Portable chess sets

I discovered these chess treasures at the back of a cupboard a few days ago: foldable, two-dimensional chess sets for the purpose of playing chess or analysing a chess game while on-the-go. Used to be very popular in the past before smart phones allowed for chess apps to be installed. Nowadays, these portable chess sets have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

Of the three shown in the picture, the one on the bottom right was a souvenir from the 29th Chess Olympiad in Novi Sad, Serbia, in 1990. The casing is made of leather while the pieces are pieces of small chess figurines glued onto transparent pieces of flat plastic which can be pushed, with some force, into tiny slots cut into the leather board. The one of the lower left is definitely of Soviet origin. I recognise the Cyrillic characters on the cover of the set although I'm at a loss at knowing what it says. Meanwhile, the topmost set was a souvenir from flying with Singapore Airlines a very long time ago.

A little update. A long time ago, I had also bought two Portland cardboard chess sets. One of the sets came with a single chess board while the other had two chess boards laid out side-by-side but only with one set of pieces. Maybe the other set had gone missing elsewhere, I can't quite remember.

The former was the original Portland cardboard set from England, made by Robinson & Sons Ltd of Chesterfield and sold through CHESS Sutton Coldfield. Decades later when the double chess board version came into my possession, I bought it from Ignatius Leong's chess outfit known as National Chess Enterprises. I would assume he had acquired the rights to make the Portland set in Singapore by then.

A second little update. Apparently, the Portland cardboard chess set has a bit of history. The manufacturer of the original set was this Robinson & Sons Ltd of Chesterfield in Derbyshire, England, as I had mentioned above. This was a family business, founded in 1839 by John Bradbury Robinson (1802-1869) in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. From making pill boxes, the company grew to become a major packaging and healthcare business. The packaging business, it seemed, started in 1839.

John Bradbury Robinson had two sons and it is interesting to note that one of them was named Charles Portland Robinson (1844-1916), and this is probably my a-ha moment because the cardboard chess set also spotted the Portland name. To cope with the expanding cardboard packaging business, an extension to their manufacturing plants was opened in 1920. By this time Charles Portland Robinson had already died and it could be that the Portland Works was named after him.

Victor Owen Robinson initiated the set-up of the Chesterfield Chess Club in 1924, becoming its vice-president. He was in the family business and in 1945, he became the Chairman of Robinson & Sons Ltd. And here was where Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp came into the picture. 

Duchamp was a French painter and sculptor. He was also a chess-player. During the Second World War, he escaped from France to the United States. According to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he created a leather pocket chess set in 1943 and planned to produce and market them to chess enthusiasts with the guarantee that the pieces would remain in place even though the chess set was moved about during travel. 

After the War, Duchamp's innovative idea came to the notice of Victor Owen Robinson who saw the potential of mass producing his version of the flat foldable chess set from cardboard. The Philadelphia Museum of Art suggested that the first edition of Victor Owen's cardboard chess sets appeared in 1950, but of the nomenclature, surely they must have called after the factory where they were made, the Portland Works?

Note: All these are only my interpretation and nothing is definitive. I may still be wrong in my narration and conclusion, and I welcome any new information that comes to light. 

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