MissScarlett: <Chinnery was a founding member of the world’s oldest track and field club, London Athletic Club (AC), which had been set up in 1863 and was initially called Mincing Lane AC. The following summer he was to become the first amateur athlete in the world to break 4:30 for the mile in August 1868. Chinnery was to become a wealthy stockbroker and was perhaps not atypical of the ‘gentlemen amateurs’ of the era – very different indeed to their forerunners of a couple of decades before like Gazley, who lived in comparative poverty on the Greenwich/Lewisham borders.>https://runner500.wordpress.com/tag...
Looking for evidence to confirm this Chinnery was coterminous with the <Walter Chinnery> who played Blackburne
in a blindfold simul (see the London <Daily News>, July 5th 1862, p.3), I alighted upon an election profile of the prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate for Battersea:
<The acquaintance between Mr. Chinnery and Mr. Medley began in a strange way, and originated in the fact that they were both enthusiastic chess players. With Mr. Medley’s acquirements we have no present concern, but Mr. Chinnery represented London in several chess matches. [...]
After remaining a year with Mr. Medley, Mr. Chinnery started in business for himself as a dealer on the Stock Exchange. In 1873 he entered into partnership with Mr. Medley and Mr. H. J. Chinnery, and three years later the brothers started together as Chinnery Brothers. They are the only two partners in the firm, and their business is confined exclusively to dealings in the stocks and shares of railways, and other undertakings in the United States of America. Mr. Chinnery has travelled a good deal in America, and has visited most of the principal places there, as well as in Europe. Mr. Chinnery married, in 1871, Miss Dixon, niece of Admiral Burney. That lady died in 1880, and three years later Mr. Chinnery married the second daughter of Mr. James Wilson, of Royal Exchange Buildings, and Gratwicke, Billinghurst, Sussex, a civil engineer, and a member of the Society of Civil Engineers. At the beginning of this year Mr. Chinnery bought Hatchford, the estate in Surrey on which he had resided for the previous five years. The property extends to rather more than a hundred and fifty acres, and formerly belonged to Lord Ellesmere, the present earl being still the patron of the living.>
<South London Press>, October 19th 1889, p.4.
This <Medley> was, of course: George Webb Medley
Chinnery's bid for power failed: http://electionhub.co.uk/uk/1892/co...
Kibitzing
