Rixi Markus

Rika "Rixi" MarkusMBE (27 June 1910 – 4 April 1992) was an Austrian and British international contract bridge player. She won five world titles, and was the first woman to become a World Grand Master within the World Bridge Federation. "In a 60-year career", Alan Truscott wrote in a bridge column 15 weeks after her death, "she had far more victories with partners of assorted nationalities than anyone else has ever had." She was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for contributions to bridge in 1974.

Markus was born as Erika (Rixi) Scharfstein into a prosperous Austrian Jewish family in Gura Humorului, Bukovina. Now in Romania, Bukovina was a duchy in the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1775 to 1918.

In 1916, her family fled, ahead of the Russian advance, settling in Vienna. After finishing school in Dresden she returned to Vienna, where she first made her name at the bridge table. Married young, and disastrously, she devoted herself almost entirely to bridge.

In 1938, she fled Austria after German forces entered Vienna (the Anschluss). Rixi then made her home in London, where she remained for the rest of her life. She worked as a translator for the Red Cross during World War II, and became a naturalised British citizen in 1950.

Rixi's husband, Salomon Markus, also came to London. He opposed her efforts to gain independence in every way he could, and fought her for custody of their daughter Margo. Divorce was not simple in those days, but Rixi obtained a judicial separation and a subsequent divorce in 1947. She described in her autobiography three subsequent long-term relationships with men: first Standish Booker, a leading bridge player, then Wash Carr (Walter Copley Carr) of the News of the World, and lastly Harold Lever (Lord Lever), a senior Labour Party politician.

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