Mary Rudge
Mary Rudge (born February 6, 1842 in Leominster , † November 22, 1919 in London ) was England's leading chess player in the last quarter of the 19th century . After her superior victory at the first international chess tournament for women in London in 1897, she was counted among the strongest players in the world. The British Chess Magazine she titled after this success - 30 years before the first official competition for the chess crown of Women - the first world chess champion .
Life
Mary Rudge was born on February 6, 1842, the youngest of seven children of the doctor Henry and his wife Eliza Rudge in Leominster, a small town in southwest England, where she grew up and lived for 32 years. After the death of her father in 1874, Mary left her hometown and moved on to the south-west of Bristol with her older sister Caroline - both were unmarried . There they lived with their brother Henry, a bachelor who had worked as an assistant pastor in the port city since 1870.
Start of chess career in Bristol
Mary Rudge learned the game of chess from her two sisters Emily († 1873) and Caroline († 1900), who in turn were taught it by their father Henry. In 1864, she and her sister Emily took part in a correspondence chess tournament organized by Cassell's Illustrated Family Newspaper , using the pseudonyms Snowdon and Vesuvius . Her first recorded games date from 1872, when she took part in a correspondence chess tournament organized by Gentleman's Journal . Rudge's move to Bristol was beneficial for her chess development, as she probably had no serious opportunity in Leominster to compete in local chess. Mary Rudge found accommodation at the Bristol Chess Club , the oldest chess club founded outside of London (1829 or 1830), which had just decided in 1872 to accept women.
In Bristol, Rudge first appeared by name in 1875 when she played against English champion Joseph Henry Blackburne , who visited the Bristol Chess Club for three days in February and gave a blind simul event on ten boards. Mary Rudge lost the game after 27 moves. In October of the following year, at the invitation of the club, the Pole Johannes Hermann Zukertort stayed in Bristol to compete against several opponents at the same time in a blind game, this time on twelve boards. The course and the result of his game against Mary Rudge are not known, in total Zukertort won five games, drew three and lost one encounter; the remaining three were not finished. In the 1870s Rudge played some competitions against the strong amateur Edmund Thorold (1833-1899), in which she received specifications .
In the following years, Henry Rudge gave up his position as assistant pastor at St. Thomas Church and took over the management of the Luccombe House Preparatory School in Bristol until 1885 , whereby it is assumed that his two sisters were active in the school as teachers. When Henry gave up the school administration in 1885 and moved to take up a new position as pastor in Southport on the central west coast of England, Mary Rudge stayed in Bristol. At the age of 45 years, Rudge improved her chess game under the influence of the chess club and was used in the team of the Bristol and Clifton Chess Club against foreign clubs. In the years 1887 and 1888, two encounters have been recorded, in which Mary won once against male opponents on the sixth board and played a draw once. In 1888 she played in another simultaneous game against Blackburne and this time came to a draw, the following year she won the Challenge Cup of the Bristol and Clifton Chess Club .
After her brother left Bristol - Henry finally died in 1891 - Mary Rudge, who had no steady income of her own, got into financial difficulties. An appeal was even published in British Chess Magazine in 1889 asking for Rudge's support. Around this time the Irish journalist Frideswide Rowland took care of her; Rowland organized, together with her husband Thomas B. Rowland, chess events, published their own chess compositions and had a significant influence on chess in Ireland at that time. Mary Rudge was able to work at Rowland as a socialite and commuted between England and Ireland in the following years. Until 1896 Mary Rudge continued to play in teams (for Bristol and the county of Gloucestershire ) and gave in Clontarf, Ireland (near Dublin ) - possibly as the first woman ever - a simultaneous performance on six boards, in which she could win all games. She also played in Ireland for the Clontarf Chess Club : In the 1889/1890 season, Rudge remained unbeaten in eleven games on the second board with eight wins and three draws.
In the 1890s she won two smaller tournaments: in 1890 the Ladies' Challenge Cup in Cambridge, six years later the "B tournament" of the Southern Counties Tournament in Bristol, as the only woman among the ten participants.
The first international women’s tournament in London in 1897
Women's chess experienced a not insignificant upswing in Great Britain in 1895, when a tournament for women was held as a side program at the international championship tournament in Hastings , which attracted increased media attention. In the same year, the London Ladies Chess Club was founded on the initiative of Mrs. Rhoda Bowles . It was also Mrs. Bowles who two years later organized the first chess tournament for women in London, which was played with international participation. This tournament, which Mary Rudge was able to complete as the superior winner, was to be her greatest success at the age of 55.
The international ladies' tournament was announced for June 1897, just as the 60th anniversary of Queen Victoria's throne was celebrated in London. The tournament was sponsored by Princess Maud of Wales , a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. The tournament was announced in various publications from March onwards, for example in London's The Field , the Times took on regular reporting, and the March issue of the German Chess Newspaper also gave a first hint; The organizers finally accepted 20 of a total of 32 registrations. The German chess newspaper wrote after the tournament that “representatives of almost all countries where the game of chess is native” had participated and only players from Austria and Russia were missing. The participants came from England (eleven players), Ireland (two), Scotland, France, USA, Canada, Belgium and Italy (one player each); the only lady starting for Germany was “Miss Anna Hertzsch from Halle a. S. "," Miss Müller-Hartung ", another German, played for the USA.
The games were played in the first week of the tournament in the Hotel Cecil from June 23rd, and in the second week, due to the celebrations of the throne's jubilee, they had to move to the Ladies Chess Club . The participants had to play two games on one day, the rounds were scheduled at 1pm and 7pm. As a reflection of each player were an hour for twenty trains available, after four hours of play, the games were canceled and the stalemate continued to play the next morning. Among the favorites were - besides Mary Rudge - the winner of the ladies tournament of Hastings, Lady Edith Margaret Thomas, and the runner-up, "Miss Fox" (her nickname is unknown). Also Louisa Matilda Fagan (Italy) and Harriet Jona Worrall, the wife of the American chess player Thomas Herbert Worrall.
Mary Rudge started with 13 wins from 13 games and gave up the only half point in the fourteenth round against Marie Bonnefin from Belgium, who later came in fifth. An important game for the course of the tournament was in the previous round, when Rudge had to play against Louisa Matilda Fagan, who had been second to date. The Italian sacrificed a jumper in a balanced position, but had to give up a little later because she was "hallucinated". Mary Rudge led with 13.5 points after 14 rounds with two points ahead of Fagan and won her remaining five games. In the end, she scored 18.5 points from 19 games and won with a three point lead over Fagan, who was able to defend her second place. In the other places followed the Englishwoman Eliza Mary Thorold in third and Mrs Worrall in fourth. Anna Hertzsch from Germany took fourteenth place.
For her tournament success, Mary Rudge received an impressive £ 60 ( pound sterling ) as a prize , which, based on today's standards, corresponds to a sum of around £ 5000 (about € 7500 ). £ 15 was advertised for sixth place, the special prize for the most beautiful game (£ 20) was donated by chess patron Albert von Rothschild . The prize fund was raised, among others, by the American master player Harry Nelson Pillsbury ; the first prize was donated by Sir George Newnes (1851-1910), a publisher and member of the English House of Representatives. In its final report on the London tournament, British Chess Magazine names Mary Rudge, who has long been considered the strongest chess player in the world, as the lady chess champion of the world .
The years after the London success
Simultaneous Part, Bristol, 1898
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The final position after 28. Qh8 – h7, the simultaneous event was canceled here. Black wants to win.
One year after Rudge's tournament success, the then world chess champion , the German Emanuel Lasker , was in England. After defending his title against Wilhelm Steinitz (1896), Lasker toured Europe several times , including London and Bristol at the end of 1898. At the Hotel Imperial in Bristol , Mary Rudge was also one of his rivals: after Lasker made a mistake in a better position and first lost a pawn and then sacrificed quality , Mary Rudge was on the winning side (see diagram). However, the simultaneous performance was canceled after the agreed total playing time, after several hours of playing time. The game could not be brought to an end, but immediately afterwards Lasker admitted, "unofficially", the defeat against Rudge.
Mary Rudge continued to play for club teams and in smaller tournaments for the next few years without making any noteworthy headlines. When her eldest sister Caroline died in 1900, Mary Rudge was left alone with no close relatives. In 1912, her mentor Rowland published an advertisement in the Cork Weekly News, Ireland, asking for a grant for Mary Rudge. She suffers from rheumatism and is seeking assistance to be admitted to a Dublin hospital.
She played her last rated game in 1913 in a correspondence chess competition. In 1915 she was still playing against wounded soldiers in a hospital where she lived in Streatham .
On November 22, 1919, the pioneer of women's chess died in Guy's Hospital in London. Exactly thirty years after Rudge's victory in the first international women's tournament, Vera Menchik won the first official women's world chess championship . At the World Cup tournament, which was also held in London as part of the 1927 Chess Olympiad , Menchik won with a result comparable to that of Rudge and only made one draw in eleven games.
literature
- John Richards: Mary Rudge: Bristol's world chess champion . In: The Regional Historian . No. 13, 2005, pp. 33-37. Online (PDF document, English; 500 kB)
- Edward Winter : Chess Facts and Fables . McFarland, 2005, pp. 212-215, ISBN 0-7864-2310-2 .
Web links
- Replayable chess games by Mary Rudge on chessgames.com (English)
- Mary Rudge and the ladies' tournament in London: Kibitz 109 ( Memento from June 28, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 105 kB), Kibitz 110 ( Memento from June 28, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 119 kB) and Kibitz 111 ( Memento of June 28, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF documents, English; 203 kB)
Individual evidence
- ^ Year of birth according to the General Register Office of Leominster, March 1842, cf. Richards (2005). In Jeremy Gaiges Chess Personalia , 1845 is (incorrectly) stated.
- ↑ a b British Chess Magazine , August 1897, p. 289. Quoted from Winter (2005), p. 214.
- ↑ a b c Tim Harding: Rudge, Mary. In: Henry Colin Gray Matthew, Brian Harrison (Eds.): Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , from the earliest times to the year 2000 (ODNB). Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-861411-X , ( oxforddnb.com license required ), as of 2004
- ↑ a b See Richards (2005), p. 33.
- ↑ The Blind Simultaneous Game Blackburne - Rudge to replay (Java applet)
- ^ John Burt: The Bristol Chess Club . James Fawn and Son, Bristol 1883. Excerpts online: [1]
- ↑ British Chess Magazine 1889, p. 231. Quoted from Winter (2005).
- ↑ See Richards (2005), p. 34.
- ↑ a b c cf. Tim Harding: The Kibitzer . No. 111, PDF ( Memento from June 4, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Deutsche Schachzeitung , March 1897, p. 93.
- ↑ Deutsche Schachzeitung , July 1897, p. 221.
- ↑ See Deutsche Schachzeitung , May 1897, p. 155.
- ^ The Field July 10, 1897, quoted from Harding: The Kibitzer . No. 111.
- ↑ The German chess newspaper published an incorrect table in the June issue in which Fagan's two defeats were declared as victories, cf. Deutsche Schachzeitung , June 1897, p. 222.
- ↑ Lawrence H. Officer, Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a UK Pound Amount, 1830–2005, offers more precise calculations for comparing values . MeasuringWorth.Com, 2006. online (English)
- ↑ On Lasker's lectures and simultaneous events, cf. the issues of the Deutsche Schachzeitung in March, April, May and December 1898.
- ^ According to the Weekly Irish Times of January 14, 1899, quoted from Richards (2005).
- ↑ According to the American Chess Bulletin , May 1912, cf. Winter (2005), p. 214.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Rudge, Mary |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | English chess player |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 6, 1842 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Leominster |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 22, 1919 |
| Place of death | London |