Amos Burn should be as well known as Garry Kasparov and Bobby Fischer, according to our bygone woodpusher correspondent Phil Ascough.

If he’d been born a footballer or rugby league player, Hull-born Amos Burn would have become a household name. Years before Hull City, Hull FC and Hull KR began competing for honours, Amos was being recognised as the second-best chess player in the world. He was 16 when, in 1865, Hull FC were formed as the oldest of the city’s sporting giants. The year is also significant as the one in which he left his home city for Liverpool, where he flourished, making the most of the opportunities at a chess club which was more developed.

“With no history of chess in his family, Amos became an elite grand master in the 1890s, second only to the World Champion,” said Graham Chesters, President of Hull & East Riding Chess Association (HERCA) “I’m surprised that the chess community in Liverpool haven’t made more of the centenary of his death.”

The hope is that Amos Burn’s story will inspire others to explore and enjoy chess, and the Association marked the centenary on 25 November 2025 by partnering with Hull City Council to erect a blue plaque in recognition of his achievements. It hangs on a wall at St Clare House, a care home in Bourne Street which now sits on the site of his family home. The script reads: “Eminent Victorian chess master, son of a Hull timber broker, he became one of the world’s leading players. He was born on this site.”

The original house stood three storeys high and had a cellar but Graham admits there is little information about Amos’s time in Hull, including how much of the property his family occupied or where he went to school. Amos Senior’s occupation indicates that their address was convenient, on the doorstep of Queen’s Dock with its yards and warehouses storing timber, slate, corn, tobacco and more. Graham said: “Amos’s older brother Richard moved to the docks in Liverpool and Amos followed as an apprentice to a firm of ship-owners and merchants. All the signs are he became very successful as a businessman and by a relatively early age – late 30s – he was independently wealthy.”

Amos ended up spending quite a lot of time in London on business and that’s where he met the then world champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, a German who coached him. Graham added: “He never became a professional chess player. He set up a business in New York – they had moved beyond timber by then and were all trading in one thing or another. After that he spent his time playing chess and being a chess journalist. That’s what he focused on.”

The archives show that Amos was regularly invited to the greatest international tournaments over two decades and achieved some outstanding results at the very highest level: equal first at London in 1887; first at Amsterdam in 1889 ahead of future world champion Emanuel Lasker; second at Breslau (1889); and first at Cologne in 1898 ahead of world champion and mentor Steinitz.

As a journalist, Amos wrote about chess for the Liverpool Courier and The Field, a prestigious monthly magazine. He became known for his sharp analysis of games and for his direct reporting of tournaments in which he himself was a participant. It was whilst preparing a column for The Field with a colleague in November 1925, that Amos suffered a stroke at his home in London. He died the following day and was buried in the Margravine Cemetery, but his grave cannot be found.

The erection of the plaque in Hull was the culmination of a mobile exhibition organised by HERCA during 2025 to share details of Amos’s family, birthplace, his life in Liverpool and his career as an amateur chess master. Over the years Hull has been prominent in the promotion and development of chess. Players from the city were involved in setting up the governing body, now the English Chess Federation, and in the 1990s Hull became a serial winner of the Yorkshire League. Graham said: “We also won it in 2024 and finished as runner-up in 2025. We are sharing the lead at the moment and have been helped by an influx of Ukrainian players who came to Hull because a well-known chess coach from their country moved here before the war.”

It’s a young team, with one player just 15, others in their early 20s and more prospects coming through. HERCA has four junior chess groups in Hull and Beverley but local schools are not as active in the game as they used to be. Graham: “There was quite lot of chess activity and some strong players in Hull in the 1860s and 70s when Amos lived here but it was at Liverpool chess club where his talent emerged. Hull has been a hotbed of chess at various times in the past and HERCA’s main aim is to show the parents of juniors that a city like Hull can produce someone who could become the second best chess player in the world. He never became a professional but he was clearly an exceptional player.

“We commemorated the centenary of his death with pride. May he inspire a new generation of chess players in the city of his birth – and beyond.”

Phil Ascough

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Stop sniggering at the back! This isn’t smut, it’s a serious piece about social hygiene by our phwoar! missus! correspondent Angus Young.

Had he still been with us, I think spending an hour or two having a natter with Cyril Bibby would have been time well spent. Educator, biologist, author, poet and an authority on limericks, he is also now regarded as one of Britain’s first sexologists.

Born in 1914, he was brought up as part of a family of eight children in Liverpool before going to Cambridge University to study natural sciences. After graduating, he taught science and biology initially at a school in his home city before moving to a new teaching job at Chesterfield Grammar School which didn’t last long.

In a 1981 interview, he explained how he ended up joining the government’s British Social Hygiene Council in 1941. “This was an interesting situation. I was without a job. In fact I had been sacked from my job in a grammar school because of my political (Socialist) and anti-war activities and I was perusing papers for any job that would bring in something to keep the wolves from the door. There wasn’t a social security system in those days.

“I saw an advertisement for an education officer with a range of attributes; knowledge of biology – there were thousands of better biologists than me able to lecture fairly well but I knew but I knew I could; able to write simply -I think I could; persona grata with trade unions and labour organisations – which I was and I just thought: ‘My God, that’s me. I didn’t think I had the slightest chance but I wrote and applied.’”

The BSHC had been founded during the First World War to educate people about venereal diseases. Soon after Bibby joined, it was amalgamated with the Central Council for Health Education but he would continue his role in promoting better understanding of the biological elements of health education. He would recall later: “One of the earliest things I did was to manoeuvre the need to get the various existing pamphlets re-written because I didn’t think they were terribly good. Then there was giving talks in schools and factories.”

The Council oversaw a rapid roll-out of sex education across the country with officers like Bibby working with a regional network of medical officers, education officials, leaders of youth organisations and major employers.

Wartime allowed him to pursue a more radical agenda towards getting messages about sex, contraception and communicable diseases across to the masses. “Nobody wanted to waste manpower then and the degree of freedom one had to draw up plans was remarkable and was exhilarating.” he said.

His personal lightbulb moment came at a meeting where he was addressing a gathering of local biology teachers. “One said: ‘Well at our school, we deal with this matter perfectly satisfactorily. We tell all our children about the sexual organs of a rabbit and the breeding and so forth and then we tell them the organs in humans are the same.’ I can recall replying: ‘Well, that’s absolutely fine if your aim is to persuade children to grow up so that they behave sexually as rabbits do with the same promiscuity and the same breeding habits.’ At that, the meeting rather quivered for a moment. I happened to hold a very high view of sex, that it was important to build into the very fabric of sex education at every stage and understanding that homo sapiens is a rather different create from a rabbit, capable of much else and that therefore attitudes and sentiments  and a feeling of responsibility and self-discipline were necessary too.”

Bibby’s message was simple: yes, sex is great when those natural urges start to kick in but it should also be a lifelong joy if you approach it right. During his work with the Council he wrote over 300 information pamphlets, delivered hundreds of lectures and even featured in regular radio broadcasts on the subject. He later wrote both academic and children’s books on sex education and the workings of the human body.

Many of these were written after he moved to Hull in 1959 (we were wondering when Hull would come into this – Ed.) to become principal of the city’s College of Education, later to become Hull College of Higher Education and now known simply as Hull College. He remained at the college until retiring in 1977.

His biography of Victorian biologist and anthropologist T.H. Huxley is still regarded as the definitive work on the English scientist who championed Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution while he revealed another personal passion in 1978 in a book called The Art of the Limerick in which he examines the history of the five-line form of poetry. As well as featuring 750 limericks penned by others, he also adds 200 of his own. Reading the book, it’s fun to imagine Bibby sitting at his college principal’s desk conjuring up limericks while at the same time, in another academic institution in Hull, Philip Larkin pondering over the next line in a new poem currently under construction.

Bibby died in 1987 but his legacy lives on in Hull in a charitable trust he bequeathed along with his late wife Frances which offers grants to elderly disabled people living in the city. 

Angus Young

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Admit it, it’s the question you’ve been asking yourself for yonks. Well now our prussian glassware correspondent Angus Young finally has the fascinating answer.

East Prussia, 1763. A group of men gather for a candle-lit dinner in a grand town house in Konigsberg, a port city on the south-east corner of the Baltic Sea. The house is almost certainly the home of Immanuel Kant. Born in Konigsberg, he’s a tutor at the city’s university and an influential philosopher who would become one of the great intellectuals in the Age of Enlightenment.

As the evening draws to a close, a single tall champagne glass is passed around the guests. It features seven names in diamond engraving and an inscription which reads: “Secrecy in love and sincerity in Friendship. All happy together notwithstanding what happen’d in the World” There’s also a date: “August of 30th 1763”.

The names are of those present, headed by Kant himself. The name below is Antony Schorn, the son of a wealthy wine merchant from the nearby town of Braunsberg. A third name – Joseph P – remains a mystery to this day, not helped by most of the engraved surname having worn away over the centuries. However, the remaining four names – Joseph Green, Robert Motherby, John Chappell and Charles Staniforth – are still perfectly legible. All four were from Hull.

Their presence – both at the dinner and on what is now known as the Kant Glass and held in a private collection – reflects the historic trading links between Hull and the Baltic port. Green was a Baltic merchant who hailed from a Hull shipping family. His brother Philip was one of Hull’s most successful late 18th century shipowners, owning the first vessel to enter the Dock (later Queen’s Dock) in 1778. However unlike Philip who lived in a huge house in George Street (the former Hull YPI building), Joseph eventually settled in Konigsberg where he continued overseeing a merchant business trading in grains, coal and herring as well as manufactured goods as well as acting as an agent for other merchants back in Hull.

As well as business, the attractions of the Baltic port city were obvious. Four times the size of Hull, it was the cosmopolitan and sophisticated capital of East Prussia, boasting a cathedral as well as a new university. Motherby was Green’s junior business partner, having arrived in Konigsberg from Hull as a teenager following in the footsteps of his elder brother who worked in the city as a physician. Their firm Green, Motherby & Co. would eventually manage Kant’s finances which included an investment in the company.

Hull-born Chappell didn’t live in Konigsberg but was a regular visitor, captaining ships operating between the two ports. Typically, West Riding cloth and Derbyshire lead was shipped from Hull while yarn, flax and hemp were common cargo on the return voyage. At the time, between 15 and 20 ships regularly sailed between the two. Staniforth completed the line-up from Hull. Another wealthy merchant, he divided his time between his home city and London and became a brother-in-law to Joseph Green.

The engraved glass and its inscription together with a repair to its slender stem continues to fascinate experts well over two centuries since it was made. It’s believed to have been made in England and specially shipped to Konigsberg for the occasion, with either by Green or Staniforth footing the bill.  The average quality of the inscription work suggests to antique glassware expert Simon Wain-Hobson that it might have even been a DIY job, He also suggests topics of conversation that night would have included the recent conclusion of The Seven Years War in Europe. The date on the glass certainly fits this theory.

“Possibly these seven men found themselves at dinner in one of their Konigsberg houses ‘all happy together’ where they exchange horror stories of close shaves, bankruptcy and ruin. No doubt they toasted their lucky escape,” he said. “Maybe a member of the party took one of the glasses and started to inscribe it. Others added their lines and names, with more or less success, depending on blood alcohol levels. Maybe the glass was broken that evening, which for some was a lucky omen – an 18th century custom. As the Kant glass was handed down directly within the  Motherby family from 1763 to 2008, Robert Motherby was probably the main culprit.”

The remaining mystery is the phrase ‘Secrecy in Love’. According to Christine Battersby, Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick, it echoes a similar line in a well-known 17th satirical poem. However, there’s also a possibility it could be a nod to the lasting friendship between Green and Kant. Neither man married and a 2001 biography of the philosopher stated “Green’s effect upon Kant cannot be overestimated”. At this distance, it’s impossible to say they were secret lovers in an age when such relationships were rarely made public but, equally, it’s a scenario that can’t be discounted.

Angus Young

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