Alexander McDonnell

◇Belfast to Westminster

He was born in Belfast in 1798 and went into commerce. He lived for a time in the colony of Demerara (now part of Guyana). In 1824 he was secretary to a committee of the colony's inhabitants, appointed at a public meeting in George Town that February. He later became secretary to the committee that represented West India merchants in London. John Townsend's research into his will and his brother's university record, reported by Edward Winter, identifies his father as Thomas McDonnell, a merchant in Belfast.

In London he joined the Westminster Chess Club and became the strongest player in Britain, having learned much of what he knew from William Lewis, who eventually declined to play him on level terms.

◇A writer on trade and slavery

His books concerned political economy and colonial policy. In Free Trade (1826), he defended restrictions on imported corn and challenged Ricardo's account of wages and profits. In its preface he anticipated objections to his treatment of established economic writers and appealed for indulgence toward the force of his arguments.

His commercial writing also defended West Indian plantation interests and slavery. Considerations on Negro Slavery (1824), published in London, names him on its title page as secretary to the Committee of the Inhabitants of Demerara. It set out the colonists' objections to the regulations on the treatment of enslaved people that the government had put into force in Trinidad by Order in Council, and it printed in full the reports on plantation conditions that the committee had collected from managers and doctors in the colony. In Compulsory Manumission (1827), he opposed allowing enslaved people to purchase their freedom at an appraised price without their enslavers' consent. In Colonial Commerce (1828), he argued for protective duties on British West Indian sugar. He renewed his opposition to compulsory manumission in An Address to the Members of Both Houses of Parliament on the West India Question (1830).

◇1834

In My Great Predecessors, Part I, Garry Kasparov credits George Walker, another pupil of William Lewis, with organizing the six-match series. There were eighty-five games, played without clocks. La Bourdonnais took the series 45–27 with 13 draws; McDonnell won the second match 5–4, and the last was left unfinished with him ahead.

The two were opposites at the board — La Bourdonnais quick and voluble, McDonnell painfully slow, sometimes taking an hour and a half over a single move. They never spoke during play; contemporaries recorded that they had no language in common beyond the game.

An 1834 letter, reprinted in the Chess Player's Chronicle in 1846 and reproduced by Edward Winter, gives McDonnell's own view of the contest. He acknowledged his nervousness at the board, admired his opponent's strength and asked his correspondent to examine an opening position he had not had time to analyze himself.

◇The games and their influence

Kasparov admires McDonnell's combinations but also describes the risks of his aggressive openings. In his account of the famous game in which La Bourdonnais advanced three connected pawns to the seventh rank, he judges the Frenchman's positional understanding superior. The series gave later players examples to study: Kasparov singles out Anderssen's analysis of the La Bourdonnais–McDonnell games during his improvement in the 1840s.

◇Kensal Green

He died on 14 September 1835, of Bright's disease, aged thirty-seven, barely a year after the matches. He was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in London.

La Bourdonnais died five years later and was buried in the same cemetery, a short distance from his former opponent. Edward Winter reproduces an account of McDonnell's grave inscription published in the Chess Player's Chronicle in 1843, which gives his death date as 14 September 1835.