Union Congress in Plymouth in 1903, he played in the third American Section, where he won but a solitary point out of seven, and that was against a Miss Hunt from North Devon, who scored a complete blank. Henry Bremridge came 1st= with 5½. Yet the fact that in the photograph below he was seated front centre hints at the esteem in which he was held by his peers.

S.C.C.U. Congress at Plymouth 1903

A group from the Southern Union Congress at Goodbody’s Café, Bedford Street, Plymouth, September 1903.

When the Devon Association was founded in October 1901, Blanshard was on the committee, and he founded the Totnes club at this time. It is not clear whether he stayed in Devon throughout the remaining 23 years of his life. He certainlyplayed postal chess for the county during this period, and as late as 1922 was paying an annual fee of 52p to be one of the Association’s 28 Vice Presidents, but was not listed among the membership of any Devon club. So perhaps he was living a distance away in his later years, but maintaining contacts.

At the DCCA’s A.G.M. in October 1924, the General Secretary, George W. Cutler, reported on the passing, that year, of a great swathe of Pioneers, including Carslake Winter-Wood and his sister, Mrs. W. J. Baird, the Secretary of the Totnes Club, the “genial and much loved J. Darley Dingle”, and followed by “Mr. C. T. Blanshard, who was playing for Devon in a correspondence match at the time of his death, and whose