In 1853 The Chess Player’s Chronicle, Howard Staunton’s magazine, published a reader’s letter about time management in chess. It said, “Juries, ere now, have convicted men and judges have hung them, to save time. Railway companies at the present day break our legs, and sometimes our necks, to save time. Our courts of law, and it is more extraordinary still, will even relax the rules of evidence to save time. Our chess-players are the only men in this busy country who disregard it and are insensible to its values.”
Convicting men and hanging them, breaking bones and necks, relaxing rules of evidence, just to save time, these are bad things and at first sight this quote might seem a tribute to the valiant chessplayers who refused to succumb to the cruel regimen of saving time. But this was the age of progress and from the rest of the letter it was clear that this reader was fed up with the slowness of many chessplayers. He wrote, “What would be thought of the combatant who took an hour to draw his sword, when his opponent’s point was at his breast?”
The letter was signed “A Barrister.” Perhaps it was written by Staunton himself, who had a habit of publishing fake reader’s letters with invented pseudonyms.
As the historian Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862), one of the strongest chessplayers in Europe, remarked: “The slowness of genius is hard to bear, but the slowness of mediocrity is intolerable.” But help was coming.
Around that time chess clocks became common and in 1899 the Dutchman Hendrik Diderik Bernhard Meijer introduced the flag, the guillotine of chess. He was probably not a strong player, as his favorite opening as Black is said to have been 1...a5, 2...b6 and 3...Ba6. But the influence of this simple player on the development of the game was immense.
Recently on the website of the Dutch club HSG (Hilversum Chess Society) there was a nice article by Wim van der Wijk devoted to the Garde clock. It was written on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
For players of my generation it was not the Trabant car, sometimes called a biscuit tin on wheels, that was the iconic industrial product of the German Democratic Republic, but the Garde clock. These clocks looked beautiful and they were solid and accurate, at least that’s what most people thought.
According to Van der Wijk the Garde clocks were introduced in top level chess at the Leipzig Olympiad of 1960 and since then they were used in practically all important tournaments and all world championship matches up till Kasparov-Short in London in 1993.
Van der Wijk relates that in the 1980s he often went to tournaments in Hungary, where he met players from the GDR who had come with suitcases filled with Garde clocks. He would buy them for a small price – small for Dutchmen, but valuable valuta for East Germans – and pass them on to his club. Every Dutch chess club and every chess friend I knew had Garde clocks at that time.
The proverbial accuracy and solidity of the Garde clocks have been questioned. In 1988, Geurt Gijssen, chief arbiter at several world championship matches, did a test and was shocked by his findings. Could he be sure that the contenders at the matches he had supervised had had equal time? Not really. Gijssen found that the difference could have been several minutes.
As to the solidity, I well remember that at my club many of these clocks had to be repaired regularly. But maybe that was because they were used in a way they were not meant to, for frantic blitz sessions. Anyway, my old Garde clock is still working fine. And it can certainly not be denied that they were more beautiful than the modern digital clocks.
I don’t want to be too sentimental, but I regret the loss of a dear experience. In the tournament hall you only heard the sound of the ticking of the clocks. From a distance you could tell by the buttons on the clock whether it was your move or not, and with a sharp ear you could even hear the falling of a flag, or so you imagined.
At the end of the last century, analog clocks were replaced by digital clocks which had all sorts of advantages. Greater accuracy. The possibility of playing with increments. And, a source of joy for the bright and fast young things, the possibility to play blitz with one minute for the whole game. The old dear Garde clock would have broken down under the strain.
At the time when that article by Van der Wijk appeared, I happened to be browsing through a long biography of the Berlin master Kurt Richter (1900-1969) by Alan McGowan (McFarland 2018). Richter, who was nicknamed the Berlin Executioner because of his ferocious attacking style, was also an icon of chess in the GDR as a wild and inventive chess player, a writer who like few others could convey the joys of chess, and a meticulous editor of several German chess magazines.
He was generally described as a mild-mannered man who tried to keep away as much as possible from politics. This seems a sensible course for a man who for the greater part of his life had to live first under the Nazi’s and then under communism. He could not prevent the names of Jewish chess players from disappearing from his books and magazines during the Nazi period. In some instances, Nimzowitsch became N and Lasker became L. Of course they were resurrected later.
In the game viewer there is an example of the Berlin Executioner’s ferociousness.