Commodore Laurie Brokenshire
Naval officer and occasional magician who once swam the Channel and became a puzzling expert
COMMODORE LAURIE BROKENSHIRE, who has died aged 64, was a successful naval career officer, a member of the Magic Circle and a world-class puzzling expert.
After retiring from the Navy, Brokenshire and his wife, Ethel, camped and bicycled the length of several continents to reach the annual and secretive International Puzzle Parties (IPP), attended by invitation only. They wild-camped or stayed with friends along the Eastern coast of Australia, around the North Island of New Zealand, across Japan, Europe and Scandinavia, and several times across the US. In 2014 he organised and hosted IPP 34 for 200 fellow puzzlists at a hotel near Heathrow.
Brokenshire was in regular contact with puzzlists worldwide, and was retained by a number of puzzles companies as a consultant. His own puzzle collection was considered one of the largest in Britain, so large that he built an extension to his home to house them all.
A long-standing challenge was the “Dudeney Problem”, a chessboard dissection puzzle with a solution which had been revealed in by the British puzzle compiler Henry Dudeney (1857-1930). An American rival, Sam Loyd (1841-1911), showed that there was a second solution, and after a hundred years Brokenshire revealed a third. It is now known as the “Dudeney-loyd-brokenshire Problem”.
Brokenshire was also accepted into the Inner Magic Circle, and was an occasional professional magician. He used his magic to raise money for charities and performed for members of the Royal Family. He always carried his magic bag with him and was adept at finding tricks to suit any occasion.
Laurence Phillip Brokenshire was born in Plymouth on October 20 1952 to a naval family and educated at Devonport High School for Boys and Slough Grammar School, where he played junior hockey for Buckinghamshire and captained the chess club and the bridge club (which beat Eton College on one occasion). He gave his first magic show aged 13.
He read Mathematics at Exeter, where he played hockey and table tennis for the university. He also beat his head of department, Professor David Rees, at chess and, at Rees’s insistence, the strategy game Go. Later he read for a science degree at the Open University.
Brokenshire joined the Royal Navy as an instructor officer, and after appointments to Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and in Plymouth, Portsmouth and Faslane, specialised as a submariner. In later years he commanded two shore establishments: the fleet headquarters at Northwood (1992-93) and HMS Raleigh, the Navy’s training centre (2001-03).
He was appointed CBE in 2003 and following the end of his Royal Navy career, Brokenshire was appointed as Commodore of the Sea Cadet Corps.
In 1986, Brokenshire swam the Channel, and when his son Matthew repeated the achievement in 2012 they became one of the few father and son pairs to have done so. In later years, Brokenshire enjoyed year-round sea-swimming with the Lee-on-solent “Shack Sharks” club representing the club at swimming competitions. When he was diagnosed in 2016 with cancer, he and seven members of his family undertook a 30-mile sponsored sea swim from Fowey to Plymouth, raising more than £45,000 for Macmillan Cancer Support and other charities.
In 1980 he married Ethel Isobel Mcmahon, a former WRNS, who survives him with their two daughters and two sons. One son became a Royal Marines officer and a daughter joined the Royal Navy.
In 1994 Brokenshire and his wife heard a radio advertisement by Hampshire County Council seeking foster parents and felt that it was a sign from God. They went on to foster more than 70 children. During his protracted fight with cancer, he delighted in meeting some of those they had cared for.
Commodore Laurie Brokenshire, born October 20 1952, died August 4 2017