Knowing the appalling tricks of fate, I half expected my card-sharping crony to be working the Stirling Castle of the Union Castle line when I boarded her on May 7th, 1937 at the end of my successful defence of the snooker title. I can only say it was lucky for him that he was not.
I was on my way to South Africa, under the auspices of Thurston's. Out there they were very enthusiastic about both billiards and snooker, but their skill lagged some considerable way behind their enthusiasm. In strict contrast to my ill-fated Australian venture I was assured of a royal progress through the country, with the red carpet and, better still, a full engagement book at every port of call. To be precise I had a diary listing eighty-five exhibitions in 105 days during which I was scheduled to travel from Cape Town to Salisbury, in what was then Southern Rhodesia, and then back to Cape Town.
At least I was able to relax aboard ship during the outward voyage, sailing along under blue skies with, mercifully, the sea as smooth as a billiard-table. And for a week or two I hoped that this would be as near to a billiard-table as I would get! Instead, I took my exercise by indulging in deck tennis and quoits. I was in the championship class at neither, but I was enjoying myself, reflecting that life as a professional snooker player was not without its compensations after all. Nor did I lack company; the entire Aberdeen football team and officials were on board and throughout the journey they regaled me with Scottish stories. My favourite concerned the three Aberdeen brothers who one Friday received word that their father was ill over in Glasgow. To save money, one of the brothers was deputised to go over to see him and to send back word by telegram - always remembering that he could send only nine words for sixpence. On the Saturday night the two remaining brothers received their telegram. It read:
'Arrived. Father dead. Funeral Wednesday. Rangers 2 Celtic 1.' On the way to South Africa we called at Madeira for five hours and here the president and committee of the local sports club came out to the Stirling Castle in their launch in order to whisk me off on a lightning tour of the island. My most vivid recollections are of the flowers that abounded and of their drivers who must surely have been the maddest in the world. I was shown the club-house which boasted two handsome English billiard-tables on which they performed with the good old ivories. However their standard was not earth-shattering. The club secretary confided to me that in their local billiards championship, finished only a few days earlier, a break of 15 brought the house down.
I had the warmest of welcomes at Cape Town at the hands of Mr S. B. H. Gillett, son of Sidney Gillett, managing director of Thurston's, and the committee of the Western Province Billiard Control Association of which he was chairman. And for two days thereafter I was shown the sights - including the inevitable but still unforgettable cable car trip up Table Mountain. But after this it was down to work, the first job being to sample the hardware. The tables that I tried all seemed very fast, the dry climate keeping them in good trim, but for the most part they had the old-fashioned pocket openings which was something of a disappointment to me since they were not as conducive to potting as the modern pockets back home. When asked my opinion I told the authorities there to modernise themselves and give their people a chance to carve out better breaks for themselves. I also found that various makes of snooker-balls were in use which, with their inevitable differences in density, made judgement that much harder for me as I switched from one type to another. The combination of pockets and balls meant a worrying few matches at the beginning of my tour, as I strived so hard to give the spectators 1,000 breaks at billiards and centuries at snooker - without being able to succeed. Not that anyone complained. The South Africans themselves, like the men of Madeira, had so much to learn, not only about the finer points but about the basic skills, that my play, below par though it was, was a revelation to them. In Western Province at that time the highest recorded billiards break was 125 and the highest snooker break made against me was 34 - and even then, with the additional advantage of a 35 start, my opponent lost.
My first engagement was at Cape Town's Lord Milner hotel where hundreds of people were unable to gain admission and stood about on the pavement outside waiting for news of my performance to be relayed by bush telegraph. And inside, the room was so packed that I often had difficulty finding enough space for cueing. Still, I managed to make a break of 756; having lost the white at 681 I continued with losing hazards off the red until I reached the maximum of 25. This I followed with two adequate snooker breaks of 54 and 72. Both performances were greeted with rapturous applause; they had never seen anything like it.
Exhibition games followed at the Junior Civil Service Club, the Criterion Hotel, the Municipal Recreation Club, Duke's Regimental Institute, the Claremont Club and the Central Hotel. Playing to packed houses all the way. My session at the Regimental Institute aroused so much interest in advance that it was transferred to a large drill hail and, judging from the attendance, the Regiment was all present and correct. In the second week, playing a public exhibition at the Royal Hotel, Wynberg, I settled down to something like my usual form at snooker. On the first day I made a break of 76 and the next afternoon, playing against local amateurs, I made breaks of 75, 47 and 85 in consecutive visits to the table. My opponents in these three games made 10 points between them. Nevertheless I came to the conclusion that the average standard of snooker in Western Province was better than the average standard of billiards. Most of their billiards stroke play was good enough but they failed dismally to control the ball. Top-of-the-table play seemed a closed book to them - largely, I think, because they had never had the opportunity of seeing it exploited by top players.
A thirty-hour train journey saw me in Johannesburg with a full month's strenuous diary still ahead of me. My programme was confined to private exhibitions and included social clubs, hotels, recreation clubs and even Pretoria Prison - albeit the officers' club. The gold mines were, of course, well represented - Dominion Reefs Sports Club, Crown Mines Staff Mess, Modderfontein Dynamite factory, Wit Deep Employee's Society, Simmer and Jack Recreation Club, Krugersdorp Germison and Nourse Mines and many more. Allan Prior, the South African amateur champion, was a frequent opponent during this period.
I opened at the Rand Club, the most exclusive club in South Africa, with a billiards break of 458 and a snooker break of 63. It was a good beginning to the second leg of my tour. But the high-water mark came at Pretoria Prison where, in a game against J. van der Westhuizen, I established a new South African snooker record with a break of 120 - potting fourteen reds followed by eight blacks and six pinks plus the yellow, green, brown and blue.
This, I am happy to say, broke Walter Lindrum's existing South African record of 114.
My billiards form, too, improved during my tour of the Rand. When playing Prior at the Sub-Niger Recreation Club I knocked up 1,064 points in an hour to Prior's 123, ending with a seven minute break of 273 with which the marker could scarcely keep pace. And at the South African Club breaks of 579 and 312 helped me to 1,135 points in the hour. I concluded my first series of engagements in Johannesburg by playing a three-day billiards match, under the auspices of the Transvaal Billiard Control Board, against a team comprising Allan Prior and two other leading amateurs, S. Cranko and Gus Bowlly. They played me one day each and I conceded their team 1,500 points. On day one I made 886 to Cranko's 73, on day two 921 to Prior's 46 and finished the third day, in which Bowily scored 16, the winner by 2,804 to the amateur's 1,635.
On that note I set off for Natal to fulfil engagements in Durban, Newcastle, Pietermaritzburg and Dundee. It was in the Midlands Club in Pietermaritzburg that I exceeded my personal snooker best with a break of 141 - fifteen reds, twelve blacks, three blues, and all the colours. As I knew the table was not a championship table there was no chance of this break being recognised as a record, but it was heartening all the same and caused a sensation in South Africa which served only to enhance my tour.
This continued at the Limbe Country Club near Blantyre in what was then Nyasaland, which I was able to visit only thanks to a plane being laid on by the promoters. But it was worth while; I was the first professional to play in the country. Afterwards I flew to Southern Rhodesia for exhibitions in Bulawayo, Salisbury and Kimberley before returning to Johannesburg to play a series of public games against the South African pro F. Ferraro who used a 13 ounce cue that looked like a twig. I beat him over ten sessions, conceding him 35 points per game. And so on to Cape Town from which I set sail on September 10th aboard the Arundel Castle.
On the voyage home I was able to look back on what had been a successful tour - and not only from my own point of view. At that time in South Africa there was an annual tax of £10 per table in public halls and of £17 105 in hotels, which effectively confined the game to clubs and recreation rooms. And various newspaper writers commented towards the end of my trip that it was now impossible to get a game on club tables without booking days in advance. Furthermore, as I left, the South African amateur billiards championship was revived after a lapse of many years and the Western Province had just inaugurated a snooker championship which was drawing a phenomenal number of entries. If South Africa, as well as myself, had benefited from my visit then so much the better.
Wherever I went during my tour in the summer of 1937 I was urged to 'come back soon' and indeed a return visit was fixed a couple of seasons later. But with the war clouds gathering over Europe I was in two minds whether to risk it; hospitable and beautiful though the country was - and even if Prime Minister Herzog did wish to stay neutral - I did not particularly want to get stuck there for an indeterminate period, not knowing what was happening back home.
But in the event in 1939 I set sail aboard the Stirling Castle and crossed my fingers. If anything, this second visit was even more successful than its forerunner. On the first week in Cape Town I made my ninety-ninth century snooker break and wherever I went afterwards everyone was on tenterhooks for me to notch up the magical hundred 100s. But although I reached the nineties on half a dozen occasions I never did manage it in that summer of '39. However, I did make a break which in its curious way was a personal record. I had arrived in an up-country club to fulfil my usual programme, an hour's billiards and two or three frames of snooker, when the secretary took me aside and informed me that they did not play orthodox snooker in their club. Their game was a sort of volunteer snooker in which any ball could be potted any number of times. The secretary further hinted that he had lined up an opponent who was pretty hot at this local speciality - so much so that he might be able to give me a start, though if I insisted I could play level. I said I thought I might risk it and, as modestly as I could, I asked him what the black counted. He answered: 'Seven. And you can pot it as often as you like.'
I gave my opponent the opening shot to see what he could pull out but, perhaps because he was nervous, he missed altogether and the cue ball travelled up the table to leave me a sitting black. I thought of the many hundred times old W.J. Peall had potted the red from the same position and I set to work on the black in earnest. One or two straightforward pots to get my cue arm working, and then I introduced a few frills to keep the club members amused - a deep screw-back pot would be followed by a run-through pot off two cushions, and so on. Altogether I potted the black exactly one hundred times. The marker called my score at 700, the members applauded, and my opponent threw his handkerchief on the table.
Later, on Saturday, September 2nd, while on my way to the Mozambique port of Beira I played an evening session at Umtali in Southern Rhodesia. It was a nervous time. We all knew that war was imminent. At nine o'clock next morning, as the British ultimatum was being delivered to the Germans. I motored over to Salisbury and checked in at Meikles Hotel. It was there, sipping a gin with Mr Robinson, the manager, that we heard over the radio Chamberlain's fateful announcement that in the absence of any reply to his ultimatum Britain was at war with Germany.
I had to think furiously and quickly how best to get back to England. My one hope seemed to be to reach Cape Town and endeavour to board a ship. From Salisbury I managed to hop on a plane to Johannesburg and after a few days I reached the Cape where I found myself in luck. The Union Castle line's Cape Town Castle was about to sail and I was told it could accommodate me, although all passengers would have to wait a few days so that the armed forces could install a gun on the stern and a couple of anti-aircraft guns on the bows. This certainly served to bring home to us the reality of war, even so far from Europe, particularly since our liner was then expected to serve as armed escort to seven or eight smaller ships. At Sierra Leone we put into Freetown to collect another handful of small vessels, and thereafter appreciated the truth of the phrase that a convoy can travel only at the speed of its slowest ship. We now had some pretty sluggish tubs with us and so were forced to crawl with agonising slowness along the African coast looking for U-boats at every turn. We were all scared stiff night and day but we made it back to Southampton without incident.
war or no war, snooker went on for a little while at least; certainly up to the spring of 1940 when I was called on to defend my title for the thirteenth time. Would it be an unlucky number?
In recent years there had - thank goodness - been one or two new faces on the professional scene such as Alec Brown, a West End hotel billiards marker and a wizard potter of a ball who came into prominence around 1937. In the 1938 Gold Cup tournament he was certainly too good a player to whom to concede five blacks as I was handicapped to do and he therefore beat me in our heat at Thurston's. Not that he had everything his own way, however. I did in the end manage to win the trophy and during our heat at Thurston's he had to watch me pot every ball on the table to crack the snooker record for the eighth time, with a break of 138. I broke, Brown played for safety, I then missed a long pot, he also missed a pot to leave the red near the top left pocket - and I was away. Charlie Chambers was calling the score when the number 111 penetrated my consciousness and I realised that a new record was on. After the reds I potted eleven blacks, one pink, two blues and a green. This exceeded a break of 137 which I had made at Leicester only three weeks earlier and for which John Bisset had only just presented me with a certificate. They must have found these nibbles at the records rather exasperating; why not get the wretched 147maximum and have done with it!
In addition to Alec, there was Sidney Smith, Sydney Lee, the stylish Walter Donaldson and my younger brother Fred. And all these new faces were seen gracing (if that is the right word) the last of the Gold Cup snooker tournaments which ended in February 1940. Alec Brown took the trophy for the second year in succession with Lee as runner-up, then brother Fred and Donaldson, before Tom Newman and I, the heavily handicapped old-timers, got a look-in. Sidney Smith brought up the rear.
All of them, too, were in the running to snatch my snooker title from me after my return from South Africa, particularly Sidney Smith whom I had beaten in the finals of 1938 and 1939. But in the event it was my brother Fred, whom I had beaten in the previous year's semi-final, who came through to challenge me in 1940. And it turned out to be the toughest final of them all.
I was, of course, giving Fred a few years; I being thirty-eight and he only twenty-six. But that was all I was giving him. I know that some people have never given Fred due credit for his victories over me - he is in fact the only player ever to beat me at snooker on level terms - on the assumption that I was going easy for him. Nothing could be further from the truth, I used to give our matches everything I had.
Also contrary to popular belief I helped him very little in his playing career. I played a few games of billiards with him in the twenties but at snooker we had hardly played each other at all until our meeting in the semi-final of 1939, which was Fred's first real season. He first came to prominence as a lad of twelve in the Boys' Billiards Championship of 1925 when he lost to Sydney Lee in the semi-final. But he won the title at the next attempt in 1928 and in 1931 at Leeds he took the Junior Billiards title, an event for people between eighteen and twenty-five years of age.
I can, however, claim to have arranged his first professional engagement - at a local miners' institute - for which I, as impresario, paid him the princely sum of 5s. This, he always reckoned, was about the right price for the job. I also gave him the 17-ounce cue which he still uses; it was presented to me by the Willie Holt table makers in recognition of my 1,247 break in reply to Walter Lindrum's 4,137.
Fred was, in my opinion, the greatest technician in the profession. I have seen him make century snooker breaks from nowhere. His cue action and stance was near-perfect and when in form he never batted an eyelid or moved his head or body so much as a millimetre. This made him very hard to beat when he took it into his head to do battle. But if he had a flaw in his make-up it was a tendency to be temperamental, at times giving the impression that he could not care less. He was the best ambidextrous player in the game - very nearly as accurate with the left as with the right. And though he usually plays right-handed he is the only right-hander I know who chalks his cue with his left hand. He and I shared with father the habit of holding playing cards in our right hand and putting them down with our left, but there was nothing natural about my own left-handed play; only constant practice kept it up. To Fred it was second nature.
As far as I know Fred was the first leading professional to take to wearing spectacles during play, and I suppose I can claim a little credit here, too. In one of his earliest championship bids he was beaten in an early round by W. A. Withers who was not usually reckoned in the first rank. Indeed the previous year I had beaten him by 30 frames to 1 and felt sure that Fred could repeat this drubbing. I was therefore amazed when he was beaten.
'Why on earth were you playing so badly?' I asked afterwards with brotherly bluntness. Fred said: 'I don't seem to be seeing the balls as well as I used to.' So I packed him off to an oculist there and then. The specialist's verdict was that Fred's sight was so appalling that he was lucky to be able to see the other end of the table, never mind the balls. And so, to fulfil the specialised requirements of the professional snooker player, swivel-lens glasses were born. Fred still wears them, as does John Pulman.
Fred won the world professional snooker championship for the first time in 1948, the UK Billiards Championship in 1951 and in 1960 took the World Open Snooker title contested in Brisbane, Australia. He would, I feel sure, have been an even greater force in the game had he not practically abandoned the competition game for quite a time due largely to the fact that he and his wife Sheila ran a very large and successful hotel, the County in Llandudno.
Equally, Fred eschewed that staple of the professional's diet, exhibition work in clubs. He is a non-smoker and practically a teetotaller - which made life difficult on the club circuit. His hosts, intent on being kind and hospitable, were apt to press drinks on him. I used to experience the same situation, but while I never used to drink before a session I was always happy to down a couple when chatting to people afterwards. Fred's favourite beverage, however, was a simple cup of tea. 'A what?' they used to say.
However he enjoyed a revival of popularity when in his sixties, thanks to BBC 2's Pot Black series. He played in every Pot Black competition from 1969 to 1973, winning the 1970 and 1971 special prize for the highest break of the series. In '974 his doctors told him to take a complete rest which prevented his playing in the Pot Black matches; he had had a coronary. But it did not stop him, at the age of sixty-two, from playing in the World Championship that April when he beat the twenty-four-year-old ex-champion Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins by 15 to 14 in a tense quarter-final. Unfortunately this took it out of him rather and he lost to Ray Reardon in the semi-finals which were the next day.
I think what endeared Fred most to TV viewers was his sunny smile - even when he made a hash of things! Back in the spring of 1940, however, as I knew only too well, there was little likelihood of his making errors in our struggle at Thurston's for what the headline writers were calling 'the Davis Cup'. I took an early lead, winning eight out of the first twelve games, but after that I had to struggle for every point. Fred snookered me at the drop of a hat and never left any remotely promising position. On the last evening, which was the Wednesday just before Easter, we were level at 36 games all - with just one game left as the decider. I made a century and kept the title.
To have two brothers playing each other in a world championship remains to this day a unique event. The only occasions remotely similar were when the Charlton brothers faced each other in the FA Cup Final - but then they did bring along a few friends to help - and the 1898 men's single final at Wimbledon in which R. F. Doherty beat his brother H. L. Doherty (an esoteric one, that). It was certainly a proud night for mum when she came down to Thurston's to see the Duke of Roxburghe make the presentations.
As the war took a grip on the country the professional championships fell into abeyance. Nor were they ever quite the same afterwards. For it was in the October following that memorable final that Thurston's received its direct hit and was reduced to a shell. And along with its irreplaceable atmosphere was destroyed a priceless collection of billiards antiques on exhibition at the time in aid of the Red Cross. The devastation was total.
But the cheerful 'London can take it' attitude applied as well to the world of billiards as to other walks of life. The morning after the razing of Thurston's old Tom Reece arrived to survey the remains of the building in which he had first played in 1920. Standing in the midst of the smoking rubble he stroked his chin. 'Hmmm,' he said thoughtfully. 'It looks as if Inman was playing here last night.'