Chess player in the attic

Historical knowledge and information regarding our great game.
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Christopher Kreuzer
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Chess player in the attic

Post by Christopher Kreuzer » Mon Mar 11, 2024 11:01 pm

The thread title kind of gives away the story, but I was watching a series of oral history interviews featuring Shirley Hodgson (the younger sister of the Penrose brothers), hoping that she might mention her brothers, and in particular Jonathan Penrose (who became a chess grandmaster).

She didn't mention her brothers directly (which is unsurprising really, as they were much older than her - the age gap ranged from 16 to 12 years), though in her recollections of her childhood she did refer to the very academic nature of the household and the house guests.

Speaking of house guests, at about 2 minutes into this clip from the interview:

Tansey E M (intvr); Yabsley A (prod) (2016) Hodgson, Shirley: 01 - How and why did you become interested in science? (04-Nov-2015). History of Modern Biomedicine Interviews (Digital Collection), item e2016011. London: Queen Mary University of London.
"...people would come and stay for several years just sort of by chance and um I remember once [...] we couldn't find any hot water bottles and we found that there was a chess player in the attic and he had about 12 hot water bottles in his bed so uh that sort of thing used to keep us amused..."
This scenario will be familiar to anyone who has had a chess player as a house guest! :mrgreen:

I don't suppose it is possible to identify who the chess player was, but maybe it was from the period when Shirley was a child (say, from when she was 8 to when she was 18, so around 1953 to 1963, more likely the early 1950s IMO) and possibly a friend of Jonathan's was staying (I am assuming here that the chess player was an acquaintance of Jonathan, though the other brothers also played chess, I believe)?

Regardless of any more details emerging, it is a lovely anecdote! Does anyone know of any other similar stories, either relating to the Penrose family, or other chess-playing house guests in the 1950s?