Kevin Burke is a member of the St. Benildus chess club.

Frank Scott

In 1972, a new teacher in St Benildus Junior School by the name of Frank Scott came across a few loose sets in the school. Having played a bit while in the Merchant Navy, he ran a chess class on Fridays after school for a few months. The next year, he moved to the Senior school and for a while thought no more of the game. But a few of his pupils, who had moved up from the Junior School, were keen to continue playing, and in 1974/75, the school entered the Leinster Schools leagues for the first time with immediate success, winning the Minor B title. So began the club’s — and Frank’s — 40+ year involvement in the game which continues to this day.

St. Benildus schools team (L to R): unknown, Brian O'Farrell, John Healy, Paul O'Brien, Michael Dooley, Michael Banim and Frank Scott

In 1978, Frank arranged for Wolfgang Heidenfeld to give a simo at the school as part of its German night; 18 players took part, with Heidenfeld promising a signed copy of Modern Chess Miniatures, co-written by himself and Leonard Barden, to anyone who won. Five players won, including Oliver Dunne, now with Elm Mount, and presumably enough books were found to go around!

The same year, we played Marist College in the Leinster Junior final. With no clocks, the game lasted over four hours, after which, Marist’s Paddy Divilly had to drive back to Athlone with six passengers in his car. The game has changed slightly since then! Marist pipped us that time — the first in a long string of victories Paddy has recorded against St Benildus — but the following year, we did win the Leinster Juniors for the first time, and won again in 1982.

St. Benildus & Dundrum Merge

It wasn’t until 1989 that St Benildus ventured into the "evening" leagues, having reached a critical mass of former pupils still interested in the game. Our first team was Breffni Keegan, Brendan Coughlan, Ross Mayne, Vincent Tormey and Aidan Tormey, a team which was considered too strong for the BEA, the bottom league at the time. Instead, we were parachuted straight into the Ennis, which we duly won first time out.

Prior to that, Benildus players tended to join Dundrum as a senior club, so the logical step was to merge, which we did in 1991. Dundrum had been formed within a year or two of St Benildus, with Jim Prendiville the first President – this of course was around the time that the Spassky v Fischer match was stirring greater interest in the game. Dundrum had won the Armstrong in 1984/85, and in September 1985 travelled to Budapest to take on Hungarian champions MTK Budapest in the European Club Cup. MTK were quite strong — board 1 was Lajos Portisch GM, then sixth in the world and one of three GMs on the team. The 16-year-old Susan Polgar FM (then the strongest female player in the world) didn’t make the team. We played two six-board matches, picking up three draws in the first match and two in the second. The team was Eugene Curtin — who drew with Portisch — John Griffin, Kevin McHugh, David Drakeford, Brian Mac Réamoinn and Ivan Gormally. Kevin McHugh — who drew with Levente Lengyel GM, and who is still playing Armstrong for St Benildus — tells of finding better exchange rates on the back streets of Budapest than in the banks. However, on one occasion, he haggled a bit too hard — a knife was drawn and an agreeable rate was very quickly reached!

Dundrum – who had themselves merged with Sandymount in 1986 – brought a wealth of experience to the club. Harry Higgins was the driving force behind the Dundrum International Chess Congress in the 70s, which shaped tournament chess play in Ireland today, being acknowledged as an inspiration for the Kilkenny Chess Congress for one. For more on that time, see the upcoming article on the history of the Dundrum Open. Kilkenny was won in 1989 by Gerry O’Connell — previously of Sandymount — who throughout the 90s ran the Benildus Classic as a warm-up for the Irish Championships. Along with many others gained during the merger, those two are still involved with the club today.

The merger had an almost immediate effect; in 1991/92, St Benildus/Dundrum were runners-up in the National Club Championships and in 1993/94, St Benildus – the club dropped the Dundrum addendum after one season – were Armstrong champions. It’s still our only Armstrong triumph to date, though we came close again in the following seasons – third in 1994/95 and 1996/97, and second in 1997/98. In 1998, Gerry O’Connell became the first player from the club to play in the Olympiad, scoring 3½/10 in Elista. Nicky Benson followed suit in 2010, when she was selected for the Khanty-Mansiysk games, scoring 4/9.

Staying up in the Armstrong

Since the merger, St Benildus have been ever-present in the Armstrong (as indeed have Gerry O’Connell &emdash; since 1977 — and John Gibson — also since the 70s, which includes a run of 25 years without missing a game). We did come close to relegation in an amazing finish to the 2003/04 season, when we went into the final round 2½ points clear of Bray and Rathmines A and a point adrift of Dún Laoghaire. With Rathmines B long since relegated, it was between us four for the second relegation spot — and we were all playing each other on the final day. We were up against Bray, who were determined not to go down — indeed, they turned up with a 2300 and two 2100s on the top three boards, none of whom had played for the club previously that season. In the interests of balance, we should note that our board 2 hadn’t played for us all season either, though he was a club regular in previous seasons. The rule that you could only play in the last round of the leagues if you had played at least once in previous rounds was introduced as a result of this game, but back then, both teams were perfectly in accordance with league rules.

The picture below shows (1) the St. Benildus Armstrong team: Zdravko Manojlovic v Ciarán Quinn; Gerry O'Connell v David Fitzsimons; John Gibson v Matthias Rahneberg (hidden), Ciarán Ruane (standing), John Healy v Juan Manuel de Dios Ortega; Kevin Burke v Liam Porter; Eddie Gahan v Stefano Minguzzi (hidden); (2) two Heidenfeld games: Jim Murray from Lucan facing the empty chair (where Ciarán should be sitting) and Michael Hanley v Patrick Daly and also (3) Dave Willow (standing), who's playing Gerry McElligott (hidden).

Not surprisingly, we struggled, though we did get a vital walkover win on board 5 and Gerry O’Connell held a draw on board 1. However, at 4½-1½ down, with just one game in the entire Armstrong in progress, we were half a point behind both Rathmines A and Bray, and had lost to both, so only a win would keep us up. With seconds remaining on both clocks, Brendan Lyons defied a 270-point rating gap to mate Stephen Scannell, and we were safe while Rathmines A went down on tie-break. Curiously, in the 2012/13 Armstrong, a St Benildus result again saw both Rathmines A and Rathmines B relegated.

2004 Onwards

In 2004, Frank Scott retired from teaching, and the school’s conveyor belt of talent dropped off for a short time. However, in the past few years, we’ve bounced back. In 2006, we entered a Bodley team to give some of the younger players competitive chances, and in 2011, we entered a second Bodley, both with non-playing captains/coaches. Frank Scott, meanwhile, has actually become more active in recent years and, in addition to captaining six schools teams and arranging trips to the annual Millfield tournament in Somerset, also fixes weekender trips to Kilkenny, Cork and Bunratty, as well as scouting players in other schools for the club.

Success has been gradual rather than instant, but since January 2013, the club has recorded tournament wins in the Irish u-14 Championships, the Leinster u-12s Championships (two separate Benildus players in successive years), the Leinster u-14s Championships (two Benildus players sharing the title), Malahide, Gonzaga, Bunratty, Drogheda and Galway, while we’ve been runner-up in Galway, Gonzaga, Kilkenny, the Irish Intermediate Championships and the Irish u-12 Championships; nine different players in the honours all told. 2013 and 2014 saw four players named in the various Ireland training squads — Ross Beatty led the u-12s to a first ever victory in the Bernie Stokes Cup in 2013. The Frank Scott Shield — the Junior Club Championships — was instigated in 2012 and shows the strength in depth the club has; despite all the international honours in the club, the two winners so far have been 11th and 7th seeds.

But it’s not all about the Armstrong or the juniors; the club has five teams at present, and there’s been plenty of dramatic seasons. We’ve had awful seasons and great ones. The Heidenfeld of 2003/04 was one of the club’s low points — the team fell apart, and results included an 8-minus6 defeat to Celbridge (surely a league record?) and, maybe more remarkably, a 0-0 draw with Straffan when both sides forfeited. We’re jinxed when it comes to the Bodley – in 2010/11, we were the only team to drop a point to Arklow Cortex, and subsequently missed out on third (and promotion) by half a point. In the three seasons since, we’ve been one place off promotion four times, most recently despite winning all nine of our matches – there’s always been a new club far too strong for the Bodley or an amazing collapse on our part to deny us. In 2007/08, we won ten of our eleven games in the Ennis, only to finish the season third after an amazing four-way fight for the title. Wicklow denied us on the final day with a 6-0 win over Longford; we’d have been promoted had not Pat McCarrick hung a rook with minutes of the season remaining. Some revenge was had in November 2013 when that exact same Wicklow team – minus their board 5 – lost 3-2 to our Bodley A.

St. Benildus win the Killane/Ennis double in 2009/10 Ciarán Ruane, John Healy, Michael Hanley, Kevin May and Kevin Burke.

But there’s been good years too. We won the Killane three years in a row between 2008 and 2010, and finally won the Ennis in 2009/10 with 51½ points (7 clear of Balbriggan, who actually beat us in our individual match). We won the BA in 2004/05 despite losing three matches, picking up five whitewash wins, possibly a league record at the time. The 2009/10 Armstrong picked up an amazing 27 points in four successive matches – rounds 7 to 10; a league record? – to come from nowhere to storm into the title reckoning. A 6-2 win over Elm Mount was “all” we needed to seal the title for the first time since 1994/95. Alas, it was Elm Mount who won 6-2 to win the Armstrong for the first time ever. In 2011/12, we started the BA with 12 straight game wins – another league record? That team got promoted but promptly lost two players as the Ennis went up too, while a third player emigrated. With three players bumped up from the Bodley, we won only one of our opening seven matches to lie bottom, three points off safety, but then won all our last four games to more than double our points tally and end up seventh; a truly Houdini-like performance which testifies to the strength in depth in the club.

The one thing that’s sure about the next 40 years is that there’s bound to be more ups and downs to come!