For The Rest of the world I suppose it was a pretty ordinary Thursday; January 9th, 1964. It was not even Twelfth Night. There was nothing much to celebrate. It was, as the hymn has it, a day for 'the trivial round, the common task'. A day for wolfing down a bowl of cornflakes before dashing off to the office, a day for toiling over trigonometry in the classroom (not that I ever did!), or a day for complaining about the price of lamb chops.
Me, I spent a bit longer in bed. For me, it was very much an extraordinary day. And for me there was something to celebrate. For I woke up for the first time as long as I could remember knowing that I did not have to spend hours of practice bent over a snooker table. In fact, it would not matter whether I even went near a snooker table that day, or on any day in the future. The previous night I had played positively my last exhibition game.
It had been in Bristol in aid of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, with which I have been involved for many years. To be honest, I had never intended to play the exhibition; my plan was that I would bow out a few weeks earlier - at the ninth of the Christmas snooker exhibitions which I had given for the Fund in the Louis Suite of the Café Royal, courtesy of Sir Charles Forte. But at the show I was collared by an old friend and snooker enthusiast from Bristol, Peter Reeve, who announced that he had already laid everything on for a January show at the city's University and Literary Club. I capitulated before Peter's fait accompli. And so, the morning after, it was from a comfortable bed in his home in Bristol that I contemplated my decision to stop playing.
My first feeling was that a tremendous burden had been taken from my shoulders. The burden of knowing every day that I had to travel somewhere to give yet another display, and that every display would be watched with that hyper-critical eye which audiences the world over reserve for those who are regarded as prime exponents of any sport or art.
The fact that I felt the heavy responsibility of continually trying to give better shows and of trying to please the public with century breaks, was to my mind proof positive that it was time to lay my favourite old cue in its case. Throughout my fifty years in the profession I had always been enthusiastic and ambitious, but towards the end of 1963 I was finding the travel wearing and the traditionally smoky billiard-hall atmosphere very tiresome. Though I must admit that I was playing almost as well as ever, I realised that I was slipping slightly and that practice was becoming hard work instead of a labour of love.
To get as near to perfection as possible had always been my aim at the table and I could not tolerate the intimations, which perhaps I alone detected, that my standards were declining. So deciding to retire from the game cost me little sleep.
I made a vow that I would never in any circumstances be tempted to return to the green cloth and bright lights. This vow I have kept to this day and have never had a moment's regret. I still have my billiard-table in the basement of my home but if friends or my grandchildren play on it I am content simply to watch or act as 'spot-boy'. About the only time I lift my old cue out of its case is when I wander into the billiard-room from the adjoining bathroom while waiting for my bath to fill.
Many of my friends criticised my decision to quit exhibition play, just as they criticised my decision in 1946 to leave championship play. They thought I was playing as well as I had ever done and that my announcement was premature. But I replied that whether or not we disagreed over the level of my play there could be no dispute about the facts of life; I was almost sixty-three. Moreover, I had been playing billiards and snooker for money since I was a lad. It was not as though I intended to turn my back on life and to shuffle off into a comfortable, carpet-slippered, decline. And in any case it is generally assumed that when a man reaches his mid-sixties he is entitled to climb off the treadmill. Why should snooker players be excluded?
In ancient times it was always said that on the birth of someone destined for fame planets whirled about the heavens cracking into each other, while comets and meteors raced hither and thither. But in the Derbyshire coal village of Whitwell at the turn of the century people did not much go in for that sort of thing. Certainly no such heavenly omens greeted my birth on April 15th, 1901 - none, anyway, that my mother told me of.
Perhaps the powers that be did not want to make any risky predictions. For I have to admit that on the face of it there was little reason to suppose that any sort of public notice would ever be taken of the infant Joseph Davis, first child of Fred and Elizabeth Ann Davis.
As a newly-married man my father had gone to Whitwell to look for work and it was down the mine that he found it. But he was a man of great ingenuity and ambition, and with my mother an industrious and more down-to-earth companion it did not take them long to save enough money to take over a small beer house. How they managed to save anything at all in those far-off days is difficult to imagine. But they did it and at the age of about two I was whisked off to my new home at the Travellers' Rest at Whittington Moor, a couple of miles from Chesterfield.
This was only a short move; Chesterfield is also in Derbyshire. That is its trouble. Had it been in Italy it might well have been world famous instead of having to settle for a modest degree of purely English renown. For at the top side of the sloping market square stands the fourteenth-century church of Our Lady and All Saints whose 228-foot octagonal spire resembles nothing so much as a bent and elongated corkscrew. You can approach it from any side, feeling confident that it must look perpendicular from one angle at least only to be disappointed. To be precise it leans 7 feet 6 inches to the south, 7 feet 10 inches to the south-west and 3 feet 2 inches to the west. It certainly has something that Pisa lacks.
I understand that the weight of the lead covering on rather immature timbers caused the distortion of the spire over a number of years, though many less mundane explanations have traditionally been offered. One version has it that the spire bowed towards a virgin who was entering the church to be married, and never straightened up.
Years later, in 1924, the first drawing of me by the great Daily Mail cartoonist Tom Webster depicted me standing beside the church. The tongue-in-cheek caption stated that I must have a good eye for the game because I had noticed that the spire was not straight!
It is a truism to say that, in those days, times for the working men were hard - but it does not make it any less accurate. And for a young married couple trying to better themselves, as opposed to making ends meet, there was inevitably another layer of hardship. This was particularly true if, like my parents, they were running a pub. For the pubs used to open at six o'clock in the morning for the benefit of men on their way to work, and would stay open throughout the day until around midnight. During the First World War Lloyd George radically revised this system (and to this day is warmly remembered by publicans, if not blessed by their customers); but this was still a decade or so away when we moved to Whittington Moor. Finally, there was one other factor to add to the complications of my mother and father's life; my mother was pregnant again.
All of this had a significant effect on my own early years. For there was no question about it, young Joe - pleasant enough lad though he doubtless was! - was a bit of a burden. Accordingly, an important decision was taken: I would have to go to live with my mother's parents about two miles away in Newbold.
I cannot say with what heart-searching and reluctance this step was taken. But from my point of view it was not at all as bad as it might sound. Children are very adaptable and though the decision might seem odd in retrospect it has to be remembered that the 1970s are not the 1900s and in working communities all over the north of England similar arrangements, involving what sociologists now like to call 'the extended family', were in being. In short, though obviously not normal it was far from being eccentric. It certainly seemed perfectly normal to me.
I enjoyed life very much at Newbold, though my memories of those very early years are few. One fact which no doubt helped was that there, in contrast to the Travellers' Rest, I had someone to play with; my grandparents' youngest boy, Tom, though older than me was still young enough to be company. In the somewhat remote and small communities of Whittington Moor and Newbold there was little enough for youngsters to do, and doing it alone could be a depressing experience.
My grandfather was a very fine chap whom I admired enormously. He lived an exemplary life and was an assiduous church warden for many years. In fact he had his own two-seater pew in church and very often took me along with him.
Despite the geographical closeness of Newbold and Whittington Moor they might have been in separate worlds for all the contact that there was between them. I went to the little Newbold council school (where it would be less than true to say that I distinguished myself) while the children that I had known at Whittington Moor went to their own educational establishment. And it was very seldom that I saw my mother and father.
It was not until I was about eleven years old that I returned to the family fold, by which time a baby boy had been born (and, sadly, had died after some eighteen months) and my eldest sister, Gladys, had arrived on the scene. The reason for my return was simply that the labours of my mother and father had not been in vain; in the intervening years they had amassed enough money to be able to take another pub. Perhaps, to be more accurate, I should say that it was my mother who had saved up the money and with great ingenuity kept the knowledge from my father, for I was later told that it was with some astonishment that he learned of the family fortune. However, the result was the same; they were able to move into the Queens Hotel where my mother could afford additional domestic help and thus cope with having me around - especially since I was old enough to be useful in the pub.
In one way the move was not a big step for my parents to take; the Queens Hotel was just about two hundred yards from the Travellers' Rest. But in another way it was a big step since the new pub operated in an altogether superior league. Apart from being much larger it boasted three key attractions lacking in the Travellers' Rest:
A licence for spirits (so that my father, who drank only Scotch, could at least entertain his cronies in his own pub); A crown bowling green (with tables round it at which the posh customers could eat and drink); And a full-size billiard-table.