Dissertation Arcana #1,871: Believe It or Not, This Post Ends Bloody and Toothless

My researches have led me to a particular chess game, played by two upper-class gentlemen for the highest of stakes: the rights to a particular rail line.  One of the gentlemen, let us call him Mr. X., has his savings invested in in that line; the other, Mr. Robber Baron, has diverted all commercial traffic from that line in order to depress its value, so that he might sweep in, purchase all its stock, then reroute all commercial traffic back to it.  Mr. R.B. is not what your mother calls "a nice man."  Mr. X. pays him a visit and vicious battles of wits transpire until, eventually, both men stare at each other from opposite sides of a chessboard.

According to Mr. X., Mr. R.B. opens with "The Catapult Gambit."  I'm a fairly accomplished chess player—accomplished enough to be familiar with most (if not all) of the common openings—but I had never heard of this "Catapult Gambit."  I consulted my chess library.  Nothing.  I consulted other people's chess libraries.  Nothing.  I finally found one obscure reference to it in a chess history.  It mentioned it by name, but said that it belonged to a variation of chess called "Stanley Chess." 

The hunt, it was on.

A few hours of archival work later, I possessed the oddest of dissertation detritus; odd not because it won't be useful, but because it will.  (Such tangents typically lead to lands tangential, the exploration of which is fatal to Normative Time.)  Here is what I found:

Once upon a time there was an English family of "Ferrers."  A war happened, and either because of or in spite of it, these "Ferrers" were awarded the Earldom of Derby and the courtesy title of "Stanley."  Now wealthy and bored, these Stanleys started playing chess.  Sadly, conventional chess failed to excite them, so they accessorized.  Catapults being very fashionable in Fall 1254—everyone who was anyone had at least one Plague-Ridden Cow Corpse and Flaming Wicker Ball that year—the Stanleys decided chess needed one too. 

"The Catapult Gambit" was born.  But the Ferrers Stanleys could not allow the common folk to acquire a device powerful enough to launch small objects entire feet, so they hid it.  "Stanley Chess," as it was called, became the hobby of the gentlemen who played their chess in secret gentlemen's clubs.  They held secret tournaments in England for hundreds of years.  Eventually, one of them ventured to the New World, founded his own secret societies, and taught its members how to play Stanley Chess.  They too held tournaments, local and national, the winner of which took home an ornate trophy which had been in the Stanley family for hundreds of years.

In 1892, one member of the Stanley clan, Frederick Stanley—possibly upset by the prominence of his cousin, Charles Henry Stanley, author of the first weekly chess column in America—decided that his family heirloom would no longer be awarded to the premier secret chess player in North America.  So in 1892, he decided to replace brain with brawn, donating his family's treasured Stanley Cup to an amateur hockey league in Canada.

And now, you know, the rest, of the story ...

... only not really, as I left out all the information about how this fits into the dissertation chapter I currently slave on.  (You are welcome to guess how it does, but I warn you: it has nothing to do with the popularity of chess in C19^th America; debates about the moral qualities chess created or corrupted; or the development of intellectual abilities which may or may not have been transmissible to one's children.)

Comments

[Bryan]

I think this might be one of my favorite posts ever.

[Michael Bérubé]

This was great, but I didn't get the "replace brain with brawn" part.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Bryan, thanks. I aim to please.

Michael, that's what us fake historians* call "an enabling fiction."

* Deliberately ambiguous.

[Adam Kotsko]

This post should be nominated for those awards that Cliopatria does. (I was -- unaccountably -- among the judges last year, so I have some serious pull.)

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