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Biography

Vera Francevna Mencikova, was a Russian-born Czechoslovak chess player who primarily resided in England. She was the first and longest-reigning Women's World Chess Champion from 1927 to 1944, winning the championship a record eight times primarily in round-robin tournaments.

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Vera Francevna Mencikova, was a Russian-born Czechoslovak chess player who primarily resided in England. She was the first and longest-reigning Women’s World Chess Champion from 1927 to 1944, winning the championship a record eight times primarily in round-robin tournaments. Vera was also the first woman to regularly play in high-level tournaments alongside men.

She began playing chess when she was 9, and when she was 15, her family left Russia for a better life in England. She joined the Hastings Chess Club in 1923 and took private lessons from the Hungarian grandmaster Geza Maroczy. After some success in regional tournaments, she gained wider fame by winning the London Girls’ Chess Championship in 1926 and the Women’s World Chess Championship 1927.

After winning the women’s tournament in 1939, Menchik went back to England, where she was named director of the National Chess Center. It was a short-lived post; the center was destroyed in a German air raid a year later. During another German attack, on June 26, 1944, Menchik, her sister and her mother all took cover in the basement of her house, rather than use the bomb shelter in the backyard or the neighborhood shelter in an Underground tunnel across the street. A V-1 rocket landed on the house, demolishing it, killing all three women and destroying many of the records of Menchik’s career. Menchik was 38 and was still the women’s world champion at her death.

Today the winner of the Women’s Chess Olympiad receives the Vera Menchik Cup. Menchik herself best described her philosophy of life in a 1935 article on chess tactics in The Social Chess Quarterly. In it, she encouraged readers not to accept defeat, even when it seemed inevitable. “Counterattack is the soul of the game,” she wrote. “In the times of need when we are faced with a very cramped or even a lost game, our best chance of recovering the balance is to introduce complications.”

Lifespan

1906-1944

Nationality

Czech-British

Occupations

Chess player

Era

20th Century

Born

1906 Needs source

Died

1944 Needs source

Tags

Czech-British, 20th Century, Chess player

Themes

Global History