John Burt's 1883 history of the Bristol Chess Club contains a passing reference to a correspondence match played between representatives of Bristol and Cardiff: 'The following autumn [1860] witnessed the commencement of two games by correspondence, between the Club and that of Cardiff; in which the local champions were worsted in both games; they were conducted by Messrs. Selkirk, Holloway, and Phillips, with occasional assistance from others, and they are poor specimens of those players' chess force.'
Poor specimens they may have been, but correspondence matches between provincial clubs were not so common at this period (or thereafter) as to be dismissed in a sentence, and in this particular case the background to the match, and its outcome, had elements which threatened to turn it into a public wrangle. The full circumstances cannot now be known, but from passages in Howard Staunton's column in the Illustrated London News it is possible to gauge something of the dispute and its causes.
Readers of the Illustrated London News first heard of the Bristol-Cardiff match on 11 August 1860, when Staunton acknowledged receipt of the scores of both games - submitted, unsurprisingly, by a Cardiff representative - and promised to report on them as soon as he had had time to carry out an examination. In the following week he delivered his verdict: 'It is impossible to believe that two such games could have been played by correspondence between "strong players". They are evidently the work of quite young hands, and have hardly a single point of interest from beginning to end. Let the combatants arrange another match, and, during its progress, undergo a severe course of study at the openings.'
This was fairly damning; but Staunton added a note acknowledging that since the publication of his report in the previous week he had received 'three or four communications from Bristol protesting against the games in question being described as a "Match between the Clubs of Cardiff and Bristol," since the strongest players in the latter club took no part in the contest.' The initial challenge from Cardiff had, it seemed, been declined by the Bristol Club 'in its corporate capacity', and had been accepted only by a few members acting on their own. It would have been well, Staunton commented tartly, if the parties who sent in the games had made this clear.
This was not, however, the end of the matter. A few days later Norman Fedden of Cardiff wrote to express extreme scepticism as to the Bristol claim that its representatives had been novice players acting without official approval. The two leading members of the Bristol Club, Kennedy and Thompson, had indeed 'stood aloof from the contest'. But other facts pointed toward a clear involvement of the club 'in its corporate capacity'. First, at the outset a notice had been posted in the Bristol clubrooms inviting members who wished to participate to notify the club secretary. Second, all the correspondence relating to the match had been carried on by this same official. Third, and perhaps most damning to the Bristol case, the games 'were recorded every other day in the Bristol daily paper as "between Bristol and Cardiff".' Fedden's trenchantly expressed view, in short, was that Bristol had been happy to regard the match as one in which the fortunes of the club itself were involved 'until they found they were losing'.
That, alas, was the end of the matter, at least as far as the Illustrated London News was concerned. It would be nice to know exactly where the balance of truth lay, but perhaps we are unlikely to learn this now. As an ironic footnote, however, we should perhaps record that Norman Fedden, the irascible Cardiff spokesman, moved to Bristol in 1880 and in the following year was elected a vice-president of the Bristol Club.