In 1929, at the Carlsbad tournament in Czechoslovakia, the Viennese master Albert Becker proposed a new club. Any master who lost to Vera Menchik, the 23-year-old women's world champion, would be granted membership in the "Vera Menchik Club." It was meant as mockery. What respectable master could lose to a woman?
Menchik lost her opening game at Carlsbad, so the joke seemed safe. Then she beat Becker in round three: the club's founder became its first member. A second skeptic, the journalist Hans Kmoch, had sworn he would take the stage as a ballerina if she scored more than three points. She scored exactly three. The jokes were backfiring.
Menchik was used to being underestimated. Born in Moscow in 1906 to a Czech father and an English mother, she learned chess at nine from her father. When the Russian Revolution upended the family's life, she, her mother, and her younger sister moved to Hastings, England, in 1921 — Vera arrived speaking only Russian. She joined the Hastings Chess Club in 1923 and took lessons from Géza Maróczy, later one of FIDE's first grandmasters. In 1925 she beat the British women's champion, Edith Price, in two matches.
Two years later she won the first Women's World Championship ever held, at the 1927 London Olympiad, with 10½/11: one draw, no losses. She would never lose the title again. Between 1927 and 1939 she won all seven Women's World Championship tournaments, losing exactly one game in total — in 1930 — and running off four consecutive perfect scores from 1931 to 1937. In 1937 she also beat her great rival Sonja Graf 11½–4½ in a title match at Semmering. At Buenos Aires in 1939 she arrived with a nine-year streak of at least 59 consecutive wins at these tournaments, and won again with 18/19 before the war shut the championships down.
The Club, meanwhile, had become a running joke in the chess press — at the men's expense. At Hastings in 1930/31 she beat Max Euwe, the tournament winner and a future world champion; the next year she beat him again, along with Mir Sultan Khan. When Sir George Thomas lost to her at Hastings, the British Chess Magazine crowned him "president" of a club whose "membership is strictly limited to victims of the woman champion." By 1950, four of the first 27 players FIDE made grandmasters were Club members: Euwe, Samuel Reshevsky, Jacques Mieses, and Friedrich Sämisch. In 1942, Mieses — then 77, once among the world's top ten — played a match against her; she won 6½–3½. Thomas, for his part, was generous: Menchik was, he wrote, "the only woman who has won, and won beyond cavil, a place in the ranks of the masters."
She held that place to the end. On 26 June 1944 — or the early hours of the 27th; the records disagree — a V-1 flying bomb destroyed her house at 47 Gauden Road in Clapham, south London. Menchik, 38 and still the undefeated world champion, died in the basement with her mother and sister Olga, and she had been due to play again the next day. Most of her life's records — the games, the writings, the trophies — went with the house; one dented gold medal survived.
The trophy for the Women's Chess Olympiad still carries her name, the Vera Menchik Cup. But the Club is the truer monument. It was invented to mock a woman, and it became the most exclusive society in chess — founded by a man she defeated, populated by world champions, and closed forever when the champion died.