Separate London games from 1856, chiefly consultations with changing partners at St George’s Chess Club. No combined tournament winner or final annual result is established. Historical Black sometimes moved first. The native score normalizes the first mover as modern White, so printed color labels alone do not justify reversing a result.
Incomplete record. This archive holds 24 games of this event; the others are missing, and the number played is not established. An early consultation draw is reported but no score was found; the collection’s full historical total is unknown.
Twenty-four scores from London in 1856, chiefly consultation games at St George’s Chess Club. The source labels combine separate occasions and do not establish a single tournament or match.
Changing partners at St George’s
Contemporary Illustrated London News columns identify 21 of these scores as consultation games. Staunton, Löwenthal, Barnes, Owen, Cunningham and other club players changed partners from one occasion to another. The three remaining generic London records retain unconfirmed occasions.
Some original scores give Black the first move. The archive follows the native convention that the first-moving side is White. In the consultation published on 16 August, all 124 printed plies establish Barnes / Owen as the first party and Staunton / Cunningham as the second. The exact team-label correction retains the native result and every move. Other native player labels may omit consulting partners.
The surviving scores
Three alternative versions are excluded from this collection: a shorter prefix of the existing mating score, an Evans game with Kc8 instead of the original Ke8, and a Vienna game with a6 instead of the original a5. Their original archive records remain preserved. An unqueued m2 game without an established consultation occasion is also excluded.
Seven records stop before the original report says play ended. Their approved moves and results are retained without adding a continuation. The November Cunningham–Löwenthal score differs from the printed version in move order and a king move; the legal native version is preserved.
The report published on 16 February describes an earlier drawn consultation game whose score was not found in either approved archive. The later surviving March draw has different partners. No reliable total for this mixed collection, final annual table or combined winner is established. Publication dates are evidence dates, not replacement playing dates.