Page 15 - ISQ UK_October 2017

JANUARY 2022

All Quiet on the Eastern Front

Jeremy Batstone-Carr, European Strategy Team, Raymond James

Late one night, around twenty-five years ago, a train pulled favoured, was just such an avenue. Getting the 24-match series
out of London’s Waterloo Station. To the casual bystander, if on had proved complex from the outset. The then US President,
any were around at that time, they would have seen empty Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Dr Henry Kissinger, had
personally interceded to remind Fischer of his patriotic duty, but
coaches save for two people, sat opposite from each other what finally brought the latter to Iceland was a doubling in the
but heads bowed conspiratorially together. One, the elder, prize money, put up by Slater himself.
was Jim Slater, financial tycoon and City grandee, the other, What followed had the world in its spell. It is said that 18 of every
younger, was this writer. We both had been attending a City 21 bars in Manhattan switched TV channels from the New York
conference, Slater as the keynote speaker, I a mere dele- Mets’ baseball and the Democratic National Convention, to events
gate. Slater was in an ebullient mood, the conference had unfolding in Iceland.
gone well and he was keen to expand. This writer had
another subject for discussion.
“In the UK, chess was the first item on the
It is high summer, 1972. Barely out of short trousers, the writer national news and, temporarily, the dartboard
and his fellow school friends were transfixed by events unfolding was swapped for the chessboard as matches…”
in Reykjavik, Iceland, the location of the battle for the World Chess
Championship. Pitted against each other were the brilliant, like-
able and gentlemanly Boris Spassky and on the other side of the In the UK, chess was the first item on the national news and,
board and representing the United States, the maverick, misan- temporarily, the dartboard was swapped for the chessboard as
thropic genius that was Bobby Fischer. The Cold War’s nuclear matches were followed and played out move by move. Game six is
threat had, for the time being, subsided and the United States still said to this day to be a thing of beauty, as close to perfection
had, not long before, put a man on the moon. as a Mozart symphony. At the end, a game won by Fischer, even
his opponent stood up to applaud him. Game ten proved that
The Soviet Union was keen to explore other routes by which to Spassky was not there simply to make up the numbers. His victory
attempt to assert its intellectual superiority and chess, much had the audience chanting his name to the rafters.

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