Chess Comes to Greek Street: Carl Portman MBE at L'Escargot

On 9th September, one of Soho's most famous dining rooms turns its attention to the chessboard. L'Escargot, at 48 Greek Street, plays host to Carl Portman MBE, who arrives as guest of honour of the Howard Staunton Society to give a talk with a deliberately unshakeable title: Chess in Prisons: And Why It Matters.

For Soho's chess enthusiasts — and this is a quarter with a long devotion to the game — it is a rare chance to hear a player who has faced Karpov across the board, captained England at the NATO championships, and been crowned UK Armed Forces veteran champion. But Portman, by fierce preference an amateur and self-described "back street Brummie," has earned his MBE not for tournament glory but for more than a decade carrying chess into some of the least visited rooms in the country: the nation's prison cells.

That is why the evening reaches well beyond the chess set. It asks something of the general public too — about rehabilitation, second chances, and what a fifteen-century-old game can still do for a person who has run out of light. As Portman puts it, the last four words of his title are aimed squarely at the sceptic.

"The sceptic is the general public," he says, "but it isn't entirely their fault." Most people, he argues, only ever hear about prisons when something goes wrong — escapes, assaults, overcrowding — and never the good-news stories behind the walls. "It matters because rehabilitation matters. There is a personal cost and a financial one. The public is paying up to £60k a year to keep someone in prison." And then the line that has become something of a signature: "If we don't reach out across the dark waves, people will continue to drown."

His conviction is rooted in his own story — a Birmingham council estate, no father, no mentor, and a schoolteacher who, when Portman was twelve, showed him how the pieces moved and gave a dark room a light. Since 2014 he has watched the same thing happen for others. One prisoner wrote that chess "probably kept me from suicide"; another taught his son to play down the phone from his cell. "We have an ancient game being played in a contemporary setting and still weaving its magic," he says.

There are triumphs, too. In 2022 he helped take a squad from HMP Hewell into the World online prison championship in a matter of weeks — and they drew with Germany. "It showed that preparation with hard work can bring results," he reflects. "That chess is a meritocracy — that results through honest work bring reward, in that feeling of self-worth, of belonging."

For anyone weighing whether the subject is "for them," Portman is direct about what the night offers. "The takeaway from the night is the power and beauty of chess as not just art, science and sport, but as a seed for new and stable communities, as a tool for personal growth, and as something that reveals and challenges your character."

It is, in the end, an invitation to see the game whole — from the grand master's board to the cell in which a man named Ted plays out his sentence. Portman ends where the game's own motto does: Gens una sumus. We are one people.

For Soho — a place that has always made room for the outsider and the seeker — it is exactly the kind of evening the neighbourhood does best.

Carl Portman MBE speaks on Chess in Prisons: And Why It Matters for the Howard Staunton Society at L'Escargot, 48 Greek Street, Soho, at 6pm on 9th September. He will bring and sign copies of his book, Chess Behind Bars. Tickets and full details at stauntonsociety.com/events, or here: https://owlsy.org/d10YgD