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Leek Chess Club
Leek Chess Club was founded on a formal
basis in 1890 and held its earliest meetings in the Mechanics Institute in
Russell Street. It is known, however, that organised chess was played
amongst the professional men of the town at least 40 years before that,
and it is suspected that an earlier Chess Club had once been established
in Leek, probably as an offshoot of the town Cricket Club, which was
founded in 1844.
In 1890, the club joined the newly-formed
North Staffordshire and District Chess League and played in it without any
spectacular success for most of the next decade. Apart from a couple of
seasons in the early 1900s, Leek did not continue to participate in the
league and the league found itself in some difficulty, winding up
temporarily just before the First World War. When the league made two
attempts to restart in the early 1920s and again ten years later, it was
without Leek. The club itself seems to have failed to re-emerge after
closing down during the Great War.
Thanks mainly to the efforts of Bill
Hardisty, however, the club was re-established at the end of the Second
World War. Not many years afterwards,the club moved into the Nicholson
Institute and was taken under the wing of the Leek Arts Club, thereafter
being known as Leek Arts Club Chess Section.
Just as the club owed a great deal to Bill
Hardisty, chess generally in North Staffordshire owed a lot to the efforts
of a schoolteacher called Lawrie Landon. Landon had been a member of the
Hanley Chess Club from the early part of the 20th century and had become a
leading light in North Staffordshire chess in the 1930s. In 1940, when
most clubs had closed down, Hanley was no exception and Landon took it
upon himself to hire a room in 1941 at Hartshill where he and a few
friends met twice a week to play chess. This was the beginning of the
famous Victory Chess Club.
At the end of the war, Landon invited a few
other clubs to join Victory and reform the North Staffordshire Chess
League. This duly took place in 1946. Leek re-entered a year later. Not
content with this league, which operated on Saturday afternoons, Landon
converted the Victory Club's internal team competition into another league
which he called the Stoke-on-Trent and Newcastle-under-Lyme and District
Chess League. His idea was to use all the players in the Victory Club in
various teams which adopted a variety of names and played each other in a
league competition at the club's premises every Friday evening. Once this
league had become established in 1947, he invited other clubs to enter
teams in it. Leek joined in 1957.
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