They boast

I'm a member of a Facebook group called British Chess News, which by and large I recommend, albeit not everything I see there can entirely be recommended. That thought was prompted by this posting yesterday, which came as a surprise to me and not a pleasant one.

Introducing? Jon might never have heard of CCF

but a lot of other people have. Indeed we last heard from them (or rather, didn't hear from them) only a week or so ago. And although some things about CCF certainly are very unusual, some of them are not at all welcome.

But here's Scott Freeman to tell us about them.

Scott was number two to the club's chairman and centre manager for many years. So who could be better informed?

As Jon suggests:

- but not, perhaps too little.

That's too little all right. Is there anything else unusual about the club, Scott? Or about some of its members, past and present?

Now this might be a pertinent question

but to be honest it's not really the players so much as the officialdom I'm interested in. But do go on.

Indeed, it's not the behaviour of the juniors that's the problem, though I do recall some behaviour towards younger people on the premises in the past. Wasn't there a court case?

But perhaps we'll be told about that when Jon asks...

Can you, Scott? I certainly could.

Now that's what I call a summary - and one that leaves the most important bits out, notably the experience of having your leader arrested and imprisoned for the assault and abuse of women and children.

But talking of "run the show" and "owned" - why, I wonder, might CCF have a somewhat different structure to most other chess clubs? Might it be because rather than being an independent organisation, it's actually a subsidary of something else?

One last chance.

I can think of one or two things. But not these ones.

You wouldn't like to let us know that CCF is owned by a religious cult, would you Scott? Such a distinctive club and yet you leave out the single most distinctive thing about it. What a strange thing to do.

Now given the history of this religious cult, and given that Scott is a long-time member of that cult, it's not really the sort of thing that should be hidden away - particularly because it was partly because things were hidden away that Scott's old boss was able to do what he did and get away with it for as long as he did.

Scott knows that happened, and he also knows that CCF is a very unusual club indeed for reasons other than its size. And he knows that when he's boasting about "the best chess club in the country", there's some very big things indeed he needs to hide in order to make that claim.

To be fair, Jon didn't know about any of that.

But Scott did.