City of London Chess Club Championship
The City of London Chess club Championships were the pinnacle of competitive play until the Second World War. The game below was played by two of the luminaries of chess in their day and both also members of Kingston Chess Club: R P Michell (1873-1938) and J H Blake (1859-1951). Blake, a resident of Tolworth was still playing board one for Kingston in his nineties. He was an outstanding national player, being a former British Champion and the Games Editor of the British Chess Magazine. Reginald Price Michell was a civil servant in the Admiralty and, although chess took second place to his work, like Blake he played for the British team against the Americans in the transatlantic cable matches. He was also a stalwart of West London chess club where he was president.
There is a story in Chess Notes from G H Diggle on the anniversary of R P Michell in 1988. 
About 1926 Michell defeated the writer, then on holiday in town, in an offhand game. William Winter, whom I had met at the Gambit Café and who (though rather intolerant of “duffers”, as he called them) had a kindly streak where youthful players were concerned, asked me if I would like to see the famous City of London Club, where he was just going. I was in the Seventh Heaven when he took me round, and introduced me to the “Hon. Sec.” – the venerable J.H. Blake, who promptly enrolled me as a Country Member (one guinea a year) and procured me a game with none other than R.P.M., who happened to be on the premises and disengaged. So I faced the bespectacled veteran and his slightly “walrus” moustache. Neither on our introduction nor throughout the game did his manner give the slightest indication that he was not playing another master. However, one or two portly “lounge lizards”, eager to witness the “brutal baptism” of some incongruous youth who had somehow penetrated their precincts, gathered round, their very waistcoats saturated with sadistic expectation. Michell soon got an overwhelming attack on the king’s side, whereupon one “sarcastic old beast” observed: “You seem to have got the gentleman somewhat tied up”. “My QRP is weak” was all the change he could get out of R.P.M.’
The game between Michell and Blake is a Ruy Lopez played in The City of London Chess Club Championship of 1920. The game was submitted by Kingston club member Mike Sheehan, an antiquarian chess book dealer, who located it in Fred Reinfeld’s 1946 book “Chess by yourself”. Presumably the game was of sufficient merit to have it annotated by a famous chess writer. Publishers are unlikely to choose such a title nowadays which perhaps explains its falling out of print.
The opening of the game is surprisingly modern. The open variation of the Ruy Lopez has tested players from Lasker and Tarrasch at the beginning of the 20th Century to Michael Adams and Magnus Carlsen at the beginning of the 21st Century. Blake was tactically alert and took advantage of Michell’s inaccuracies to build up a focused attack culminating in an elegant mating pattern.
Ruy Lopez, Open
ECO C83
