Club Champions 1882-1895
It’s not clear when the annual club competition started at Shrewsbury. Certainly, matches with other clubs were not very frequent in the earliest years of the club. There were only a few other fledgling clubs in the county and transport was limited by our standards. However, reports from the late 19th Century, do show that by that point, Shrewsbury Chess Club held an annual Winter Tournament between its members. The competition spanned the autumn and winter months of a year and concluded in the spring of the next and the result was initially used to determine who would become the president of the club for the following year.
The first player to have won what we would now call the Club Championship was Thomas Challenor Royle, who was declared the winner of the 1882 competition. Royle (1846 to 1920) was originally from Chester but moved to Shrewsbury and for over 20 years worked as a bookseller for W.H. Smith before leaving Shrewsbury for Guernsey in 1890.
In 1884, Henry Deakin was declared the winner, and therefore became president of the club for the following season. Deakin (1845 to 1928), was a local man, who for many years worked as the chief clerk at the railway station and also acted as club secretary, but after the 1880s he seems to have dropped out of the club, as he no longer figures in match or annual reports.
The Montgomery County Times, 1898 records the following match.
In 1893, George Herbert Lock (1851 to 1924) was declared the winner. For many years he was the senior mathematics master at Shrewsbury School. Lock would go on to win the title at least another four times in the early 20th century, and was a regular player for the club in its matches with other local teams. He would go on to be the club president from 1903 until 1923.
By the middle of the 1890s there appears to be a significant change. Instead of being given the role of club president for a year, from this point onwards, the Winter Tournament winners were awarded an elegant silver trophy with a shield bearing their name and the year of their victory. This was to become the club trophy that is still used today!