English businessman Charles Masson Fox was BOTD in 1866. Born in Falmouth, Cornwall into a prosperous Quaker family of aristocratic descent, he worked for his family’s timber and shipping firms. A lifelong bachelor and discreet homosexual, he visited Venice in 1909 with his friend James Cockerton, where he socialised with an English homosexual expatriate circle including Horatio Forbes Brown, Henry Scott Tuke and Frederick Rolfe. He and Rolfe established a long correspondence, in which Rolfe detailed his sexual adventures with adolescent gondoliers (“My preference was for the 16, 17, 18 and large“). In 1912, Fox was blackmailed by a Cornish woman who accused him of seducing her 16 year-old son. He eventually reported the matter to the police, leading to the woman and her son being imprisoned. Though exonerated by the police, the resulting publicity destroyed Fox’s personal and professional reputation. He increasingly spent more time in London, becoming prominent in the world of competitive chess. He became a leading exponent of the appropriately-named “fairy chess” (chess problems involving variation in the rules), writing a series of bestselling books about chess problems. Little is known of his later life or relationships, though presumably London offered more opportunities to meet men than Cornwall. He died in 1935, aged 68.