On this day in 1976 we played a London League Division 1 match against Cavendish, whom we have also played twice in the last few days, winning narrowly in the league and losing narrowly in the Eastman Cup.

Cavendish have an interesting history. They were formed from a chess club first known as East Ham, and then, perhaps as the result of local government reorganisation, Newham and East London. Some of their members worked for an accountancy firm, King & King, whose policy was to recruit chess players to join their London League team. At some point in the 70s they changed their name to Cavendish and moved to a central London venue.

David Edward Fault was again much in evidence, this time giving a two board simul. The Cavendish also played a reserve on B11. Defaults on individual boards seem to have been a lot more common then than now.

With two losses on the top four boards we really needed those free points to score an important victory.

You’ll have noticed that Danny Wright and Barry Green were still playing for Cavendish against Richmond 43 years after this match. In addition, Geoff Hollis, Syd Kalinsky and David Openshaw all still play for Cavendish: a pretty impressive statistic, I think. We wish them many more years of London League chess!

(And, by the by, I’d have posted this earlier, but spent a couple of hours this morning with Russell Picot, who, as you will have seen in the previous post in this series, played for Mitcham against us 43 years ago.)