A WORLD-BEATING HEROINE WE SHAMEFULLY NEGLECT

ROBERT HARRIS’s latest novel, V2, is based on a forgotten episode of female calculating exploits in the fight against the Nazis. As Harris recounted in Saturday’s Mail, he had been inspired by reading the obituary, in 2016, of a former WAAF officer, Eileen Younghusband.

This mathematician had in 1944 led a team that, using nothing more than slide-rules and a knowledge of the parabolic flight path of the V2 rockets, tried to work out the location of these deadly weapons’ launch sites.

This story provokes me in turn to pay honour to a remarkable British woman, scandalously under-recognised in this country, who was one of the thousands of London victims of the ‘doodlebugs’.

On June 27, 1944, a V1 rocket annihilated 47 Gauden Road in South-West London. It was the home of 38-year-old Vera Menchik, who lived with her mother and sister. All were killed instantly.

Vera, born in 1906 to a Czech father and English mother, was the woman’s world chess champion. Not only that, she had been champion uninterruptedly since 1927, having successfully defended the title eight times, with the quite astonishing overall tally of 78 wins, four draws and one solitary lost game.

In short, no other woman came remotely close to her, and the Russian world champion Alexander Alekhine observed: ‘She is without doubt a phenomenon . . . it is totally unfair to persuade a player of acknowledged superclass like Miss Menchik to defend her title year after year against very inferior players.’

So Menchik became the only woman of her era — or any previous one — to take part in male grandmaster tournaments, where she defeated, among others, the future world champion Max Euwe (twice) and the eight-times U. S. champion Samuel Reshevsky. Despite this, she was a modest character, who self-deprecatingly declared: ‘I am eccentric enough to be addicted to chess.’ Her achievements are recognised internationally: the trophy for the Women’s event in the biennial Chess Olympiad is called The Vera Menchik Cup.

The Czech Republic and the former Yugoslavia printed postage stamps commemorating her. Yet when in 2008 this country launched stamps celebrating historic British women of achievement, Menchik not only was not among them: she was never even considered.

Her physical existence was destroyed by the Nazis, and not just that: the V-bomb’s devastation of her home also meant all her trophies, scoresheets and notebooks were annihilated. But that is no reason for the only British world chess champion to be effaced from our own history of female achievement.