Late Life and Death
In 1937, at the age of 31, Vera Menchik married Rufus Henry Streatfeild Stevenson (1878–1943), twenty-eight years her senior, who was subscriptions editor of British Chess Magazine, a member of the West London Chess Club, and later honorary secretary of the British Chess Federation.
Vera Menchik's younger sister Olga was also a tournament chess player. In 1944, as Britain was nearing its sixth year in World War II, and 38-year-old Vera, who was widowed the previous year, still holding the title of women's world champion, the two sisters and their mother were killed in a V-1 rocket bombing raid which destroyed their home at 47 Gauden Road in the Clapham area of South London.
The trophy for the winning team in the Women's Chess Olympiad is known as the Vera Menchik Cup.
Read more about this topic: Vera Menchik
Famous quotes containing the words late, life and/or death:
“Yet therein now doth lodge a noble peer,
Great England’s glory and the world’s wide wonder,
Whose dreadful name late through all Spain did thunder,”
—Edmund Spenser (1552?–1599)
“There is probably not more than one hundred dollars in cash in circulation today. That is, if you were to call in all the bills and silver and gold in the country at noon tomorrow and pile them on the table, you would find that you had just about one hundred dollars, with perhaps several Canadian pennies and a few peppermint Life Savers.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“For in the word death
There is nothing to grasp; nothing to catch or claim;
Nothing to adapt the skill of the heart to, skill
In surviving, for death it cannot survive,
Only resign the irrecoverable keys.
The wave falters and drowns. The coulter of joy
Breaks. The harrow of death
Depends. And there are thrown up waves.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)