Eileen Tranmer

 

Tranmer (left) and Rowena Bruce (right)

    Eileen Betsy Tranmer (b. May 5, 1910 in Scarborough , d. September 26, 1983 in Ticehurst) was not only a British Ladies Champion (awarded the WIM title in 1950), but she was also a well-known clarinetist.  
     Miss Tranmer played for Britain v USSR in the Radio Match 1946 and won the British Ladies' Champion in 1947, 1949, 1953 and 1961. She also participated in the first Women's World Championship held after WWII, at Moscow 1949/50, scoring 9.5 out of 15, finishing 7th out of 16, defeating Elizaveta Bykova, a Soviet Union representative and winner of the tournament, and eventual World Champion. In the early 1950's among female players she ranked in the top six in the world.
     She was a musician by profession and lived in Scotland where she was a member of the Edinburgh Ladies' CC and Polytechnic CC in Glasgow. From 1950 on she was a member of the Sadler's Wells Orchestra. 
     In the book Sundial: Theoretical Relationships Between Psychological Type, Talent, and Disease by Barbara E. Bryden, the author noted that many great figures in music, art, science and chess had sensory impairments of one kind or another. Beethoven, Robert Schuman and Homer Watson suffered deafness as did Eileen Tranmer. 
     Some notable simultaneous display results: In 1953 while in Scotland with the Italian Opera orchestra she gave a simultaneous display at Glasgow Ladies' Chess Club where won 5 games and lost one. In 1954 at the Glasgow Ladies' Chess Club she played 12 games, winning 9 and drawing 3 and at the Edinburgh Ladies' CC she played 19 games, winning 18 and losing one. In 1955 at the Glasgow Ladies' Chess Club she won all 13 games. 
      In an article appearing in the July 1972 issue of the New Scientist titled The Psychology of Chess, author Dr. Peter Wason wrote that he had spotted Tranmer among the spectators at the Teeside GM Tournament and she told him, “Chess is not a matter of: if he does that, then I do this. We are creating ideas.”