AFTER TWENTY-TWO YEARS.

Evening Star, Issue 22913, 22 March 1938, Page 14

AFTER TWENTY-TWO YEARS.

A MEMORY OF JUTLAND A 23-year-old girl arrived in London from Hull last month and finished a game of chess begun 22 years ago by two naval officers. One was her father. He went down with the battle cruiser Queen Mary at the Battle of Jutland. The girl is Miss Eileen M'Namee. Her father, Lieutenant George M'Namee, was a naval schoolmaster, and with Lieutenant-commander James George Rogers, now retired, agreed in November, 1915, to play a game of chess by correspondence. They started two games simultaneously, informing each other by letters and diagrams, which they posted when they reached port. Lieutenant M'Namee won the first game in May, 1916. The second opened with an Evans gambit, and went on until the afternoon of May 31, 1916. Lieutenant M'Namee then had to make his twenty-seventh move. The Battle of Jutland opened on May 31, and the Queen Mary sank with 57 officers and over 1,200 men. Commander Rogers kept the chess board exactly as it was as a shrine to the memory of a man he never saw. Recently he asked Miss M'Namee, the only daughter of his unseen opponent, to finish the game at his home, Heathfield Gardens, Chiswick.

Miss M'Namee ended the game and won it in a single move, which forced her father’s old opponent to retire. “ I have known how the game stood for years,” she said, “ and have long planned the move which succeeded so well to-night.” Commander Rogers said : “ Now both games are ended at last after 22 years. Eileen made the very move I had feared her father would make, and it left me helpless.”-