IF you mix together Sir Neville Chamberlain, the rainy season in India and a mess billiard-table, then add a dash of the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, what do you get?
The answer to this recondite riddle is, quite simply, snooker.
Let me explain.
I suppose I must have read or heard a dozen different circumstantial accounts of how the game had its inception. And I have read or heard a dozen other accounts flatly contradicting them. The only feature they shared was that they all came from people who 'actually knew' the true origins of the game. But I was never wholly satisfied. They always smacked of those well-worn 'true stories' which happen to the friend of an aunt or a workmate of a second cousin.
One account which laid more claim than most to serious consideration was that the game had its origin at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, where officers of the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers undertook their cadet training. This theory carried conviction since a first-year cadet at the RMA - or 'The Shop' as it was known - was called a 'snooker', this being a corruption of the original word for a beginner, 'neux'. But since the game undeniably enjoyed its initial popularity out in India, the problem for this version of the story was how to transplant the game from Woolwich. This was solved ingeniously. Lord Kitchener, it was said, copied the rules from those at 'The Shop' and took them with him to Ootacamund where he hung them in the officers' club. This version was propounded in an article in The Field in 1938. Alas, this role for Kitchener was seriously undermined shortly afterwards when General Sir Ian Hamilton wrote a letter to The Times asserting that Kitchener never visited the sub-continent until many years after snooker had become well known.
Subsequent investigation of the whole vexed question showed that there was indeed a tenuous but important connection with Woolwich - as Compton Mackenzie explained in his definitive account of the origins of the game given in an article in Billiard Player. He explained that out in Jubbulpore during the rains of 1875 Colonel Sir Neville Chamberlain, then a young subaltern, was becoming increasingly weary of the endless games of Black Pool with which his brother officers sought to alleviate the longueurs of the wet afternoons. He suggested introducing another coloured ball to the mess billiard-table and gradually other colours were added.
The final piece of the jigsaw puzzle was supplied one afternoon when a subaltern of the Field Battery at Jubbulpore was being entertained by the Devons and happened to tell Chamberlain about the nick-name 'snooker' given to the tyro cadets at the Royal Military Academy. Sir Neville was still alive at the time that Compton Mackenzie's article was published and was perfectly clear on the subject. Taking up the story from the moment of his chance conversation with the Field Battery subaltern, he said:
'The term was a new one to me, but I soon had an opportunity of exploiting it when one of our party failed to hole a coloured ball which was close to a corner pocket. I called out to him:
"Why, you're a regular snooker." I had to explain to the company the definition of the word and, to soothe the feelings of the culprit, I added that we were all, so to speak, snookers at the game, so it would be appropriate to call the game snooker. The suggestion was adopted with enthusiasm and the game has been called snooker ever since.'
Later, other distinguished authorities including Major-General W. A. Watson, Colonel of the Central India Horse (Sir Neville's old regiment), Major-General Sir John Hanbury Williams and Sir Walter Lawrence supported Sir Neville's claim to be the inventor of snooker. And, to my mind, the matter was clinched by the statement of Field-Marshal Lord Birdwood who recalled that when he was a subaltern in the 12th Lancers at Bangalore, the game of snooker was introduced to the mess by Sir Neville.
So much for all those people whose grandfathers were in the same regiment as a certain Captain Snooker and were actually in the billiard-room when he made up the game.
Some fifty years after the inventiveness of Chamberlain in Jubbulpore, snooker had become pretty popular in the billiard-halls of Britain. But among the majority of professional billiards players it was still looked down on as an impure knock-about game appealing only to those lacking the skill to play billiards. I well remember one occasion - even later - when I walked into the Midland Hotel, Manchester, where I was playing a snooker exhibition, only to find that old die-hard Tom Reece sitting there (with, as it happened, the young jockey Gordon Richards). As I entered the lobby Tom called out in a loud voice: 'Where's your ruddy corduroys and clogs, then?' He hated the 'tomato' game, as he liked to call it.
However, I had a feeling in my bones that snooker was the game of the future. This was not incredible intuition, merely a sharp observation of the paying customers.
In the twenties, if a billiards session finished earlier than expected, the organisers would ask the players to throw in a quick game of snooker as a closer - just so that the paying customers felt they were getting value for money. But eventually I had the feeling that the customers were actually willing us to gallop through the billiards so that they would have a game of snooker to watch. Finally, I noticed that the snooker games were actually being accorded the honour of a mention by the billiards correspondents, albeit as tailpieces to their main billiards reports. This was not an invariable practice, but if a snooker game was out of the ordinary it would be written up. I remember that in 1925 after a match with Tom Newman I knocked the snooker balls about with such great aplomb that I made a break of 96 - which was said to be a record (though I am not quite sure who was actually keeping the records!). The performance was described in one journal as 'sensational' and 'a really great performance', though only as the last paragraph of a lengthy analysis of the billiards scene. I expect that if the newspaper's sub-editor has been tight for space on that page he would have lopped off the final paragraph and my earth-shaking achievement would have been lost for all time.
It is not hard to see why snooker was so popular with the spectators. The rules are basically extremely simple, there is a great deal going on, it is visually stimulating and the snookers add an element of uncertainty and excitement. It can be appreciated, though in different ways, by experts and non-players alike. The overwhelming success of the BBC's television series Pot Black - especially when seen in colour - is merely a reaffirmation of the spectator interest inherent in the game.
Billiards, in contrast, had none of these advantages. Since there were only three balls there was not a great deal going on at the table, it was not visually stimulating and the skills required were such that an expert eye was needed to appreciate them fully. Finally, the rules were extremely complex.
Not, of course, that there was ever anything static about the rules. As I showed with my pendulum break, and as others had demonstrated before me, it was possible to make a monkey out of the rules and the Control Council were always ready to intervene in order to rectify matters. They took the view, rightly, that billiards supremacy was not to be handed on a plate to someone specialising in one stroke.
There are three methods of scoring in billiards: the cannon (striking the other two balls in succession with your cue ball), the winning hazard (pocketing your opponent's ball or the red) and the losing hazard (pocketing your own ball after touching one of the others). And the history of the game shows that, in turn, each of the scoring strokes has been exploited by specialists - sometimes to such an extent as to make a mockery of the game.
Consequently the rules were amended periodically to cramp the style of the offending player. The skill of the man who could mark up thousands of points by using one particular stroke may have been admirable in itself, but it threatened to strangle the game. Furthermore it made fair comparisons between players very difficult, and sometimes impossible. Away back in 1885, for instance, W. J. Peall potted the red off the spot 634 times in a break of 1,922 while five years later in his famous break of 3,304 (watched by the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII) he potted the red no fewer than 1,058 times - and 400 of these were in straight succession. It took him three days. It is impossible to compare such performances with those of John Roberts junior, to whom the stroke was anathema. And so a feud built up, for after the spot strokes were barred Peall claimed that he must still be regarded as champion while Roberts, who had been instrumental in getting the stroke barred, insisted that all efforts until then were void.
Roberts's policy, surely the right one in the interests of the game itself, was best summed up when a friend queried Roberts's wisdom in attempting, unnecessarily, a particularly difficult shot. Roberts answered: 'I know that such a shot is full of risks, but it is full of poetry, the charming poetry of motion. And, to my mind, playing it or leaving it alone marks the distinction between a workman and an artist.'
After the banning of the spot stroke, the determined terrier-like Charles Dawson - who had been on the receiving end of Peall's 3,304 - startled the billiards world with a break of 23,769 using the anchor cannon. Shortly after this, it was the turn of Willie Cook. Cook had already carved a small niche in the history of the game by beating John Roberts senior, the 'Father of Billiards', in 1870 thereby ending his dominance of the game and opening up the championship to be contested between himself, John Bennett and John Roberts junior. Now Cook put Dawson's break in the shade by achieving with the anchor cannon the astounding total of 42,746, for which he was duly awarded a certificate by the Billiards Association. (It was, of course, left to Tom Reece to demonstrate with his 499,000 - odd points, the absurdity of this method of scoring.)
Next in chronology came the 'Red Ball King', George Gray, whom I had watched so admiringly as a boy. Between November 1910 and March 191 I he made twenty-one four-figure breaks, the vast majority of these points being obtained by the expedient of going in-off the red into a middle pocket and bringing the red back off the top cushion for a repetition of the stroke. On one occasion, in an unfinished break of 2,196, he scored 1,944 off the red. This, like the anchor cannon, was in turn barred. But despite the best endeavours of the authorities in squashing specialist strokes the expertise of players became such that many games were little more than clinical exercises by past-masters, savoured by the aficionados, but by few others.
Yet we were now in the 1920s. The Victorian age was over. The First World War had begun and had finished. It had changed many things - indeed it had changed society itself - and billiards was not immune from the new exuberant questioning spirit that somehow was in the air. Many of the senior players were, of course, products of the Victorian John Roberts era and applied the standards that had then obtained. I was a different generation altogether and saw the profession and its future differently.
Billiards did not die overnight. The game still had plenty of supporters and a flourishing Press, and the arrival in this country towards the end of the decade of the Australian, Walter Lindrum, began a period in which the game enjoyed possibly its greatest popularity. Nevertheless the writing was on the wall. And I was one of those who were reading it.
When I used to manage Ernest Rudge's saloon at Hasland I played quite a bit of snooker, along with pink pool (the game in which the miners made me play left-handed) and pyramids. This last, like pink pool, was basically a gambling game played with just the fifteen red balls. Every player paid fifteen agreed units - a penny, say - into the kitty and anyone who potted a red drew out one unit for every person playing. All this was, naturally, good training for snooker. And training was certainly needed. What Tom Reece and his fellow denigrators of the game did not realise is that in many respects snooker calls for even greater control and touch than billiards, and especially for greater accuracy of aim. In playing billiards you can fall asleep making a cannon and lose your position in the process but the cannon is nevertheless made and there is nearly always some recovery stroke that can be made to continue the scoring and hold on to the break. But at snooker, if your concentration strays or your aim is not a hundred per cent accurate the ball does not go down and the break is at an end.
I remember once, many years later, leaving the Leicester Square billiard-hall after a session. The crowd was filing out and as they did so I heard one man say to his friend: 'Joe can make those balls do everything but talk.'
'Yes,' said the second man, 'it's a gift; something a person is born with - like Caruso's voice.
I smiled. It just is not true. If I were born with one asset which was of use to me as a professional it was a hefty slice of determination coupled with self-discipline. In my early days in London the brilliant cartoonist Tom Webster - also a great critic of the game - said in one of his drawings that as a billiards player I was as crude as a navvy but that he liked the cut of my jaw which, he prophesied, would take me to the top.
It was this natural aggressiveness of style, allied with my one-eyed stance and my earlier practice at potting balls, that suited me so fortuitously to snooker. Other players, even Tom Newman for instance, were not as well equipped. He had altogether the wrong action for the sort of no-nonsense striking that snooker calls for. Perhaps, also, my height was a help; I know that W. J. Peall, the 'Mighty Atom', always reckoned that his lack of inches assisted his potting ability. But whatever the reasons for my aptitude, the simple fact remained that I had it and that it was therefore in my interests to foster the game.
At this point, there came on the scene my very good friend Bill Camkin, who had a firm in the billiards trade in Birmingham. Like me he felt that the sheer speed of snooker and the violent somersaults in the scores caused by the high values of the last few balls made the game a first-class spectator sport.
Yet there was no professional snooker championship at that time, even though there had been an amateur competition for ten years. One day Bill and I were bemoaning the fact and I said to him: 'I wonder why the Billiards Association doesn't stage a championship. It doesn't make sense.'
Bill answered simply: 'Well, perhaps they would if we put it to them.'
Bill was a first-rate organiser and not a man to let the grass grow under his feet. So I immediately found myself drafting a letter to the BA&CC and drawing up conditions which Bill and I thought would be suitable for staging a championship. It was as Bill had said. The Association fell in with our proposal and fairly soon afterwards issued the conditions and invited entries. The first professional snooker championship was born.
It was held in May 1927, just after my failure in the billiards championship in March. But, apart from myself, the leading professionals steered well clear of this presumptuous event. For the first four or five years the contestants were players such as Tom Carpenter, Fred Lawrence, Joe Brady, the Irish champion, Tom Newman's brother Stanley, Alec Mann, a Birmingham pro who was making big breaks in local games, and Albert Cope, the manager of the Midland Hotel billiard-room in Birmingham. In the final I met another leading light, Tom Dennis, who had a billiards club in Shakespeare Street, Nottingham, and it was there that we played our match of 31 frames. But despite Tom's home advantage I won by 20 to ii and so took Britain's first professional snooker title.
Quite what I had won apart from the title was not immediately apparent. The entrance fee had been set at ten guineas each. To offset this, it is true, there was my share of the gate receipts during the three-day final but since the competition was in its infancy we did not feel it appropriate to make swingeing charges and so all that remained for me was £6 10s.
What of the entrance fees, which by rights should also have been mine on winning the title? Well, the Billiards Association were chronically poor and so they used all the money themselves - to buy the trophy!
After the Second World War, when I retired after twenty years as undefeated snooker champion, many friends of mine were bitterly disappointed that I was not given the trophy outright. However, when it became clear that it was not to be, a great friend of mine and supporter of the game, Austin Cams, had a whip-round among some of his friends and had a reproduction of the cup made which they presented to me. The original trophy that I and my brother pros bought out of our own pockets is still being played for.
It would be unfair to disparage the snooker title merely because it did not immediately thicken my wallet. In fact it was one of the turning points of my career. Although the achievement merited only the odd paragraph in the papers it did give me a title to tack on to my name, and that was good for business.
On the other hand, though, I was not so besotted with snooker as to forget about billiards. What I wanted - in an ideal world! - was both titles. And yet again I felt that this time, in the impending 1928 championship, I really could beat Tom Newman, who still seemed my likeliest opponent since Willie Smith was under contract to Burroughes and Watts and was not deigning to enter the competition.
I began the new season in great style by beating Tom Newman at Thurston's in October 1927. It was another headline-making match for me because during the course of it, on Thursday the 20th, I made my first 1,000 break - just. It was a horribly difficult break because I had reached the nervous nine hundred and nineties, 991 to be precise, when the afternoon session came to a close. I therefore had to chew my fingers until the next session to see if I could finally make the four figures - and I knew that the balls were not in a good position. Moreover, it was particularly unsettling to reflect that my afternoon total was standing at just one short of my current record. No wonder my hands were sticky.
There were no seats to be had in the famous room that evening and there was a deathly silence as I returned to the table. However, I managed to make a loser off the red, and followed it up with another loser off the red, playing from hand. I then played a loser off the white, leaving myself with a screwed loser off the white to make my 1,000. Resolutely the ball ran into the bag and a hurricane of applause broke out; I thought it would never stop. I was absolutely delighted, of course, and, perhaps inevitably, when silence fell again, my concentration was not quite a hundred per cent. Within a matter of minutes I played a rather speculative winning hazard and failed. The break had ended at 1,011.
As well as being a personal best it was also the first 1,000 break compiled under the latest BA&CC rules, introduced after the pendulum freaks of April, which now limited the number of consecutive cannons as well as consecutive hazards. A small point of additional satisfaction could be derived from the fact that I was the youngest English player to score the coveted 1,000. Even Tom Newman, who, having been taken in hand as a lad by John Roberts junior, wrought many miracles as a young man, had only marked up his first 1,000 at the age of twenty-eight. I was still only twenty-six. And Tom was kind enough to say later:
'For sheer quality, I have never seen a better break.'
As the renewed applause for the end of my break died down Tom rose to go to the table in his usual stylish manner and, turning to me, he said: 'Is it my go now? I have been waiting a long time.' He then scored two. Such is billiards.
In an attempt to cash in on my snooker title I had issued a public challenge to play anyone in the world for £100 a side in a match of 9, 15, 31 or 61 games. Furthermore, I offered to play anyone in Britain, except Willie Smith, at £25 a side in a match of 9, 15 or 31 games while conceding my opponent 12 points per game. I even went so far as to outline my billiards engagements for the season so that any likely lads in the various venues could make up their minds whether to take up my challenge when I was in their part of the world. And if they did so decide it gave them plenty of time to round up a team of backers.
One such challenge came in January 1928 when I was playing a match with Tom Newman at the Orme Hall, Manchester. There was a very promising young snooker player in the area called Fred Pugh whose friends thought that he could teach me a thing or two and who were prepared to put their money where their mouths were. I was happy to oblige, to the extent of taking Pugh on, not to the extent of letting them prove their point! It was agreed that we should play after my billiards sessions with Tom and that, for some reason or other, our match should comprise 17 frames. In the event, I had little difficulty in winning, by 13 to 4, but I have often thought that it was rather unfair on Pugh since I had the tremendous advantage of playing on the table each day before our snooker meetings. It was nonetheless satisfying to make a break of exactly 100 in one encounter during the match: after Pugh had secured two reds and a black, I polished off the rest of the reds, with a colour to each, and then added the yellow before failing to pot the green. It was a new snooker record, and another milestone.
On March 3rd came yet another: I beat my previous break of October by notching up 1,070, against Tom Newman again, in a match at Thurston's. My week's average, too, was a personal record: 105. I was striking top form and the championship was only a matter of weeks away. It was looking good.
There was one fly in the ointment, though; not only did I think I ought to be able to beat Tom, several Press commentators also thought I should be able to beat him. I was therefore starting to some extent as favourite, rather than underdog - an unnerving experience. It is one thing to start as favourite when you are champion, but quite another to start as favourite when you are being asked to defeat the defending champion. I was very nervy indeed as the championship drew near.
Every hundred-up billiards player knows the difference between an ordinary knockabout and the club handicap match, and much the same can be said for any other sport, be it golf, tennis, bowls or tiddlywinks. Not only is there the enhanced importance of the game itself, there are the spectators watching every move like hawks.
Throughout the fortnight of the 1928 championship I was under terrific strain. For days I ate nothing from breakfast to supper and between the sessions I would roam around the streets in a dream or sit in St James's Park staring into space, thinking of the shots I had played, the shots I might have to play, and wondering whether I would ever lift Tom's title. If a friend had not taken me in hand, and forced me back to a normal way of living, I honestly think I would have cracked under the strain.
While I was at the table in Thurston's, of course, the strain did not show to the spectators - nor to the Press, who insisted on congratulating us for our sporting spirit and cool play! Tom had not been well for some time and, sadly, was not at his best as the match wore on. On the final Saturday I began the penultimate session with a lead of 427 which I increased in half an hour to around 900. Tom hit back with a couple of good scores, but I was still holding my own and we finished the session with me on 15,333 and Tom on 14,781, a lead of close on 600. In the evening, however, as crowds gathered on the pavement outside to hear the result, poor Tom collapsed altogether, giving what he described as a 'pitiable' display. It was a verdict no one, however generous, would seek to disagree with; he marked up only 93 in six innings at the table, missing at least a couple of shots which my father could have made blindfolded. Meanwhile, I coasted home to the final score of 16,000 to take the title which Tom had held on six occasions and, at twenty-seven, I was the same age as he had been when he first won it in 1921. It was a turning point in Tom's career. For although he was still only thirty-four and continued to play marvellous billiards he never again held the title.
Only fractionally less delighted than I was at my victory were the fifty or so Chesterfield supporters, led by Charles Toseland, who had faithfully accompanied me to the Manchester final the previous year and who had given me unswerving support in London on this occasion. By way of a small celebration they had lunch with pop and me in the Golden Cross hotel, managed by the BA&CC chairman John Bisset, where I had been staying.
But celebrations on an altogether vaster scale were in store for me in Chesterfield when the LMS train steamed into the station at twenty to seven on Monday evening. It is difficult in this day and age to comprehend the astonishing enthusiasm that seemed to infect everyone in the town. It was just as though the winners of the FA Cup were returning home - and considering that the Chesterfield club was never likely to achieve this status, perhaps my victory was the next best thing; certainly the huge billiards trophy is every bit as impressive as the FA Cup.
Even before the train had chugged to a halt a crowd of people had swarmed on to the platform and as my father and I stepped down cheers rang out. Engulfed in a sea of singing, swaying, chanting supporters we were swept out into the station square where I was given another rapturous ovation by a crowd of five thousand. A police cordon then helped pop and me to reach an open charabanc which stood in the middle of the square and I was invited to climb aboard by the Deputy Mayor, Alderman Cropper, whom my father and I knew well. Addressing the crowd, he declared that although no official welcome had been planned he was glad to welcome me home on behalf of the whole town - which was as near an official welcome as one could get. He added, to a mixture of laughter and cheers, that Chesterfield could produce a billiards champion even though it could not manage to produce a champion football team. My own few words of reply were drowned at every syllable by cheers and applause. I was moved by the warmth and spontaneity of the whole reception.
At this point the charabanc began to rumble off towards the Red Lion in Vicar Lane. At the head marched the Hasland Prize Band, which had been engaged by Charles Toseland, and by the sides of the vehicle surged the crowds, with several small boys looking as though they would be run over ten times a minute. Corporation Street had been closed to traffic so that we could make our majestic progress and outside the Hippodrome hung a giant banner saying 'Bravo Joe'. Down in Vicar Lane all the buildings were bedecked with streamers and bunting and our party was cheered to the echo. Even when we were safely inside the hotel for a meal hundreds of people were milling around outside so that I felt obliged to make an appearance at an upstairs window and say a few more words.
I told them: 'In my early billiards career I had three ambitions. One was to make a thousand break, another was to make a hundred break at snooker and the other was to win the billiards championship. I have realised these three things. Now I am going to try to retain this trophy for ten years.'
And so an unforgettable day came to an end.
I was kept frantically busy from that moment until the end of the season on matches and exhibitions great and small. My very first game after winning the title was, I remember, a game at the local Police Institute in aid of the British Legion. But within a week it was time for me to defend my snooker title. This time my opponent in the final was my old rival Fred Lawrence who played extremely well and made me sweat it out. But in the end I came through by 16 games to 13. Happily the finances worked out rather more favourably than in 1927; I netted purse money of £32 plus £26 12 s 6d in gate receipts.
But, most of all, I was both billiards and snooker champion. The first man ever.