Games & puzzles
1868–1955
The historian whose books are the standard histories of chess and of board games.
A reference author. Valice Press has no connection with H. J. R. Murray, their publishers or their estate. H. J. R. Murray appears here as part of the reading context around the shelf.
Biography
Harold James Ruthven Murray was the eldest son of Sir James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and as a schoolboy he helped his father by producing over 27,000 quotations for it. He read mathematics at Balliol College, Oxford, and worked as a schoolmaster, a headmaster and then a school inspector.
He learned chess as an adult and, encouraged in 1897 to research its history, spent thirteen years teaching himself Arabic and German and reading the world's great chess libraries. The result, A History of Chess (1913), proposed an Indian origin for the game and remains the most widely accepted account.
Works
Timeline
1890
Graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a first in mathematics.
1896
Became headmaster of Ormskirk Grammar School in Lancashire.
1897
Began thirteen years of research into the history of chess.
1901
Appointed a school inspector; in 1928 he joined the Board of Education.
1913
Published A History of Chess.
1952
Published A History of Board-Games Other than Chess.
1955
Died; most of his unpublished papers are in the Bodleian Library.
Why they are here
Murray's 1952 book is the first large English-language survey of the world's board games other than chess, from Mancala-type games to draughts. It remains a landmark, although parts of it have been criticised — his scepticism about the great age of Go, for example, has not held up.
His History of Chess is recognised as the standard reference on the subject, and the Indian-origin theory he proposed is still the most widely accepted.
Nearby on the shelf
These are Valice Press titles from the same part of the library. They are not by H. J. R. Murray, and they are not a recommendation on H. J. R. Murray’s behalf — only the same shelf.
63 Games from 5,000 Years of Human Play — Rules, Boards and Stories from 42 Cultures, Ready to Play Tonight
Emre Doğan
60 Games That Need Nothing but a Pencil — with Where Each One Came From and How to Win
Emre Doğan
Volume One: The Puzzles You Can Solve Tonight — Five Chapters Complete in the 1893 Text, Annotated, with Every Figure Redrawn
Emre Doğan
Edward Falkener's 1892 Reconstruction, Annotated — with Dr Samuel Birch's 1864 Paper, a Register of Reconstructions, Five Original Diagrams and the Move Tables Rebuilt from the Scan
Emre Doğan
Related authors
Sources
Everything on this page about H. J. R. Murray is written from these sources, not from memory. Their dates and key claims were checked against the sources on 8 October 2026.The life dates are compared across Wikidata and the Library of Congress’s authority records.
A note on the dates. The Library of Congress authority record gives the birth year as 1869; Wikipedia and Wikidata give 24 June 1868, as does The Oxford Companion to Chess (Hooper & Whyld, 2nd ed., pp. 265–66), which Wikipedia cites. 1868 is used here.
