him.

Denys Bonner was most active in the post-war years, first in his home town club of Exmouth, and after his move in 1954 to Yeovil, in his adopted county of Somerset. He operated at a high level in four areas of active play, correspondence chess and both composing and solving chess problems.

He came from two long-standing Sidmouth families. His father, Ernest Bonner, was a bank manager, firstly with the South West and London Bank and later the Westminster Bank. While working in the Sidmouth Branch of the S. W. & London Bank between 1908 – 1918, he met and married Emma Pepperell, whose father James ran a dairy business in Sidmouth Market Place which involved Emma and her sister. The Pepperells could trace their family back through SirWilliam Pepperell, a 17th century English settler in the New England state of Maine, though Sir William’s descendents, as loyalists, fled back to England on the eve of the American War of Independence in 1777. This line can be traced right back to the Norman Conquest.

Their first child was Kenneth Harding Bonner, but with Emma pregnant with twins, Ernest joined the Westminster Bank and was created Manager in Wandsworth, London, where Denys and his twin sister Muriel (known as Mimi within the family), were born in 1919. About 1930, Ernest gave up his job with the bank and moved to Exmouth, where he took on the Moriglen Private Hotel in Salterton Road (below).

The Moriglen Hotel, Exmouth, now demolished.

Denys attended a small private school, St. Martin’s in Sidmouth, and