Trivial Fact of the Day features Prunella Scales and Vera Menchik

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I'm listening to an edition of Gyles Brandreth's Rosebud podcast in which he talks to the actor Samuel West. It was recorded a couple of weeks before the death of West's mother Prunella Scales and so far he has talked mostly about her and his late father, Timothy West.

But there is one story he has not told about his mother...

Vera Menchik was born in Moscow, to an English mother and Czech father, in 1906. She began playing chess competitively just before the family came to live in London in 1921.

She was to become the strongest woman chess player in the world, holding the women's world title between 1927 and 1944. She regularly competed, and with some success, against the top men players of her day. There was not another woman player who did that regularly until Judit Polgár in the 1990s.

Vera Menchik died in 1945 when her house in Clapham was hit by a German V1 flying bomb.

And what does all this have to do with Prunella Scales?

Vera Menchik's great grandfather was a man called George Illingworth. And his brother John Thomas Illingworth was the great grandfather of Prunella Scales. Which makes the two women third cousins.

Thanks to Richard James for putting me on to a thread on the English Chess Forum.