Eccentric bridge player behind the top-selling game Continuo
MAUREEN HIRON, who has died aged 80, began her career as a games teacher at an inner London comprehensive, but in 1973 a 20lb air conditioner detached itself and fell on her head as she was leaning out of a window to shout at some misbehaving children.
Maureen Berman, as she then was, suffered terrible headaches, depression and blackouts and was forced to retire. But therapy during her convalescence, she believed, activated formerly dormant areas of her brain and she went on to enjoy a new lease of life as an international bridge player and, more famously, as one of the world’s top games inventors.
Her “lightbulb” moment came on April Fool’s Day 1982, when “apropos of nothing in particular, Continuo flashed into my mind.”
The deceptively simple game, played with 42 small, coloured chequered cards, involved players having to arrange the cards to make lines of colour as long as possible. “I invented the thing in about two seconds,” she recalled.
With Alan Hiron, an international bridge player whom she would marry in 1983, she formed Hiron Games. Five months later Continuo went on sale in the UK, soon becoming Britain’s top-selling game, selected as 1982 game of the year by the Association of Board and Card Games Master Players.
With sales of more than six million in more than 50 countries, Continuo is now considered a modern classic, and Maureen Hiron went on to invent more than 70 successful games, including Quizwrangle and Cavendish, winning numerous awards including three Mensa Select awards.
Her husband, who became bridge correspondent of The Independent, play-tested her inventions while she proof-read his columns. In the early 1990s they moved to southern Spain, and when Alan died in 1999 Maureen took over his Independent column, retiring in 2016.
Maureen Berman was born in 1942 and trained as a games teacher. A keen bridge player before her accident, afterwards she threw herself into the game, taking part in national and international championships.
She was on the winning England team in the 1974 and 1975 Lady Milne Trophy, and represented Great Britain in the European Championships of 1974.
It was through bridge that she met Alan Hiron, and in 1993 they won bronze at the European Union Bridge Senior Pairs in Portugal.
In 1984 the couple, who published beginners’ bridge guides and quiz books together, were the subject of a BBC documentary, A Will to Win, but shortly afterwards Maureen was diagnosed with cancer and was admitted to the Royal Marsden Hospital.
There, using her fellowpatients as guinea pigs, she developed the game Chip In, which, with the Princess of Wales as appeal president, she used to raise £25 million for the hospital.
Described by a fellow games designer as “an outstanding – if eccentric – force” who was “exasperating ... and admirable in equal measure”, Maureen Hiron conceded that she was “not good at fitting into a team”, telling the Telegraph in 1987: “I’m quite disruptive, trying out my ideas on everybody and if I’m working on something, I’m pretty boorish… I know people think I’m a bit mad… I’ve always had plenty to say for myself.”
She “always dressed the same” – in jeans and sparkly baseball caps, and often a jacket embroidered with the names of all the games she had invented. While raising money for the Royal Marsden, she wore this ensemble when she was invited to play Chip In with Margaret Thatcher in her study at 10 Downing Street.
At college Maureen Hiron had composed a children’s opera called Cats, and after meeting Sheyla Bonnick of Boney M on a cruise in 2011, they collaborated on an album, Look Beyond, in a new musical genre Maureen called Matzar – “written in modes rather than keys”.
In 2021 Maureen Hiron was inducted into the Games Hall of Fame.
Maureen Hiron, born 1942, died June 13 2022