
to the Minor Championship of Victoria. In 1931 the name was changed
again, to the Victorian Minor tourney. The Annual Handicap Tourney, held
by the club for the first 90 years of its life, was always an important
event and until the 1890s the principal tournament in Victoria. Its
decline marked the modern loss in interest in play at odds. In 1925 the
president, J.A.Pietzcker, endowed an annual open tournament, first
conducted in the Christmas holidays and known as the Pietzcker tourney
or the Melbourne Christmas tourney; later; when it was no longer played
at Christmas, its name was changed to the Melbourne annual tournament.
The tournament was last held in 1940, but was revived in 1947 as the
Australian Open tournament, a biennial event conducted by the club 4
times and so arranged as to alternate with the biennial Australian
championship. The Australian Open was taken over by the Australian Chess
Federation as the Australian Open Championship, first held in 1971 (as
the Karlis Lidums International tournament).
Before
there was any system of matches between clubs challenges provided the
ocassion of inter-club play. In 1898, for example, we find the club in a
match against Malvern chess club, while 2 years later it meets the
commercial travellers club and then the Port Melbourne chess and
draughts club. The club's open tournaments gave members of smaller
bodies an opportunity for competitive play. So in 1910 notice of the
Annual Handicap tourney went out to the chess clubs at Prahran, Malvern,
Port Melbourne and Fitzroy, the commercial traveller's association
chess club and the chess resort at the Victoria Coffee Palace."
The
Melbourne chess association, formed after representatives of clubs met
at Melbourne chess club on 20 September, 1901, staged a tourney in
1901-1902 between the 8 clubs constituting the association - Brighton,
Commercial Travellers, Essendon, Footscray, Malvern, Melbourne, Port
Melbourne and Prahran. This became an annual event, and the club was
handicapped each year by having its strongest players barred. Every year
the club also played a challenge match against the rest of the
association. The association ceased to exist in 1909 and soon after
this the smaller clubs began to decline, although the 1920s brought a
revival.
After the
passing of the Melbourne chess association we find the club playing
challenge matches against other clubs. At the same time internecine
contests take place every week by way of teams matches amongst members;
so in 1919 weekly matches are held between teams captained by Grant,
Loghran, Moody and Barnard. During the 1920s premiership matches seem to
have been held annually, and we find Clifton Hill, Brunswick, Moonee
Ponds, Hawthorn, Sunshine, Footscray, Coburg, Melbourne and the
Railways taking part. This inter-club competition was evidently
conducted by an association, but little is known of it. In about
September 1932, the Melbourne chess league was formed; the club
affiliated with it. The league conducted an inter-club competition each
year, starting in 1934. In 1935 the club handed over to the league the
running of the Victorian Minor tournament, with a view to broadening the
league's experience, a step described by the Leader as the beginning of complete self-government of Victorian chess by a state-wide association.

Over the next 3 years the committee
discussed the formation of a Victorian chess association and in about
March, 1938, Melbourne approached suburban and country clubs to
ascertain their views. There was no doubt about the views of some
C.P.Lowe of Malvern chess club (who was to become the Victorian chess
associations first secretary) complained that Melbourne could not see
beyond its own clubroom; its idea of calling for entries for the
Victorian Championship (he wrote in a letter to the Australasian Chess
Review) was to put up a notice on the clubroom wall. But the impression
remains that it was not dissatisfaction felt by the other clubs but
Melbourne's own initiative that brought the state association into
being. The club convened a meeting of representatives of all known chess
clubs in Victoria for June 15 1938, to consider forming a Victorian
chess Association. The Association was in fact formed in that year and
absorbed the Melbourne Chess League and took control of the inter-club
competition. In 1939 the Victorian Championship was played for the first
time under its auspices. It also took over the telegraphic matches
between Victoria and NSW.
In
the Association's early years the club was often unhappy with the way
in which the Victorian championship or the telegraphic match with NSW
has been run. Small things too, like a supposed unauthorised purchase of
badges, seems to have caused great friction. In 1942 the club's
delegates moved unsuccessfully that the association go into liquidation
and as an alternative that control be handed back to the club of the
championship and the interstate match. For the next 4 years the club
actually held the championship, at the association's request. Relations
were very strained. In 1945 the committee suggested to members that the
club disaffiliate, but they decided against this. Things improved, by
1948 the association was functioning to the satisfaction of all the
clubs.
The year 1966 saw
the club's centenary tournament, hailed by C.J.S.Purdy as "the very
first full length mammoth round-a-day tournament ever held in
Australia." Opened by the Minister of Education, the Hon.J.S.Bloomfield,
and held in the Tudor room at the Victoria hotel, the tournament was
won by Max Fuller. In his reminiscence at the closing ceremony Purdy
noted that he had first played in a tournament at the club almost 40
years before and that only two of the members in those days still
belonged to the club, Judge Woinarski and J.L.Beale. The president,
Joseph Matters, had the last word: "I'll see you all in another 100
years." (Matters, now 88 and still carrying off prizes in the Saturday
allegro, seems determined to keep his promise.)
3 years after its centenary the club instituted the open tournament known as the City of Melbourne championship.