It's Not All Black and White

From Wonderland to Hogwarts, the battle between pawns, knights and kings has raged for centuries. Matthew Dennison discovers how chess won a place in British culture.

- Matthew Dennison

IN 1849, an ivory turner, a magazine editor and a former Shakespearean actor collaborated in the creation of an iconic piece of British design: the Staunton chess set. Simple, well balanced and practical, the surprisingly modern design quickly achieved widespread popularity, thanks in part to well-publicised celebrity endorsement and some determined self promotion on the part of the man who lent it his name.

It remains the world’s standard chess set. ‘To pick up an old wooden Staunton-pattern set, to feel the surface, admire the workmanship and see where, over the years, pieces have been handled is magic,’ enthuses collector David Harris.

Former actor Howard Staunton, as the Morning Chronicle told its readers, was a ‘well-known Chess-player’. He was also owner and editor of monthly magazine Chess Player’s Chronicle, the chess columnist of the Illustrated London News and the author of Chess-Player’s Handbook, Chess- Player’s Companion and Chess-Player’s Text Book.

His collaboration with John Jaques, who manufactured the newly designed chess sets in packaging marked with a facsimile of Staunton’s signature, probably came about through Jaques’s brother-in-law Nathaniel Cook, who was Staunton’s editor at the Illustrated London News.

Today, the Jaques company is chiefly associated with croquet sets, but its early output extended to false teeth made from hippopotamus ivory, so its skills in the carving and turning of hardwoods, ivory and bone were ideally suited it to manufacturing chess sets. With sound commercial instincts, it produced them both in wood and ivory, the latter traditionally a luxurious alternative to fruit wood, boxwood and rosewood and one that permitted particularly crisp, carved or engine-turned detailing.