The Menchik–Mieses Match

London, 21 May to 13 June 1942

Mieses's Announcement: “Ladies at the Chess Board”

Six days before the match began, on Friday, 15 May 1942, Mieses devoted his chess column in the London exile paper Die Zeitung to an unusual preview. Readers used to seeing endgame studies and chess problems were offered instead a short cultural history of women in chess. Mieses traced it from two famous literary chess scenes: one in Lessing's play Nathan the Wise in which the Sultan Saladin is defeated by his sister Sittah; the other in Goethe's drama Götz von Berlichingen in which the Bishop of Bamberg loses to the lady Adelheid. From there he moved through the great age of medieval European chess, the rupture of the Thirty Years' War, the founding of London's Ladies Chess Club in 1895, and the inaugural Women's World Championship of 1927, won by the not-quite-22-year-old Vera Menchik and held by her ever since.

In the second half of his preview Mieses turned to his opponent and to himself. Among her own sex, Menchik stood in “a class of her own”; she had “held her own” even against masters. He then announced his terms: „Diese Veranstaltung darf in doppelter Hinsicht als ein Unikum in der Geschichte des Schachspiels hervorgehoben werden. Niemals bisher hat eine Frau einen ernsten Wettkampf gegen einen Meister der internationalen Klasse ausgefochten. Noch niemals ist es einem Spieler meines Alters – ich bin 77 Jahre alt – unternommen, in der Schacharena zu stehen.“ (This event may be highlighted as a twofold first in the history of chess. Never before has a woman fought a serious match against a master of the international class. Never before has a player of my age, I am 77 years old, taken on the task of standing in the chess arena.) He would have to play his best, he concluded, in order not to “share the fate of Sultan Saladin and the Bishop of Bamberg.” The venue was given as a building of the John Lewis company at 31 Cavendish Square, in London's West End, and the start date as Thursday, 21 May 1942.

Background: Two Worlds, One Board

When the two players met in London in May 1942, forty-one years separated them. Mieses, born in Leipzig in 1865, had fled to England after the November 1938 pogrom; an entire German life now lay behind him. Vera Menchik, born in Moscow in 1906 to a Czech father and an English mother, had held the Women's World Championship without interruption since 1927, with successful title defences in 1930, 1931, 1933, 1935, 1937 and 1939, never once defeated.

The story of her rise was at the same time the story of male chess discomfort with a serious female rival. In 1929, in Carlsbad, before her first appearance in a strong men's grandmaster tournament, the Viennese master Albert Becker proposed the ironically named “Menchik Club”: any master who lost to her would automatically be enrolled. The first member was, promptly and involuntarily, Becker himself. The membership list grew considerably in the following years – Max Euwe, Mir Sultan Khan and Samuel Reshevsky among them. The mocking signboard turned, over time, into a quiet badge of honour.

Significance: The First Serious Match Between a Woman and a Grandmaster

Robert B. Tanner, Menchik's biographer, has placed the match in a single sentence: it was “the first ever serious match between a woman and a strong master.” Women and grandmasters had certainly faced each other in tournaments before 1942 – with Menchik herself leading the way since 1929 – but a dedicated head-to-head encounter over multiple games, played at serious time controls and under the eyes of the chess public, had never taken place.

That this historic match came about at all was a product of the particular circumstances of the London exile. Jacques Mieses, once a Berlin salon master and Vienna Trebitsch champion, had become – after professional ban, flight and internment – the figurehead of a small community of German-speaking émigrés. Vera Menchik lived with her mother and her sister Olga in Clapham, in south London, and continued to work as a chess professional under wartime conditions. London in 1942 was a city under bombardment, in which the very idea of a four-week master match expressed both defiance and a quiet matter-of-factness.

Course of the Match

Ten games were played between Thursday, 21 May, and Saturday, 13 June 1942. Mieses reported on the match in his chess column on six consecutive Fridays, sometimes only with the running scores, sometimes with full notation. The opening game lasted almost eight hours and ended with a Menchik win. After game 2, a draw, the score was level. After four games, Menchik had won twice and two had been drawn. After seven games, she led three to one with three draws. Mieses's only win came in game 6. The seventh game on 5 June ended in a draw after thirty-five moves of perpetual check in a Queen's Pawn opening; Mieses published its full notation a week later, with his own annotations, in Die Zeitung. The match ended on Saturday, 13 June 1942, with Menchik 6½ – Mieses 3½.

A note on the source situation: the running game numbers above follow Mieses's contemporary weekly reports of 29 May, 5 June and 12 June 1942. His column of 19 June 1942 correctly identifies the annotated 5 June game as the “seventh.” In the closing summary of 26 June 1942, however, Mieses describes game 7 as a Mieses win, which contradicts both the column of 12 June (“the seventh ended in a draw”) and the full notation. Mieses most likely lost track of the count in his closing column by one position. The table follows the contemporary weekly reports; the final score itself is unaffected by the counting error.

Illness and Interruption

In the course of the second week, the match had to be suspended for several days. In his column of 19 June 1942, Mieses noted soberly that “a multi-day interruption became necessary, as Mieses was suffering from a persistent physical indisposition.” What lay behind that careful formula he only made explicit years later, in a private letter to his old friend Adolf Seitz. The original was in English, written in London in 1945, and reads:

“Yes, I played a match with Vera Menchik and, no wonder, I lost it, since I got seriously ill during the match, suffering of a very painful Blasenleiden. The match had to be interrupted for about a week but that was not sufficient for curing me and Vera Menchik could not agree to a longer postponement because she was engaged by the Government for war work.”

This single sentence captures the central condition of the second half of the match: the bladder complaint (Blasenleiden) for which a week's pause proved insufficient; and Menchik's wartime commitments, which ruled out any longer postponement. Mieses played out the closing games while still unwell.

An Annotated Game

The seventh game of the match has survived in full notation, played on Friday, 5 June 1942. Menchik opened, as she did every game of the match, with the queen's pawn. Mieses replied with a flexible setup that allowed the king's pawn to advance in two moves. The game ran to thirty-five moves and reached an endgame in which Black, thanks to a precise queen manoeuvre (22…Qa4!), was even able to generate his own counterplay; the perpetual-check finish is technically faultless.

Mieses's Public Tribute

Mieses's first detailed assessment of the match appeared in his chess column „Schach. Bearbeitet von J. Mieses“ in the London exile paper Die Zeitung on 26 June 1942. Die Zeitung was the central German-language newspaper of the British exile community during the Second World War; Mieses had taken over its weekly chess page in 1941. His balance of the match is the most direct source we have, and it is striking how openly he attributes the outcome to his own circumstances rather than to any deficiency in his game.

On the level of preparation, he wrote: „Bei Beginn des Kampfes waren beide Spieler erheblich ausser Übung, wie auch aus der Qualität der Partien hervorgeht. Sie haben ja, des Krieges wegen, mehrere Jahre keine Gelegenheit zu ernsten Meisterpartien gehabt.“ (At the beginning of the contest both players were considerably out of practice, as is also evident from the quality of the games. Owing to the war, they had had no opportunity for serious master play for several years.)

On the asymmetry of the lay-off, he was equally candid: „Dieser lange Mangel an Training hat sich begreiflicherweise bei Mieses stärker geltend gemacht, als bei seiner mehr als 40 Jahre jüngeren Gegnerin.“ (This long lack of training naturally affected Mieses more than it did his more than forty years younger opponent.)

And on his health during the match: „Er hat ausserdem während einiger Partien unter einer sehr störenden körperlichen Indisposition gelitten.“ (He also, during several games, suffered under a very disruptive physical indisposition.)

Mieses reserved the closing words of his column for his opponent, without reservation:

„Vera Menchik hat ihren bisherigen guten Leistungen in internationalen Meisterturnieren nunmehr einen beachtenswerten Sieg in einem schweren Einzelwettkampf hinzugefügt. Sie dürfte jetzt erst zur vollen Entwicklung ihrer Spielstärke gelangt sein.“

That last sentence carries a particular weight in retrospect. Mieses, a veteran of classical match chess, described his 36-year-old conqueror not as already established but as a player only now reaching her full powers – someone whose actual career still lay ahead. Two years later, Menchik was dead.

The Tragic Aftermath: 27 June 1944

On 27 June 1944, a little more than two years after the match, a German V-1 flying bomb struck 47 Gauden Road, Clapham, in south London. Vera Menchik, her mother Olga (Mrs Rubery) and her sister Olga Menchik all died in the explosion. Vera Menchik was thirty-eight.

The Women's World Championship, which she had held without interruption for seventeen years, then remained vacant for six years. It was only in 1950 that the Soviet master Lyudmila Rudenko was determined as her successor.

Mieses's own life was touched by the same V-1 campaign. Later that summer of 1944 his flat in Edith Road, Kensington, was so badly damaged in an attack that he had to be evacuated. By any reasonable expectation he would have been the one to predecease Menchik; in the event the order was the reverse.

Sources

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