Alexander Cunningham

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Would anyone here be able to help with a question I was asked recently about Alexander Cunningham? There were two people of this name around at the same time in Scotland, with one being a chess player.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_ ... 8jurist%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_ ... storian%29

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Cunningha ... 28DNB00%29
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Cunningha ... 28DNB00%29

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6914
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6915

(The latter links require subscription.)

Does anyone have more information on Alexander Cunningham and chess in Scotland and Europe in the late 17th and early 18th century? Is it likely that both would have played chess?

[Gordon Cadden]

Murray solved this conundrum in 1913. Two chess players with the name Alexander Cunningham. One a jurist, the other a historian. For a period, they were both resident at the Hague. The jurist was by far the strongest player, attracting players from all over Europe, to the Hague. But Murray concluded that it was the historian that first played the Cunningham Gambit, because of his relationship with Lord Sutherland, and the existence of an MS originally owned by Lord Sutherland, with a dedicatory letter of introduction from Mr de la Caze, with Game 139, demonstrating the Cunningham Gambit, dated 1st. September, 1706.
This was before Cunningham the jurist, had arrived at the Hague.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Thanks! Do you know if there has been anything more recent, or has it been considered solved since then? I get the impression that people still trip up over this and confuse the two even today. Not surprising as it was a problem back then as well. One story I found involved Leibniz writing "in some bafflement to ask of the two 'Messieurs Synonymes' [which] he had the honour to know"!

[Gordon Cadden]

Murray has the last word, but we must thank Mr de la Caze for recording the game. We are told that Cunningham the jurist, was the strongest player, but sadly very few games were recorded during this period.
Even Philidor never bothered to record his games. We have to thank George Atwood for keeping a record of important games played at Parsloes Club. His manuscript volumes of games, was sold at auction in 1832. George Walker was the successful bidder.

[Tim Harding]

In Kibitzer 196 (September 2012) at the Chess Café, I referred briefly to the conundrum which has been raised by Christopher Kreuzer on this Forum, namely which Scotsman named Cunningham was the inventor of the 3…Be7 line in the King’s Gambit, and who was the opponent of Charles Spencer, third Earl of Sunderland [NOT Sutherland, Gordon!] in games played when both lived in The Hague.

Was it Alexander Cunningham of Block, the jurist and critic, who was born in the 1650s (approx.) and died 1730, or his contemporary, the historian Alexander Cunningham (died 1737)?

Gordon Cadden is certainly right insofar as Harold Murray BELIEVED that he had solved the problem.

In an article in BCM (April 1912) and in his History of Chess (pages 844-845), Murray said that both Cunninghams played chess but that the strong player was Cunningham the historian. Murray believed that the original Dictionary of National Biography had misidentified Cunningham of the gambit.

Murray repeated this conclusion an April 1914 article for BCM about the Caze manuscript, to which one of Gordon’s postings refers. The Oxford Companion to Chess and Eales’s ‘Chess: The History of a Game’ essentially accept Murray’s findings though Eales does hedge his bet by saying (page 101) “probably the historian”.

On the other hand, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography does not mention chess in its article on the historian (by Basil Morgan) whereas its article by John W. Cairns about Cunningham of Block does mention chess and places him in the Netherlands (if only for brief periods) at a much earlier date than Murray did, and dates the start of his residence in The Hague much earlier than Murray, thus undermining one of the latter's key arguments.

ODNB also has a long article about Sunderland (by an American scholar whose PhD thesis was about the man).

I certainly do not claim to be an expert on this period but I can draw some conclusions from the ODNB articles if they are correct. In particular, it seems Sunderland (then the heir to the title, and known as Lord Spencer) was in the Netherlands as a young man from April 1689 to April 1690 at least (studying at the University of Leiden) and may well have continued living or visiting there for some time, at least up to his first marriage in 1695. His first wife died young and his second marriage was to a member of the Churchill family.

It is not quite clear from the dates in the ODNB articles but it rather looks as if it may be possible that he met either or both of the Cunninghams in the Netherlands but would not have been in regular contact as the dates don’t quite match and Spencer was then very young,

It is much more likely to me that they became friends in London in the period 1694-1697 in England and the ODNB clearly does not agree with Murray in that it says AC of Block was the one who was friendly with Sunderland.

Perhaps Murray relied too much on the dating of dedication letter by Caze to Sunderland (Amsterdam 1706). This is in the Caze MS, which was originally in Blenheim but later sold to John G. White by Sir Winston Churchill’s uncle and now in Cleveland Ohio, which I saw there in 2007. It was Caze, not Sunderland, who was in Amsterdam at the time, and the main part of the MS consists of some of the earliest known recorded chess games, perhaps even recorded 20 years previously. The fact that Caze wrote that he was present at some games between Sunderland and Cunningham does perhaps imply that those games were in the Netherlands but some of their chess games may have been in London rather than in The Hague.

I do not accept Gordon’s contention that Murray has had the last word. Even if Murray’s conclusion ultimately turns out to be correct (which I am unsure about) some of the dates he gives for both Cunninghams do not match those in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In particular, Murray says the one generally recognised to be the strong player, namely A. of Block (the critic), was not resident in The Hague until 1710 but ODNB says he lived there from 1703.

So I am not convinced this mystery has yet been cleared up. The editors of the new Oxford D.N.B. and the writers of the two articles about the Cunninghams have either overlooked Murray’s critique or believe him to be in error and insufficiently important to be worth an explicit contradiction.

I have been meaning for some time to raise this matter with the ODNB editor who commissioned the articles from me on Evans, Gunsberg and Rudge, in case he can clarify whether his contributors on Cunningham and Sunderland were aware of this issue.

Before I do so, does anybody want to make any further points?

(Minor correction on a side issue: Atwood's MSS of Philidor games were acquired by Walker from a bookseller named Thorpe; perhaps Thorpe bought them at auction. See preface to Walker's 'Games at Chess actually played by Philidor and his contemporaries, page xiii.)

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Many thanks for this. I hope you manage to find out more from your ODNB contacts.
(Changing subject: there is a brief 'history' mention of the Turk automaton over here if interested.)