Dr. Jonathan Penrose

Who is Dr. Jonathan Penrose?

Dr. Jonathan Penrose, OBE is an English chess Grandmaster and International Correspondence Chess Grandmaster, who won the British Chess Championship ten times between 1958 and 1969. He is the son of Lionel Penrose, a world famous professor of genetics, the grandson of the physiologist John Beresford Leathes, and brother of Roger Penrose and Oliver Penrose. He is a psychologist and university lecturer by profession.

Learning the game at age four, he was a member of Hampstead Chess Club at twelve and British Boys Champion at just fourteen years of age. Chess was played by the entire Penrose family. His father was a composer of endgame studies and a strong player, as was older brother Oliver.

By the age of seventeen, he was already acknowledged as a top prospect for British chess. Playing Hastings for the first time in 1950/51, he beat the French champion Nicolas Rossolimo and at Southsea in 1950, defeated both Efim Bogoljubov and Savielly Tartakower.

In 1960, at the Leipzig Chess Olympiad, Penrose defeated World Champion Mikhail Tal, thereby becoming the first British player to beat a reigning World Champion since Blackburne defeated Emanuel Lasker at London in 1899.