Gossip in Skaneateles

In July and August of 1895, George Gossip competed in the New York State chess tournament at the Packwood House in Skaneateles. It was his final tournament, capping a star-crossed career that began in 1870. For those who love the game but play poorly, Gossip should be a patron saint, for his efforts were rewarded by failure on a grand scale. Chess writers mocked his play, calling him a “grandpatzer” and “the king of the wooden spoonists,” a reference to the figurative or literal wooden spoon given to a last-place finisher. In fact, Gossip did finish dead-last in five consecutive events: the Master Section at London in 1889, the Meisterturnier at Breslau in 1889, the Master Section of Manchester in 1890, the Master Tournament at London in 1892 and the Master Tournament in New York in 1893.

The one constant in his career was bad fortune. His opponents came to the table directly from a meal of onions, or smoked acrid cigarettes. His hotel rooms were next to machinery that ran all night or above stables whose workers arrived before dawn. He faced similar disappointments as a writer. His heroic 900-page Chess Player’s Manual (1874) was a critical and commercial flop. His Theory of the Chess Openings (1879) was well received but promptly pirated, depriving him of royalties.

He was, throughout his career, an easy target for ridicule. On June 16, 1889, the New York Times ran this portrait:

“Gossip, with his long, flowing beard, looks like one of the old-time monks. He has a good-shaped cranium, bald at the top, and is a little above the medium height… He believes himself to be one of the greatest chess players in the world, and thinks that if everything had gone on to his liking he could have beaten all the champions at the tournament. He is a deliberate player, but every now and then he takes a nip from a flask of brandy that generally stands on his table. He complained that his chair was too low, and he once attributed a defeat to that. Finally, he got a large ledger and sat upon it. He did, in fact, seem to derive some inspiration from its contents, for he played two or three excellent games afterward.”

In Skaneateles, Gossip won three, lost three, and finished fifth of seven players, never to compete again. He then vanished from the public eye and only surfaced post-mortem when he died of heart disease in 1907 at the Railway Hotel in Liphook, England.

Chess in Skaneateles, Part 1

I was talking about chess with a friend over lunch at the Sherwood Inn, in Skaneateles, N.Y., and afterwards it occurred to me that we couldn’t have chosen a better spot for the conversation.

In the late 19th century, the New York State Chess Association (NYSCA) held mid-summer meetings at places like Keuka Lake, the Thousand Islands and Saratoga Springs. For city players, these tournaments were a welcome tonic, an escape to cooler, leafier climes. Beginning in August of 1889, Skaneateles was the host for four of these summer meetings, with the tourney headquartered at the Packwood House (today’s Sherwood Inn), where they paid $1.50 a day for their room and board.

The power players came from New York City and Philadelphia, the latter members having joined the NYSCA when the New York and Pennsylvania associations merged. More than 40 men were entered, and sorted by ability into four classes. Local entrants included attorney George Barrow, merchant Benjamin Petheram, William Shotwell (for whom Shotwell Park is named), and H.B. Dodge, the editor of The Skaneateles Democrat.

Spectators paid $1 to watch the games; ladies were admitted for free. The New York Sun, the New York Herald and the Associated Press had a telegraph operator in place to report the result of each game.

 Solomon Lipschütz (1863-1905)

After the first evening’s games in 1889, Solomon Lipschütz, the reigning New York State Champion, relaxed by playing 11 informal games simultaneously — winning six, drawing three and losing two. Lipschütz would become the U.S. Champion in 1891 and hold the title until 1894. But at the end of the four-day 1889 tourney, the overall winner was William DeVisser of the Manhattan Chess Club.

The NYSCA returned to Skaneateles three more times. James Moore Hanham of the Manhattan Chess Club won the 1891 tourney.

William Pollack (1859-1896)

A notable entrant in 1891 was an English-Irish-American-Canadian player, William Pollock, a winner of the Irish Championship, and at the time a resident of Baltimore. Pollack was a colorful character known for enjoying the creation of brilliant combinations more than actually winning. Howard J. Rogers, Secretary of the New York State Chess Association, described his first meeting with him as follows:

“As an added attraction to the midsummer meeting of the Association at Skaneateles, N.Y., we hit upon a match between the New York State Champion, Eugene Delmar, and Mr. Pollock, the Champion of the South. I conducted the correspondence, which was very pleasant, and awaited with much interest my first meeting with Mr. Pollock. The match was to begin on Monday, and up to Sunday noon we were uncertain of the whereabouts of the Southern Champion.

“About five o’clock, a few of us were sitting on the broad piazza overlooking the beautiful waters of Skaneateles Lake, when a dusty figure in a brown suit, freckled face and wealth of reddish chestnut hair, approached the hotel. ‘Pollock,’ we shouted in a breath, ‘where on earth did you come from?’ ‘Well, you see,’ said he, shaking hands all round with beaming cordiality, ‘I brought up in Syracuse early in the morning; I really couldn’t spend the day loafing around there, so I thought I would take a bit of a tramp across the hills and tone myself up a little for the match.’ His ‘bit of a tramp’ was a hard walk of over 20 miles in a hot August day. Pollock lost that match, by the way, but took his defeat with the utmost good humour.”

Wilhelm (William) Steinitz (1836-1900)

Also along that year, to report on the tournament for the New York Tribune, was William Steinitz, then the game’s World Champion, a title he held from 1886 to 1894. In Germany, the Deutsche Schachzeitung of September 1891 reported:

“Steinitz played two blindfold games against Hodges and Rogers and won them both, the first one even after a brilliant Queen’s sacrifice.”

In August 1892, Walter Penn Shipley and Herman G. Voight of Philadelphia’s Franklin Chess Club tied for top honors. In 1895, S. W. Bampton, also of the Franklin Chess Club, was the winner of the 1895 tournament. That year, William Duval of the Brooklyn Chess Club wrote commentary in verse, including these lines that indicate William DeVisser, the 1889 tourney winner, was a regular summer resident:

We found the lake as fairy like
And sparkling as before
Responsive to the singing throng
Or gently dipping oar

Romantic drives through thrifty farms
Brought changes ever new
Of fragrant hills and heavenly skies
And limpid waters blue

No wonder that for seventeen years
DeVisser here hath come
To build his stalwart six feet two
And find a summer home

Obsequious maids in wonder stand
With condiments arrayed
While Vis with deftly practiced hand
Imperial salads made

And when he called for ginger ale
Or gave a wink for wine
See how they rush and bring it cool
And pop it off quick time

To gild the closing hours of chess
He played a score of games
And still his prestige and success
Inviolate maintains

Among the New York State Champions who played in Skaneateles were DeVisser, Lipschütz, Eugene Delmar, N.D. Luce and Albert B. Hodges. From that group, two also became U.S. Champions: Lipschütz and Hodges.

Albert B. Hodges (1861-1944)

Of them all, Hodges is perhaps the most fascinating, a chess player with a double life. In his public career, he won the U.S. Championship in 1894. From 1896 to 1911, he played for the USA against England in 13 trans-Atlantic cable matches, without a single loss. He was the only American master to play against five world champions: Johannes Zukertort, Wilhelm Steinitz, Emanuel Lasker, José Capablanca and Alexander Alekhine.

One of the most famous chess opponents of the nineteenth century, however, was not a man, but a machine. Ajeeb, a clockwork chess automaton, was a star attraction at the Eden Musée in New York City.

Ajeeb consisted of a robed figure seated atop a cabinet, addressing a chess board. Before each game, the operator opened the doors of the cabinet to show that no one was inside. Then he wound up Ajeeb, and play began.

Inside, however, having moved from one side to the other to avoid being seen during the opening of the doors, was a real chess player, a cramped but well-paid player who worked by the light of a single candle, noting the opponent’s moves and guiding Ajeeb’s hand in the appropriate response.

Hodges did not play against Ajeeb. Rather, as a young man in New York, he was one of those who played inside Ajeeb. I have to believe he was more comfortable on the porch of the Packwood, enjoying the breeze off the lake.

* * *

New York State Chess Association Mid-Summer Meetings in Skaneateles

August 27-30, 1889
July 21-25, 1891
August 1-6, 1892
July 30-August 3, 1895

Chess players gather for a photo on the porch of The Packwood House

* * *

A final note on Albert Hodges: He apparently never got show business out of his blood. In 1916, he began appearing in silent films, as a Russian official in War Brides (1916), a police inspector in The Auction Block (1917), the coroner in Empty Pockets (1918 ) and a butler in False Faces (1919).

Chess in Skaneateles, Part 2

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902)

One of the most formidable chess players ever to visit Skaneateles was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who on at least one occasion joined her friend Susan B. Anthony at the lakeside home of Anthony’s cousin, Anson Lapham.

Elizabeth Cady was the daughter of a lawyer; she grew up being tutored in Greek, mathematics and chess by a neighbor, the Rev. Simon Hosack. When Elizabeth’s eldest sister, Tryphena, married Edward Bayard, a young lawyer, he also tutored Elizabeth in chess, along with logic and analysis, which sharpened both her debating skills and her chess game.

She later wrote, “In my younger days, chess was thought to be a necessary accomplishment. But now you seldom meet a woman who knows the game. They all say it is too hard work, as if thinking were not one of the pleasures of life.”

At the time, many young men came to study law with Elizabeth’s father, and they were at first amused by his young daughter who debated the law and the rights of women with them.

“Nothing pleased me better than a long argument with them on woman’s equality, which I tried to prove by a diligent study of the books they read and the games they played. I confess that I did not study so much for a love of the truth or my own development in those days as to make those young men recognize my equality, and I soon noticed that, after losing a few games of chess, my opponent talked less of masculine superiority.”

Her style of play, as later described by a son and daughter in an introduction to her collected letters, may have had much to do with her success:

“She played as if her very life depended upon the outcome… When she played chess, she would even-up the contest by throwing out some of her pieces at the start, she would be generous in accepting the heaviest handicap, but when the game was once started, there was never anything for her or her opponent but a fight to the finish. She neither gave nor accepted quarter. She was as intense, as uncompromising, in a game as in a suffrage contest, and defeat was as painful to her in the one situation as the other.”

In 1840, Elizabeth Cady married Henry Brewster Stanton, a prominent abolitionist; their wedding trip was a voyage to England where Henry attended an anti-slavery convention. On the return, he suffered from sea-sickness and remained in his cabin, so Elizabeth passed the time by playing chess with a British officer on his way to Canada.

In 1868, Stanton began a tour of the lecture circuit, speaking for eight months of the year as a way to finance the struggle for women’s equality. In August of that year, she joined Susan B. Anthony in Skaneateles at the home of Anson Lapham. A businessman from New York City, Lapham had retired to Skaneateles in 1861 and lived in the mansion known today as Roosevelt Hall; there he welcomed Anthony and her colleagues for respite from their travels and travails in the struggle for women’s rights.

Anson Lapham (1803-1876)

One day in Skaneateles, while looking out at the lake, Elizabeth wrote a letter to her good friend Theodore Tilton in which she anticipated their next chess game.

Theodore Tilton (1835-1907)

Tilton was a journalist who, like the Stantons, was very involved in the struggle to abolish slavery. He came to know the family, and he shared Elizabeth’s passion for chess.

When Elizabeth was editing Susan B. Anthony’s newspaper, The Revolution, she challenged Tilton to a chess “championship of the sexes.” Tilton accepted the challenge, and won the first game; Stanton won the second, and Tilton the third. Stanton said that she would leave it to Tilton to report the results, but Tilton, not one to gloat, never did.

Their most fateful game, however, was a private one, over which Tilton confided to Stanton that his wife, Julia Tilton, had confessed to having an affair with Henry Ward Beecher, one of America’s most prominent clergymen. The Tiltons had for many years attended Beecher’s church, where Julia taught Sunday School; Theodore had edited Beecher’s newspaper, The Independent, and had, in fact, helped to make Beecher famous. But when people in Beecher’s inner circle learned that Beecher had conducted an affair with Julia Tilton, they did the only thing that could be done: They fired Theodore Tilton.

After Tilton’s disclosure across the chessboard, Elizabeth Cady Stanton shared his tale of woe with her fellow women’s rights leaders Victoria Woodhull and Isabella Beecher Hooker (Henry Beecher’s sister). The Reverend Beecher had previously denounced Woodhull’s advocacy of free love; angered by his hypocrisy, Woodhull published a story in her own newspaper claiming that the clergyman was practicing in secret the free-love doctrines he had condemned from the pulpit.

Again, Beecher’s supporters did the only thing that could be done. They had Woodhull arrested and imprisoned for sending obscene material — the account of Beecher’s adultery — through the U.S. mail. Julia Tilton was successfully pressured to deny that she had ever admitted to adultery. Beecher’s church held a board of inquiry, exonerated Beecher, and excommunicated Theodore Tilton.

Theodore Tilton was now feeling rather poorly used, and sued The Reverend Beecher. Months of testimony followed, much of which centered on Theodore Tilton’s failures as a husband. Among the nuggets was a maid’s testimony that Theodore Tilton and Elizabeth Cady Stanton played chess when all the other members of the Tilton household had gone to bed. And Julia Tilton herself added this:

“He (Theodore) was absorbed in chess to such a degree that he would sometimes be up all night. I have known him to stand up at night ready for bed, engaged upon a problem in chess and to be found in that same condition in the morning without having gone to bed at all.”

The jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict, and Beecher’s supporters claimed he had been exonerated. Theodore Tilton had had enough of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, the American press, and American justice. His reputation in tatters, his marriage over, he went into self-imposed exile in Paris.

Europe was kinder to Theodore Tilton. where he often appeared in the late afternoon at the Café de la Régence to play chess. The Café drew the best players in Europe, and here Tilton was in his element. He also enjoyed the friendship of fellow expatriates, including Thomas Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s son who was working as the European correspondent for an American newspaper, and William J. A. Fuller, who had been a good friend of Paul Morphy, perhaps the greatest chess player of the 19th century. Tilton wrote about chess for various periodicals and played every day.

In the spring of 1887, Elizabeth Cady Stanton visited her son Thomas in Paris, and was reunited with Tilton. They played “some exciting games of chess” in the apartments of William Fuller, once again sharing their passion for the game, meeting once more as equals and friends.

* * *

In 1878, Julia Tilton again confessed to having an affair with The Reverend Beecher, recanting her recantation. She was excommunicated from his church. Beecher remained in the pulpit.

In 1887, the Reverend Beecher died. It is said that Theodore Tilton was playing chess in Paris when a reporter handed him a cable that said, “BEECHER DEAD. INTERVIEW TILTON.” For a long time Tilton looked out at the street. Then he turned back to the chess board and said to the man he was playing with, “I beg your pardon… Is it my move?”

* * *

Eighty Years and More (1898) by Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Elizabeth Cady Stanton: As Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences (1922) edited by Theodore Stanton & Harriot Stanton Blatch; Henry Ward Beecher (1927) by Paxton Hibben; photograph of Anson Lapham by Isaac G. Tyson of Philadelphia, circa 1875, from the collection of the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College, a gift of Albert Cook Meyers, 1940. The Friends Historical Library was started in 1871 by Anson Lapham’s gift of 150 volumes conerning the Quakers in America.