Peter Frank Jacobsen was primarily a highly respected architect but also gained note as an accomplished chess champion.
Peter Jacobsen, and his younger brother Theodore, were born in Nelson. Their father Johann Sigismund Martin Jacobsen was a builder and designer, and both sons were trained by him in Christchurch. Frank established the partnership of Jacobsen and Peez in c.1880 and moved to Wellington in 1888.
The Jacobsen brothers formed a partnership which designed about 20 buildings over a ten year period. The partnership dissolved in c.1890 and Theodore moved to Palmerston North in c.1893. Frank remained in Wellington and designed at least 13 houses, two club buildings, a shop and the Shamrock Hotel.
As a chess player Jacobsen had a formidable reputation. Whilst in Christchurch he was especially energetic in bringing about New Zealand’s first chess championship congress (1879), in which he took part, winning the third prize. He is interestingly described as having a “colonial reputation as a chess player.” He was a very prominent prize winner in local tournaments, his last success being to gain the first prize in a large competition promoted by the Wellington Workingmen’s Chess Club, of which he had been President for two years at the time of his death.
He died in 1893 of Typhoid and was buried in Karori Public Section Plot number 243
