They never are chess. Chess with no clothes on! Chess in their birthday suits! That kind of chess. Chess men!

 One thing I do spend quite a lot of time doing on the internet is playing chess. I discovered chess.com last year, and play five- and ten-minute games when I have a spare moment. I aim to keep my rating over 1000 in the former and 1200 in the latter; I'm realistic about my skills as a chess player. The site provides a year-in-review summary that suggests I've fallen infuriatingly short of breaking even in games played in 2023, and I know if I try to fix it by playing a lot more games, my ratio will inevitably get worse, so perhaps I should leave it at that.

Anyway, the site is trumpeting a 2024 "daily chess championship", and I was wondering if I should enter it. Time control of "one day per move", which is apparently challenging to the players who take online chess seriously. There are prizes for best blogs and best video analyses of it, and maybe I could become some kind of chess-blogger. It would be different, anyway.

Thing is, I've never really played a proper game of chess, the kind where you think about your moves for a long period of time. Even the ten-minute games on chess.com seem very relaxed to me, even accounting for my brain slowing down in my old age. At school, Noddy and I would find a quiet corner on a twenty-minute break and play about twenty games, all while having an extensive and enlightening conversation about comics or TV or how great we are in general, or singing extremely cool songs.

This kind of tournament doesn't sound like all that much fun - "Opening databases and opening books are permitted in Daily Chess, but the use of engines and tablebases is never permitted," says the rules. I only really play one opening; I'd get lost if I was keeping track of some other standard opening, even before we get to the point where the players are supposed to be using their own brains. I'd turn to the wrong page of the opening book and do something ridiculous with my queen.

But on the other hand, I do play othello on eothello.com all the time nowadays, and you get a long time to play your moves there. And apparently lots of people sign up for and drop out of these big tournaments on chess.com, so maybe I'll win the entire championship by default. Or else my opponents will be caught cheating - three times on chess.com I've had a message saying some dastardly opponent was using unfair means to beat me, and I got my rating bumped up by a few points. I don't know how they catch cheaters - are they watching me right now?

A ten-pound-fifty pig

 Among the Christmas presents I got from my generous brother this year was the Dennis the Menace Book 1976!

We used to have this book, long ago, second-hand (it came out about a year before I was born; British annuals are always released the autumn before the year on the cover) and it always felt a bit strange to anyone used to Dennis as he looked in the 1980s. 

Even back in 1975, it must have seemed a bit off to new readers - at that time, Dennis had been the full-colour cover feature of the Beano since September 1974 (shunting Biffo the Bear to the back pages) and had probably attracted a new audience keen to see a book full of Dennis and Gnasher to supplement their weekly dose!

But inside the full-colour hardback book with the modern-looking Dennis on the cover, readers could only find Gnasher in the various text stories, pin-ups and other features. All the comic strip adventures were reprints from old Beanos of the days before Gnasher's 1968 introduction, when Dennis was in duotone red-black-and-white single-page strips, and drawn rather differently from the way he appeared in the seventies.

The dialogue had to be updated here and there whenever someone mentions money - decimalisation had happened in 1971, and the young readers being given this book for Christmas were the first generation to grow up without shillings, tanners, threepenny bits and the other stock currency-phrases of comics from the old days!

This particular strip, though, causes more problems than that...

Not only does Dennis say "We don't have a dog, Dad!", the whole punchline relies on pre-decimal currency!

The speech bubble has been dutifully corrected - "two shillings" becomes "ten pence", "eight shillings" becomes "forty pence", but they can't really change "ten guineas" and have to leave it as it is. Well, grown-ups even in 1975 would still probably have said that kind of thing if it was funny, and they could always explain it to the kids, so there's no harm done.

Except to Dennis's backside, of course - this was the era when every comic story had to end with the protagonist getting a ferocious whacking, and it's always nice to see an innovative implement being used instead of the slipper for a change! That's what people really read these things for, isn't it?

What has Roger really been up to?

 Something I'm going to do if I ever have the time to devote to such a major task is compile a definitive chronology of the Johnny Ludlow stories written by Mrs Henry Wood. Originally published anonymously in Argosy magazine (which Mrs Wood edited and wrote a lot of the content of), "Johnny Ludlow's papers" are entertaining supposedly-autobiographical stories of things Johnny did in his younger days. They aren't written in chronological order, dotting about between different periods in his life at random, and he often doesn't specify when they happened, leaving the reader to make an educated guess as to whether we're reading a story about a young boy or a grown man.

Exactly when the stories take place is also vague, but we can pin them down for the most part - it's clear that Johnny is somewhat younger than Mrs Wood (some people suggested he's based on her son, but by all accounts Charles Wood was much more of a wuss than even the wimpy 'muff' Johnny Ludlow and never had an interesting adventure in his life). The key chronological marker on which the sequence of events can be hung is the fourth published story, "Watching on St. Mark's Eve", from April 1868.

A key plot point of that story is that St. Mark's Eve, April 24th, falls on Easter Monday. The only time that happened in the 19th century was 1848, so we can fix that one (in which Johnny is somewhere around sixteen years old) in the calendar and place the other stories around it. It works surprisingly well, in fact - all through the twenty years these papers were being written, the historical references all fit very neatly with the right years of the 1840s and 1850s without needing to be stretched in any kind of implausible way... except just once.

One of the last series of stories (sadly, the later ones do decline in quality a little) to appear in the Argosy is the three-part "Roger Bevere" saga (January-March 1884). With this one we return to the eventful trip to London Johnny made around the time of his twenty-first birthday, and pick up on his previous passing mentions to the black sheep of Johnny's guardian Mr Brandon's family, his nephew Roger.

Roger is a medical student in London, and London as seen through the eyes of Johnny Ludlow and Mrs Henry Wood is a terrible place for a young man to be. Temptation was everywhere. Sin was lurking around every corner. Mrs Wood was from Worcestershire, and had a deep distrust of the big city, which comes out more and more strongly in her writings as she gets older.

Johnny finally tracks down Roger in a part of London known as "the Bell-and-Clapper", named after a very noisy church of not at all the type that Johnny approves of. It's also next to an underground railway station, and its refreshment-room full of enticing bottles and staffed by women with strong-minded manners and "monstrous heads of hair". And it turns out Roger Bevere has been ensnared by the terrible attractions of this place in a way beyond Johnny's wildest fears! The respectable young man has MARRIED a loud, vulgar woman named Lizzie, whom he met when she was working at the refreshment-room bar!

But there's a problem with this, from the point of view of a chronologist. The Bell-and Clapper is fictitious, but Roger has been travelling from there to St Bartholomew's Hospital on the underground railway, and that's a real place - it's right by Farringdon station, the terminus of the first underground line... which opened in 1863.

The underground isn't even presented as a new thing in this story - it's well-established and has clearly been around for a good long while. The whole setting, in fact, doesn't feel at all like the London of the 1850s (which it should be when Johnny Ludlow is 21, unless all the other stories are wrong), but feels very like the bustling, modern London of 1884.

Lizzie is a very modern young lady. She drinks, laughs, disregards her husband's orders, makes a lot of noise and horrifies respectable people like Roger Bevere, who thoroughly regrets what he's done and desperately wants to keep it a secret from his family. A discussion between Johnny and Dr Pitt (who first appeared in the Johnny Ludlow stories as an outright villain, but subsequently turned out not to be responsible for the worst of it after all, and to have since stopped drinking and become a more decent person) digresses into great detail about how these underground railway refreshment rooms lead good young men into the devil's clutches and are responsible for corrupting good young women too.

I feel I should point out that this extensive moralising is balanced by a lot of wonderful humour, creativity and even occasional radical tendencies in Mrs Henry Wood's writings - please don't be put off trying them by reading a passage like this one!

And perhaps this is the reason for the chronological confusion. I think Johnny is editorialising - he's unhappy with the modern profusion of drinking places and loose women, and is taking this story as an opportunity to write about their evils at length! It also allows him to justify Roger Bevere's terrible marriage, giving his sort-of-relative an excuse that perhaps he didn't have in reality!

Because there's something else strange about this marriage. The reason for a marriage between someone like Roger and a woman in Lizzie's station of life was usually a baby, let's be honest here. But there's no mention of that (apart from a couple of coy hints from narrator Johnny that sometimes something else might happen in this kind of morally deficient place). Roger and Lizzie have been married for some eighteen months when Johnny catches up with him, but they seem to be sleeping in separate rooms and to all appearances have always done so.

 There's surely something Johnny is too discreet to tell us here (not that illegitimate births are unheard-of in Johnny Ludlow's papers, even in decent rural Worcestershire, but remember that Roger is Mr Brandon's nephew!). I think poor Roger Bevere was a worse man than Johnny wants to admit. He fell into bad ways before there was a supply of alcohol and attractive women at every underground station, got some loose woman in a scrape, got married and had to keep it a secret.

If we look at how the situation resolves itself, we can see where Johnny's sympathies lie. Two and a half years later, Johnny and Mr Brandon go for Christmas to Roger's mother (and Mr Brandon's sister) Lady Bevere and the rest of the family. Roger is more miserable than ever, still keeping his marriage a secret, and living apart from Lizzie, who's not been a day sober for the last two years. It emerges, funnily enough, that Lizzie is the sister of one of Lady Bevere's servants, unknown to any of them (Lizzie is under the impression that her surname is written as it's pronounced, 'Bevary', and has only seen 'Bevere' written down in a letter from her sister and thought it a different name entirely, pronounced 'Beveer') and Lizzie has come down to Essex to see her, not knowing that Roger is there.

Everything is sure to come out, and Roger and Johnny are waiting in terror for her to arrive and make the situation known. The suspense nearly kills Roger, but it turns into a happy ending after all - Lizzie gets lost walking in the snow, with a bottle of brandy, and dies in a ditch. Roger never has to tell anyone his dark secret, and can now "pull up" from his bad ways and become a decent member of society again. He does have the decency to secretly pay for Lizzie's burial expenses, at least. The ending sums up the relief the reader is expected to feel for the poor man:

I think a modern reader is less touched by Roger's narrow escape from the horrors of 'exposure' and more inclined to wonder just how dark the skeleton in Mr Brandon's closet really was. Merry Christmas to one and all!

I always end up playing a shepherd

I'm always pleased to see in my Blogger stats that someone has been looking at my analysis of how frequently characters appear in the Peanuts comic strip. You can check them out here if you're the kind of super-cool person who finds them interesting!

1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s

But let's talk about just one character today - the forgotten one who was there from the start but faded away long before the end. I'm talking, of course, about Shermy!

Shermy is one of the three characters who appear in the very first Peanuts strip. Indeed, he's the one who delivers all the dialogue!

It takes him a while to get a name, unlike Charlie Brown (who, like a lot of the earliest strips, is an echo of Charles Schulz's previous comic "Li'l Folks"), but Shermy is a central character for the first few months. Snoopy is just a dog who shows up now and then; back in October 1950 there's a series of strips that seem to suggest he belongs to Shermy.

But as the series develops, Charlie Brown becomes the central focus and Shermy starts to be seen less and less. New and more interesting characters appear - first Schroeder and then Linus make their debuts as babies but soon come to take over Shermy's role as a sidekick and straight man to Charlie Brown, Snoopy or the new big star Lucy. By the end of the fifties, we're really not seeing much of Shermy at all.

1960 might be Shermy's last year as any kind of regular presence in Peanuts - he appears in twelve strips that year - so let's start this story with 1961 and follow Peanuts through the rest of the decade. It's an important decade, because as well as the newspaper comics we got the debut of the animated cartoon specials! There were also comic books featuring original stories (as far as I can tell, poor Shermy never showed up in them) and other merchandise too - Peanuts was big business in the sixties! Except perhaps for the original star...

Here is what we see of Shermy in the sixties!

 

1 January 1961

We start the new year by showing Shermy as one of 'the boys' - note the gradation of heights running from Shermy the tallest down to Linus the shortest, although Schroeder has by this point almost completely caught up with Charlie Brown. It's become very rare to see Shermy just hanging out with the others like this; he's only there when a strip needs a comically large number of people to be taught a lesson all at once.

11 April 1961

Shermy's next appearance, three and a half months later, shows him in the role he'll be most often seen in here - as one of Charlie Brown's spectacularly unsuccessful baseball team.

The team consists of the nine regular characters in Peanuts at the time it was introduced - Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Schroeder, Lucy, Linus, Shermy, Patty, Violet and Pig-Pen. We don't often see the full team gathered together. Sally made her debut in 1959 but doesn't ever join her big brother's team, and by April 1961 the strip had gained an eleventh character, Frieda, who was also seen on the baseball team at times, but Shermy remains a usually-unseen presence at first base.

It's become the only thing he really does in Peanuts - Schroeder has baseball and piano and Lucy jokes, Patty and Violet get to bully Charlie Brown outside baseball stories, but Shermy's only real purpose now is to make up the numbers on the baseball team. He does usually tend to be presented as a competent player, at least!

18 June 1961

Just a glimpse of the back of Shermy's head in the final panel.

23 July 1961

Sunday strips in newspapers had to be drawn in a strict format, so that they could be presented in one of three layouts, depending how much space the paper wanted to allocate to it. The above is the 'full' version, but it was also possible to omit the second panel and restructure it like this.

Or alternatively, the paper could also drop the title panel, and just show the three shorter rows. So each Sunday strip had to be written in such a way that the title panel was unnecessary, and the second panel was super-unnecessary to the overall story, because a lot of readers wouldn't get to see them.

Shermy is becoming the kind of character who appears in the first two panels a lot.

10 December 1961

Shermy again only features in the disposable first two panels, before Linus comes in and reiterates the opening line for the benefit of the newspapers that give Peanuts less space.

13 December 1961

This is an interesting one - Shermy shows some personality! In the service of one of Schulz's clever and subtle jabs at religion, our hero displays a materialistic streak that fits in with a recurring theme in the mid-1950s of Charlie Brown sighing despondently at Shermy having a much bigger train set than him, and similar. It's interesting that Shermy gets to feature in this one - it's more of a Linus thing to be overthinking Santa Claus, but this attitude is probably just too greedy to suit Linus. In later years it would suit Peppermint Patty, but she hadn't been invented yet, so Shermy gets the starring role for once!

1 April 1962

Into 1962 now, and Shermy has one panel caught up in the mob psychology and yelling at Charlie Brown. Which isn't really like him, but... well, Charlie Brown really is a blockhead, isn't he?

3 August 1962

Four months later, and this is more like the Shermy we love. A series of daily strips in which the entire baseball team quit, and Shermy is very polite about it. Okay, he doesn't entirely appreciate Charlie Brown's good points as a manager, but he's older than CB, a good player, it's nice of him to stay on a team like this one!

21 September 1962

And suddenly, in September, another Shermy strip! He gets all the dialogue, he even gets to lean on the brick wall, and Charlie Brown is just the silent stooge! This strip was published on a Friday, incidentally, so it makes sense.

Shermy is the only character whose hairstyle officially changes in the course of the Peanuts series - he gets his trademark crewcut in April 1953 and kept it forever after, but he obviously still cares about his hair now! 

14 February 1963

We don't see Shermy again until Valentine's Day 1963, but the day clearly goes better for him than it always does for poor old Charlie Brown.

25 March 1963

The baseball season of 1963 gives Shermy a few moments in the spotlight - first he joins in with the rest of the team as they share a hopeful outlook...

29 March 1963

And then a few days later, he stands in the background of one more panel...

4 April 1963

And then he gets to show off some not particularly impressive skills. But at least he's showing his face in the comic regularly for a change!

5 August 1963

Four months later, Charlie Brown's team are looking almost like they might win something for the first time ever... but Charlie Brown still manages to mess it up. Shermy's on hand two days in a row to watch in horror!

6 August 1963

Really, that unseen umpire is being very harsh here. Even if Charlie Brown is doing the same stupid thing twice in a row, give the poor kid a break, can't you?

1 March 1964

We don't see Shermy again until March the next year, and a 'movie line' Sunday strip. These became a regular thing in Peanuts, and are always a good opportunity to see a few seldom-seen characters. Shermy's at the back of the queue, but at least he's still here!

24 March 1964

And then it's baseball season again, and once more Shermy can't resist joining in when everyone's abusing their unfortunate manager...

7 April 1964

A couple of weeks later, Charlie Brown's arm must be fully recovered, and it's another entire-cast comic (except, bizarrely, Linus).

This turns out to be the last we see of Shermy for a whole year.

18 April 1965

It's baseball season again in 1965, and the whole team are there. Except, once again, Linus! I'm starting to think he and Shermy just don't get along. Although this time, Snoopy is absent too, and 5 and Frieda seem to be on the team today. Sally presumably isn't one of the team, but has just joined the discussion, as is her usual habit.

Patty's point about movie ads and general morality is interesting, because at this time Schulz and others must have been working on "A Charlie Brown Christmas", the first animated TV special. It's been widely praised for its moral themes, although a lot of modern commentators don't know about the integrated commercials for Coca-Cola that were originally a part of the cartoon. You could have a whole baseball game's worth of discussion about the whole thing!

27 November 1965

Seven months later, we get another brief glimpse of Shermy in another movie line. He hasn't said a word for a year and a half now. But we're about to hear him and see him move for the first time!

4 December 1965

If you bought TV Guide, you could see this trailer for the new cartoon special! Is Shermy one of the kids singing "Jingle Those Crazy Bells"? The girls seem to be Frieda, Patty and Sally, but it does look like it could be Shermy in there too. And he's coming to our TV screens now!

9 December 1965

"A Charlie Brown Christmas" made its debut on television on this date, and Shermy is visible right from the start, skating with the others in a yellow coat. He doesn't get involved in much of the story, but he shows up here and there. Most famously, he does his Frankenstein dance when everybody's ignoring director Charlie Brown at the Christmas play rehearsals!

And then Lucy tells him what he's going to be in the play...

Shermy turns to the camera and delivers his only line, a famous quote for the perpetually overlooked - "Every Christmas it's the same. I always end up playing a shepherd."

After that, he's nothing but a background presence. In the final scene around the Christmas tree he's either drawn badly or mistakenly drawn as 5 (who's on the other side of the group). But still, it's a memorable performance!

22 March 1966

Into 1966, and Shermy's never going to understand Charlie Brown's love life.

27 March 1966

And nor is he likely to understand Charlie Brown's motivational speeches, but he's still there with the rest of the baseball team.

8 May 1966

More baseball for Mother's Day, and Shermy laments "We're no good!" among the general lamentation. Which sets us up nicely for another animated special!

8 June 1966

"Charlie Brown's All Stars", the second TV special, appeared on the airwaves. Shermy (just about visible in the back of the opening scene here) is seen on the team in scenes repeating the gags from a lot of baseball episodes on the newspaper strip.

 He joins in the group shoutings of 'you blockhead!', and delivers his line from the 3 August 1962 strip above when the team all quit.

Perhaps his coolest moment is in the skateboarding scene, when he's the first to skate through the girls' skipping. But he largely disappears from the second half of the story.

27 October 1966

"It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" was on TV for Halloween. Shermy doesn't seem to be in it, but a lot of online sources say he's there, crediting the same actor who played Schroeder with doing his voice, so maybe I'm just missing something. He might well be one of the ghosts in the trick-or-treat sequence...

He's certainly absent from the next two specials, "You're In Love" and "He's Your Dog". Shermy's cartoon career seems to be as short-lived as his time in the comics.

7 November 1966

He gets a bit of a run in the newspapers in November 1966, though - first in this one, which incidentally proves that Charlie Brown does know the little red-haired girl's name (unless even the school address her as such).

12 November 1966

And now he's defending Charlie Brown against Violet's gossip!

14 November 1966

And with good cause - Charlie Brown's got a promotion! But Shermy doesn't feature in the rest of this storyline.

13 February 1967

Into 1967, and Shermy's excited by the big arm-wrestling contest between Snoopy and Lucy!

23 April 1967

Another movie line, this time crossing over with the World War I Flying Ace. It might be the first time Shermy meets Roy (the one with the hat), if they sit close to each other in the cinema.

12 June 1967

"You're In Love, Charlie Brown" includes someone who's probably meant to be Shermy, running around with the rest of the regular cast. Or it might be 5. Anyway, he doesn't speak or do anything else.

17 September 1967

They're not much of a baseball team, but when it comes to critical analysis of the Book of Job, they win every time. Shermy, though, just stands silently and listens to Linus, looking as blank as Snoopy.

Now, as you can see, Shermy hasn't actually disappeared completely from the newspaper comics. But someone at Mad Magazine seems to have got the idea that he's gone, and used him as the lead character in their "March 1968" dated issue, which apparently went on sale a bit earlier than that...

26 December 1967

Now this is a bit different, but at least Shermy is being remembered! It doesn't prompt Charles Schulz to feature him more, but we still have half a dozen more appearances in the newspapers to come in 1968 and 1969...

1 February 1968

Back in his role of one of the boys to be sent flying by Lucy!

5 March 1968

And back to standing in the background of baseball-themed comics!

30 June 1968

He even gets a line in the latest pitcher's mound debate!

10 August 1968

It's a long time since Shermy and Snoopy were seen hanging out together, but Shermy still comes to his birthday party!

25 March 1969

You can learn a lot about baseball history from reading Peanuts. It was felt in the fifties that the game was too dominated by pitchers, and measures were taken which included lowering the height of the pitcher's mound. This caused a lot of laughter from Charlie Brown's team in previous strips, but Shermy seems less derisive about it here in his penultimate newspaper appearance.

15 June 1969

And this is Shermy's final word in the comics. "Really?" in the disposable second panel of a Sunday strip. After this, it's oblivion, I'm afraid. Someone who's probably supposed to be Shermy shows up in a movie line in 1975, and he's mentioned by name (but not seen) in a baseball strip as late as 1977. But he's no longer even a background character after this typically small appearance.

Shermy is gone from the newspapers, and the cartoons are soon to follow suit. But there's one surprising last hurrah for our hero!

27 September 1969

"It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown" is the last animated Peanuts of the sixties. Shermy had been entirely absent from the previous TV special, "He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown", but he makes up for it in a big way here! Maybe it's being trapped in summer camp, but he gets a very prominent role as one of the boys, all the way through.

Probably his best moment is scaring Linus twice in swift succession. "Hey! There's a spider on that log! ... I'm sorry, I was wrong. It was just a piece of bark."

Shermy is treated as a central character throughout the cartoon - maybe not quite as prominent as Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy and Linus, but getting there. He never attains that level again, though he continues to be drawn into the background of the cartoons of the seventies. This would be a good point to end this essay, but for the sake of completeness...

4 December 1969

To finish the decade, Shermy does show up briefly in the theatrical movie "A Boy Named Charlie Brown". But he doesn't speak, and doesn't even get together with the gang to watch the spelling bee at the end, which is a shame.

Here's to the eternally unimportant Shermy! The world needs someone to play the shepherd!