The daughter of a Czech father and British mother, Vera Menchik was born in Moscow. In the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution, her family moved to England in 1921. Her father taught her chess when she was nine and, in the year of her arrival in England at the age of fifteen, she won the British girls' championship. The following year, she became a pupil of Géza Maróczy, the leading Hungarian grandmaster at the time.