Napier William Ewart (17.01.1881 – 07.09.1952)

American player born in England. Businessman. First British Champion (1904). Moved to Portland, Maine and then in 1893-94 to Brooklyn which became a more permanent home.  As a boy, joined the Brooklyn Heights Social Chess Club.

His active chess career was quite short and can be identified as being merely a decade starting in 1895.  His first significant result was in 1897 when he won the Brooklyn Chess Club Championship which give him access to tournaments including the New York State Association Mid-Summer Tournament where at the age sixteen he beat Wilhelm Steinitz. In 1899 he traveled to Europe in order to study music, but chess remained his priority, and often he was seen at London in the Simpson’s Divan.

In 1900 back in the USA he tried to make a living from chess and journalism. As part of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, a tournament was arranged with Nelson Pillsbury, Frank Marshall and Napier participating with three other masters.  The eventual winner was Nelson Pillsbury with nine points from ten games.  Napier was third.

1902 saw Napier back in Europe and playing in the great Monte Carlo Tournament.  This was a massive twenty-round event, and Napier finished in eleventh place having won 8 games, losing 9 and drawing 8. Napier played also Hanover 1902, fifth-sixth place, Cambridge Springs 1904 twelfth-thirteenth place, London 1904 first place, Hastings 1904 first-second place winning the play-off against Richard Aitken.

He drew a match with Jacques Mieses in 1905 (+4=2-4), lost to Richard Teichmann in 1905 (+1-5=4), and beat twice Frank Marshall in 1896 (+7-1=3) and in 1905 (+3-1=1).

Napier’s name is known as being the loser in an extraordinary game with Emanuel Lasker at Cambridge Springs in 1904, a game which Napier is reputed to have claimed as the best that he ever played.