In the summer of 1929, at the great tournament in Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia, the Viennese master Albert Becker made a joke. A young woman had been invited into a field that included Capablanca, Nimzowitsch, Tartakower, and Euwe, and to some of the masters the idea was plainly absurd. Becker proposed that any master who lost to Vera Menchik would be inducted into a new society: the Vera Menchik Club. In the third round, Vera Menchik beat him — her last move a pawn fork that cost Becker his rook. The club's first member was the man who invented it.
By then Menchik was already a name chess knew. Born in Moscow in 1906 to a Czech father and an English mother, she learned the game at nine and arrived in England in 1921 as a refugee from the Russian Revolution. She settled in Hastings, joined the chess club in 1923, and took lessons from Géza Maróczy, a former contender for the world title. In 1927, alongside the first Chess Olympiad in London, FIDE staged the first Women's World Championship. Menchik, twenty-one, won it with 10½ out of 11: ten wins and a single draw.
Then she simply kept winning. She defended the title in every championship held before the war — eight in all, still the most of any women's champion. In the seven championship tournaments she played 83 games, winning 78, drawing 4, and losing 1; her only defeat came at Hamburg in 1930. From 1931 to 1937 she won four straight championships with perfect scores, 45 games without conceding a draw. When Sonja Graf, the era's strongest challenger, met her in a title match at Semmering in 1937, Menchik won 11½–4½.
All the while she was doing something no woman had done before: playing master chess against men. At Ramsgate in 1929 she went unbeaten, scoring 5 out of 7 to share second place with Akiba Rubinstein — half a point behind Capablanca, half a point ahead of Maróczy. The invitations followed. At 22-player Carlsbad she finished last, yet still beat Becker and Friedrich Sämisch, one of FIDE's first grandmasters.
The club Becker had meant as a snub grew into a roll call. Max Euwe — world champion from 1935 to 1937 — lost to her twice in four tournament games, and her 1930/31 Hastings win over him made headlines around the world; the press named him the club's "president". So was Sir George Thomas, whom she beat ten times in 29 known games. Samuel Reshevsky, Mir Sultan Khan, Edgar Colle, C.H.O'D. Alexander: all members. Four of the 27 players FIDE honoured as the first grandmasters in 1950 — Euwe, Mieses, Reshevsky, Sämisch — had been beaten by her. Her lifetime results sit at roughly international-master strength: about a quarter of games won against grandmaster-class opposition, nearly half against IMs.
The story ends in a basement in Clapham. On the night of 26 June 1944, a V-1 flying bomb — one of the earliest of the war — destroyed her home on Gauden Road while she, her mother, and her sister Olga sheltered below. All three died. She was 38, and still world champion.
Chess gave her a monument anyway: the trophy for the Women's Chess Olympiad is the Vera Menchik Cup, and in 2011 she entered the World Chess Hall of Fame. As for the club — the joke meant to shrink her now reads as her finest footnote. Nearly a century on, its membership still looks like what it always was: the best players of an era, listed in the order they learned not to underestimate her.