Horace Cheshire
Winner of the club championship in 1883, 1887, 1890 and 1894.
(The information below was supplied by Brian Denman)
Horace Fabian Cheshire was born in the September quarter of 1854 in London. In 1881 he became Borough Analyst for Hastings.
Cheshire won the first club championship in 1882 and wrote the column in the Hastings and St Leonards Chronicle from 1882-83 (cf. yesterday’s e-mail). He participated in the first Sussex Championship and reached the finals which were held in Brighton in February 1883. In the first few years of the Hastings CC he was probably not quite the equal in standard of a small number of Brighton players and George Downer of Chichester, but, as the club expanded, he gained practice against some very strong opposition and raised his game. He won the county championship in 1896 and 1903. For most of his chess career he was as good as anyone at the Hastings CC. It would appear that he did not always enter the club championship – otherwise he may have won the title more times. He was probably a stronger player than H E Dobell and F W Womersley and he was at least a match for Dr J E Manlove who was a club member in the early years of the 20th century. As he became elderly Cheshire was still as good as anyone at the club until perhaps the very end of his chess career. George Norman who came to Hastings in about 1919 was probably a stronger player than Horace. Cheshire did not have a particularly aggressive style, though he played solidly. In end games he was considered to be an expert. In 1911 he wrote a book on ‘Goh or Wei Chi’, a type of chess game but with different rules. He may have formed a club in Hastings for players competing in this chess variant. He probably had a number of different interests and in 1903 we find him receiving a presentation for his service to the Hastings and St Leonards Natural History Society. At the 1904 AGM he was presented with the Chapman Cup after winning it on three consecutive occasions. It appears that Horace Chapman presented another trophy for the competition. Cheshire’s death came on 8th November 1922 at Hastings. He was 68 years of age.