80th Anniversary of Celebration Match

1946 – 2026

See our Feature on the move to Wanstead House.

Here’s the original 1946 match:

We have now located the match details of the original Celebration Match of 2 October 1946, for the Club’s move to Wanstead House. (See in the heading “Wanstead Hall”? This is either a typo, or at this early stage, the idea is to rename “West Ham Hall” to “Wanstead Hall” only for this to be further modified to “Wanstead House”.)

This match, apparently, was not without its difficulties as one of the original Wanstead team players, A.W. Daniel, was not able to attend, so what was to have been a 13 board match, turned into a 12 board affair only by dint of Roy Wagstaff standing down and a couple of re-pairings: Knifton moved from Board 6 to Board 3 and Grenfell switched sides to play on Board 6 for Wanstead, leaving Board 5 void. Wanstead had White on odd numbered boards. Over 13 Boards Wanstead would have had the extra White; by leaving Board 5 void, the colours were equalised and the players retained their original colours.

We know that Board 5 was Void because, had Boards 6-13 moved up a board to close the gap, then on Board 7, John Hunnable, would have been playing White. As it is, the photographic evidence shows that he is playing Black and is therefore still on Board 8 as originally declared. There was clearly some shuffling around on re-pairing and allowing for there being not a lot of space; accordingly, the layout of the boards was no longer in a logical sequence.

Cleaned up table…

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80th Anniversary of the 1946 Celebration Match

Friday, 2 October 2026

Details of the 2026 repeat will appear here.

Link: to the Anniversary match on ECF LMS