Jim (JJ) Walsh’s first chess column in The Irish Times appeared on July 21st, 1955.
On the front page of the newspaper there were reports that the price of a telegram was doubling and former second World War allies were bickering over the fate of a divided Germany.
As he recalls, he was in the right place at the right time. His father owned a pharmacy next door to The Irish Times, then based on D’Olier Street.
Mr Walsh learned how to play chess after convalescing in hospital when he was 12 years old. He was a student at Belvedere College in Dublin and had developed tuberculosis (TB).
He was a good player, though, by his own admission, no grandmaster, but his enthusiasm and ability impressed the features editor Jack White.
White wanted a weekly chess column to accompany the bridge column on the same page. Mr Walsh protested that he was no journalist either, but he gave it a go.
In 2016, he became the longest-running chess columnist in history surpassing the 61 years and six months by Hermann Helms of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In a more fractured media landscape, Mr Walsh’s 69 years and 10 months may never be surpassed.
Chess has given him so much, he says. He met his wife Maureen through chess and they travelled the world. She died in 2009 from Parkinson’s disease.
He went to Moscow to play chess in 1956 along with an Irish civil servant who was paranoid that he would be discovered travelling behind the Iron Curtain and lose his job.
Because so few people travelled to the Soviet Union in those days, Mr Walsh offered his reminiscences from the trip to the now defunct Sunday Dispatch newspaper in Britain. They insisted on dressing him in a heavy overcoat and fur hat for his photograph, as if it had been taken in Moscow.
Mr Walsh found himself in demand during the epic match between the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky and the United States’ Bobby Fischer in Reykjavík, Iceland in 1972. Interest in this cold war clash was unsurpassed in the history of chess.
The minutiae of every game, move-by-move, that the pair played was telexed to newsrooms around the world from Iceland and Mr Walsh was called in to interpret them.
“It was like a knitting pattern to the subeditors. They hadn’t a clue. So anyway, the chief subeditor would ring me to come in and he would send me home in a taxi around midnight.”
His weekly column morphed into a daily chess puzzle in 1972, and since then, he has been submitting one to The Irish Times, six days a week, 52 weeks of the year, 53 years and counting.
Mr Walsh surpassed 15,000 columns in 2021. As of last weekend it was puzzle number 15,896. In the beginning he would work out six weeks’ worth of chess puzzles, 36 in total, and post them to The Irish Times.
In latter years he learned to work a computer programme and would put the puzzles on a memory stick and hand them to his good friend and neighbour Colm Fitzpatrick, the former manager of The Irish Times print works. Mr Fitzpatrick emailed the puzzles to The Irish Times.
The now 93-year-old is retiring this month from his column. He would have loved to have made it to 70 years, he says.
But, it’s a good time to call it quits, Mr Walsh says, with his retirement falling in the same week as a new Pope in the Vatican and Joe Duffy retiring from RTÉ’s Liveline programme.
He gets tired very quickly now, he says, and is afraid of making mistakes.
“I gave a man my number. He used to ring me up. He would say: ‘There’s a mistake in this morning’s paper.’ I would look and tell him he put the board the wrong way around.”
Chess is a game of infinite possibilities and Mr Walsh has drawn his inspiration over the years from multiple sources. He kept notebooks of all his own chess games from 1945 to 2002, the last year he played competitively.
He has 1,000 books on chess in an upstairs room of the house, which he is sadly no longer able to access himself because of his physical fragility.
“Everything has to come to an end,” he says. “I’d rather go out on top.”
Mr Walsh’s historical chess columns will continue to feature on The Irish Times Bulletin page for the near future.
