If you know a finer clubhouse for chess aficionados, tell me. This is the Nuovo Circolo Degli Scacchi in Rome. It’s almost worth playing chess to belong but I can pop in as a reciprocal member and have done so.
Here’s another picture. Truly more than a chess club. If you think through problems and consequences you are perhaps a chess player. If you react quickly to changing circumstances and odds then you may be a backgammon player, but I digress. If I want to play chess locally, I don’t, I’d join the Hammersmith Chess Club ( motto, més que un chess club).
This was their clubhouse when they were founded in 1962. Of course it was not purpose built for the club. Lower Mall, on the north bank of the river immediately to the west of Hammersmith Bridge, gets a thumbs up from Pevsner. “It is Hammersmith’s best street … a happy mixture of new and renewed buildings, boathouses and pubs with nothing out of scale.” Westcott Lodge is not new. It was built in the middle of the 18th century as the vicarage for St Paul’s – the church on Hammersmith Broadway, not the cathedral. No doubt the vicar looked longingly at the Bishop of London’s palace not far downstream but these days few clerics are better housed although the Master of the Temple’s lodgings are not incommodious. The Church of England still has nooks and crannies where adherents can nestle in comfort.
Perhaps only elected politicians, senior members of the armed forces, Masters of Oxbridge colleges – I wish I hadn’t started this endless list – can claim such agreeable perks. Interesting to read in Jock Colville’s diaries that, in his second term as Prime Minister, Churchill seemed to prefer Chartwell to Chequers. He kept putting off standing down as PM to give ambitious Anthony Eden a chance at the top job because he wanted to establish an understanding of some sort with Russia. Eden wasn’t keen and the Conservative party was divided. Our relationship with China today is as important and the Conservatives as divided. I hope the chess players in our government win.