When the 16-year-old Jonathan Penrose beat the British champion Reginald Broadbent in the first round of the 1950 national chess championships, his defeated opponent advised him not to neglect his academic studies or damage his future career prospects by spending too much time at the board.
It was advice that Penrose took to heart. Although he was one of the most gifted players in British chess history, he remained an amateur and after earning a doctorate in psychology from London University, he spent his entire working life as a university lecturer.
It meant his competitive chess playing had to be fitted into university holidays but the restriction did not prevent him from winning the British chess championship a record-breaking ten times and becoming the first British player to defeat a reigning world chess champion since 1899.
The latter was the greatest triumph of Penrose’s time at the board and it came in spectacular style at the 1960 Chess Olympiad in Leipzig, at which Penrose was a member of the six-strong British team.
Having helped Britain to top their group in the preliminary stages, Penrose found himself in the finals up against Mikhail Tal, then the world champion and leader of a Soviet team containing six grandmasters.
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Before the game Penrose consulted his team-mates over stratagems. One of them, Leonard Barden, presented him with “half a dozen bulging files” which provoked “a glazed look” but Barden then suggested a recent game in which Finland’s Kaarle Ojanen had used a positional pawn sacrifice to defeat Tal’s Soviet team-mate and fellow grandmaster Paul Keres. “Jonathan was immediately hooked and quickly decided this was his weapon,” Barden said.
Penrose unveiled his pawn sacrifice which enabled his queen and rook to breach Tal’s defences. Tal fell short of time, lost a piece and resigned.
It was the only game that the USSR lost all tournament and Penrose’s denting of the Soviet team’s invincibility made newspaper headlines around the world. When he entered the players’ dining hall that evening, Barden recalled that Penrose was given a standing ovation.
It was the first victory by a British chess player over the reigning world champion since Joseph Blackburne had beaten the great Emanuel Lasker more than 60 years earlier, but Penrose downplayed his achievement and compared it to winning a game in an Essex v Middlesex domestic county match.
His modesty was misplaced. In the same Olympiad, he also defeated the former world champion Max Euwe of the Netherlands and had the best of a draw against the American champion Bobby Fischer. He should have beaten Fischer, too, but short of time offered the American a draw. Fischer gratefully replied “Sure!” and then showed Penrose how he could and should have forced a win.
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The youngest of three sons, Jonathan Penrose was born in 1933 in Colchester, Essex, into an academically distinguished family. His father Lionel Penrose was a key figure in the development of genetics and his mother Margaret (née Leathes) was also a respected researcher in medical science.
His oldest brother Oliver Penrose is a noted mathematical physicist and a professor emeritus at Heriot-Watt while his brother Sir Roger Penrose was awarded a Nobel prize last year for his work on black holes and relativity. His younger sister Shirley Hodgson is professor of cancer genetics at St George’s, University of London.
His siblings survive him, along with his two daughters Katy and Harriet, from his marriage in 1962 to Margaret Wood, a British ladies’ championship chess competitor. The couple separated in 1978.
He spent part of his childhood in Canada, where the family moved during the Second World War, an experience which left a hint of a transatlantic accent in his softly spoken voice.
Back in London after the war, he was educated at University College School and then took a degree in psychology.
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His father, a notable player himself, taught him to play when he was four. By 13 he was the British under-18 champion and he became London champion at 15. He entered his first international tournament in 1950 and announced himself by defeating the former world title challenger Efim Bogolyubov.
He won his first British championship in 1958 and went on to win six consecutive titles. A further run of four titles between 1966 and 1969 saw him break Henry Atkins’s longstanding record of nine wins.
He also represented Britain in ten Chess Olympiads between 1952 and 1974 and his score at the 1968 contest in Lugano was bettered only by Tigran Petrosian, the world champion.
His approach to the game was described as “classical and logical” in the style of the legendary 1920s world champion José Capablanca.
He was given the title international master in 1961 but his decision to remain an amateur meant that he never attained the title grandmaster which his talents deserved during his playing days. He was belatedly awarded the title in 1993 for his achievements in correspondence chess.
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By then he had long retired from over-the-board play. He fainted at the 1970 Olympiad in Siegen, Germany after making a game-losing blunder during a tense match and following defeat in the 1977 British championship at the hands of the 12-year-old prodigy Nigel Short, he took up correspondence chess.
He led the British team to victory in the ninth Correspondence Chess Olympiad and at one point was the world’s No 1 correspondence player.
Awarded an OBE for services to chess in 1971, he continued to lecture in psychology at Middlesex University and later Enfield College of Technology, before retiring to Welwyn, Hertfordshire, where he spent some of his time quietly playing bridge at a local social club.
Jonathan Penrose OBE, lecturer and British chess champion, was born on October 7, 1933. He died after a short illness on November 30, 2021, aged 88