English Chess Forum

This is great stuff. Possibly the highlight: the line "certainly, there are no psychopaths here".

Lovely story, I don't suppose the culprit was ever found?

Brilliant!

Bognor Regis is not too far from Saunders-Roe on the Isle of Wight.

At the same time (the early to mid 60's) they were building and
testing on the Isle of Wight a rocket called the 'Black Knight.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Knight_(rocket)

The two events are obviously liked.

Someone was passing onto a spy at the congress that the Black Knight rocket was being sabotaged.
It's either that or they were nicking the Knights to stick on the ends of their pencils.

Interesting but no difference from those that chewed heads off pieces in the 1970s/80s/90s/00s & 10s.
Also ought to be sold with a warning - not suitable for young children.

Even to this very day the atrocities continue. Go to any long established club and you will find yourself stacks of mutilated kings, their crowns twisted form their heads. Not sure why this happens, I can only theorise that some players are so poor that they are taking them down to pawnbroker shops in the hope of cashing them in.

This is not just a recent phenomenon!

In Athens in the fifth century it was customary for each house to have outside a minature statue of the God Hermes to provide protection. As befitting a Greek God he tended not to be wearing a superfluity of clothes. One night the residents of Athens woke to find that a vast number of these statues had been mutilated during the night -although in this case it was not the head that was missing but a lower placed organ.

The culprit was widely believed to be a dilettante of high society by the name of Alcibiades, but here the authorities hit a bit of a problem because in between being a dilettante Alcibiades was a very capable general and had just been appointed to lead an expedition to fight in a war in Sicily. They told him that he could continue to Sicily and delay answering the charges of sacrilege against him until after his (victorious) return. Unsurprisingly things did not happen in quite this way and Alcibiades defected to Athen's arch enemy, Sparta.

Alcibiades continued his career in a highly checkered fashion. Sparta was renowned for its rather.. well, Spartan, ways which were not entirely suitable for a dilettante. When Alcibiades seduced the king's wife he quickly found it necessary to depart from his new friends. Fortunately, the Athenians were in a bit of a mess and in need of a good general: they invited him back and put him in charge of the fleet. But success still eluded him. His second-in-command (who reputedly owed his position to having once rescued a pet bird of Alcibiades) decided that he was under-valued and in the absence of his superior launched an attack against the enemy. This is a high risk strategy when a storm is blowing and the fleet was destroyed. Alcibiades was summoned back to Athens but wisely absented himself.

I could go on - the continuing twists and turns make a modern soap opera look tame! But eventually Alcibiades said good-bye to life in a brothel following a quarrel over - well lets not spell it out. The Athenians had been longingly hoping to recall him, but had to settle for conquest by the Spartans instead.

The BBC claims that Peter Shaffer's "Equus" was written 'after Shaffer heard how a stable lad had blinded six horses in a Suffolk stable'.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/threecounties/cont ... ture.shtml

But maybe Shaffer had been inspired by an earlier - and even more disturbing - tale of horse mutilation.

I am also reminded of the horse's head in the bed in The Godfather. Did Mario Puzo play chess?

Finally I note that Ray Keene played at Bognor Regis 1965 but I will leave it to others to assess the significance of this fact.

https://www.365chess.com/tournaments/Bo ... 1965/26110#

I don't remember anything about this, although I played at Bognor several times, though not 1963-1965 as I was in the US. It was a major international Swiss of its era. Of course it used to be quite easy to remove the knight's heads in that type of chess set.

The late Bent Larsen told an interesting story. There was a tournament in Denmark. A player mistook his king and queen and lost. The following day they came into the venue and found all the heads of the kings and queens had been cut off.

It was also quite difficult to avoid them coming off. Most of the school sets at (both) my secondary schools had the knights in two halves. It never occurred to me that someone might be doing it deliberately. Maybe I was/am just naive.