The Hobart Chess Club wish to warmly congratulate their President upon his preferring resignation to perpetual check.

G D'Emden, Secretary of the Hobart Chess Club, wrote this to Andrew Inglis Clark on 22 October 1897. Clark papers, C4/C390. The occasion was Clarkís resignation, that month, from the Attorney-Generalship, and from the government of E H Braddon. Clark alleged legal impropriety by Braddon and others. Clark briefly became Leader of the Opposition, but in May 1898 accepted a judgeship on the Supreme Court.

Clark had for long been a keen chess player. The 1874 Quadrilateral, which Clark edited, contains the scores of several games played by Clark at the Hobart Working Menís Club. Mostly, he was on the losing side, which perhaps reveals something of his character.

Walch's [Tasmanian] Almanac, which appeared annually from the 1860s, listed the Hobart Chess Club annually from 1890. Clark, we learn from this source, was President of the club from 1890 to 1904. Clearly, when Clark turned his back on politics, this did not mean turning his back on exquisite combative pleasures on the sixty-four squares.

There are occasional references to chess by correspondents in the Clark papers. The many letters to Clark from J G Witton between 1882 (when Witton went to Melbourne) and 1905 imply avid interest by Clark in the chess gossip of the Melbourne Chess Club.

These chessmen (above) are an old, battered, but elegant set once the property of the Hobart Chess Club, which Richard Ely (like Clark, a member) purchased from the club a few years before it ceased to exist. It was a great pity it died. Before that it was the oldest extant chess club in Australia. (Richard Ely 2001)