IF I HAD ever had a coat of arms designed I think I would have included in it a spider and Robert Bruce. I did not exactly retire to a cave after my punishment at the hands of Tom Newman but, like the Scottish leader of old, I had plenty of time to reflect upon my career thus far and the possibilities for the future. And in the end, like him, I decided that I would try again - which in my case meant entering for the championship in 1927.
I had faith that I would come through eventually. And as I had never really had any money my current cash crisis did not weigh too heavily on me, though I cannot deny that a few pounds would have helped. I could see Tom Newman and Willie Smith living quite prosperously and I felt that one day I could be in the same position. It was just a matter of time and I was still young.
Throughout the summer of 1926 a friend allowed me to practise on the table of the Terminus Hotel in Brampton which he owned - a particularly useful facility since the place was just a short walk from where I was living. The weather was extremely hot, but I stayed cooped up indoors sweating conscientiously over the table.
The lads down the mines were sweating much more than I was. Their six-month strike which had led to the General Strike had ended in total defeat; they were working longer hours for less pay, the mine owners had the whip hand and nothing was going to be done to reorganise the industry or to improve conditions. Slogging away at a billiard-table was light years better than slogging away at the coal face. I was lucky.
And so the new season came round. Though my bank manager would have taken leave to doubt it I was, despite losing the 1926 final, a successful player, pressing hard on the distinguished heels of Tom and Willie. My engagement book had, in consequence, built up over the summer recess and was looking very healthy. What is more, I was feeling very healthy. This could be my season.
In the January of 1927 I accomplished a very satisfying victory over Tom Newman, a victory described by one correspondent as 'undoubtedly the best performance' of my career, while another agreed that 'of all Davis's best performances, none can rank so high as this'.
The match in question, in which Tom was giving me 3,000 in 18,000, took place over a week at Thurston's. By the end of the Thursday evening session the outlook from my point of view was far from rosy, Tom having managed to eliminate the 3,000 start he had given me, and on the Friday he began to haul away from me - though, at the end of the evening session we were both behind our schedule and so 400 points were added to each score. This meant that at the start of the final day's play on the Saturday Tom was 578 points ahead of me. This lead he increased during the afternoon's play by scoring 752 against my 450. It was all left for me to do in the evening.
My initial play in that session would not have led anyone to suppose that I was going to pull something out of the bag; both Tom and I pottered along scoring breaks in the lowly 40s and 50s. But then it began to come right for me. I hit a solid break of 510 which left me only 91 behind, and some smaller breaks thereafter were always just that little bit better than Tom's so that when my score reached 17,546 I had taken the lead again by just three points. Tom then pulled himself together and began a confident break which ran to 259 before he failed. I really thought that he would run to game on that break but there he was, stuck on 17,929. Although he visited the table again he was unable to add to his score while I, on the other hand, added a few more scoring breaks and reached game with an unfinished break of 195. I had beaten Tom by 71 points.
This did not, of course, mean that Tom was about to sell his waistcoat and wing collar, put his cue in its case and retire gracefully from the game - he had, after all, been giving me a 3,000 start - but it was another straw in the wind.
Tom was again at the receiving end in a match in Manchester in March when on the Friday of the first week I exceeded my record break of 980 against Tom Carpenter. I was 500 unfinished at the end of the afternoon and continued in full spate in the evening. But after I had topped the 980 and was teetering on the brink of the magical four-figure break which had so far eluded me I became too cautious. Rather like the 'nervous nineties' in cricket so in billiards there were the 'nervous nine hundred and nineties'. Playing from hand with the score at 992 I fluffed a simple cannon at the top end of the table - the sort of shot that I could have made blindfolded any day of the week. I was endeavouring to bring off a very thin contact with the nearest ball so as to leave me in an ideal position to polish off the remaining points. In fact I missed the first ball altogether and a groan of sympathy went round the room. Nevertheless, this break had been surpassed only once, by Willie Smith who made 1,176, since the introduction shortly before of a rule which limited to twenty-five the number of consecutive losing hazards.
This was only a matter of weeks before the 1927 Open Billiards Championship, a championship which became dominated by a stroke that was christened the pendulum stroke. The stroke was the 'invention' of Tom Reece, one of the old firm of professionals, and a man who had a strong track record of turning in freak scores.
Tom, who hailed from Oldham, never won the championship and some observers used to express surprise at this, but I am bound to say that I never considered him a truly great player. I felt that he held his cue too lightly and that his action on addressing the ball and delivering the stroke was more like using a pump handle than a piston action. Nevertheless it was Tom who, in 1907, scored the mind-boggling total of 499,135 - unfinished - using the 'anchor' or 'cradle' cannon, a stroke played from the same position each time with the two object balls dead on the angle of each corner pocket. The stroke was being used ad nauseam in the compilation of large scores and Tom decided to demonstrate how ludicrous the whole thing was. In his historic break the object balls became gradually embedded in the cloth and a track was formed along which the cue ball travelled. Tom proved his point, for the stroke was finally banned. But he was never able to claim his freak break as a world record. No one person either from the public or the Press was present for every stroke (and since it took Tom 85 hours who can blame them?).
It was just before he was due to play Mel Inman in a heat of the 1927 championship that Reece began a rumour that he was about to introduce a stroke that would stagger the world. It succeeded, much to the discomfiture of Inman, who on April 12th had to sit and watch Reece score 1,151. Afterwards Reece said, tongue in cheek: 'I used to lie awake at night thinking how to liven up billiards. Then I thought of this new stroke and practised it for hours every day until I could do it.' Altogether, he claimed, he had spent seven months bringing to perfection this secret weapon.
To me all this sounded a lot of baloney. And I found out how right I was a fortnight later when I was playing Tom Newman in the final in the Orme Hall, Manchester.
The previous day Tom Reece had begun to compile yet another break using the pendulum shot - as it had now been dubbed - which he said nobody else would be able to exploit. Playing Arthur Peall at Thurston's he reached 546 unfinished. Tom Newman and I, reading about this renewed feat, went over to the Orme Hall in the morning, determined to see what we could make of the stroke and to establish finally whether or not there was indeed any secret involved and whether or not seven months' practice was required, as Reece asserted, before one could master the stroke.
We discovered that it was, in fact, ridiculously easy for a good professional. All that was required was that the two object balls should be jammed in the jaws of a corner pocket, touching each other, so that the cue ball could be tapped across them from one cushion to the other. It was as stupid a stroke as the anchor cannon - though rather more fatiguing since, after each stroke, one had to walk round to the other cushion in order to play the return ball. There were only two aspects of the stroke which called for skill. The first was that the balls had to be worked along the cushion into the jaws of the pocket. The second was that after twenty-five direct cannons the rules called for a cushion cannon - a stroke which necessitated playing the cue ball on to the cushion before it skimmed both object balls, something which called for fine judgement. But apart from these points the pendulum stroke was one of total monotony for players and spectators alike.
Later that day, while the luckless Arthur Peall in London was sitting through yet another session monopolised by Tom Reece, I in Manchester found myself falling farther and farther behind against Tom Newman, my chances of the title receding into the distance.
When, in the afternoon session, Tom added to an unfinished break to lead me by 1,589 points, I decided that the situation called for desperate measures. And so, on my second visit to the table and much to the puzzlement of the spectators, I manoeuvred the balls into the jaws of a pocket and began to use the pendulum cannon!
I was not sure how long I could keep it up, for although simple in itself it called in the long term for a good deal of concentration. But after half an hour I had reached the 500 mark and it was not long before I exceeded Tom's English record of 1,379. At 1,743 I disturbed the red, but soon tickled it back into position and by the end of the afternoon session, I had reached 2,239 unfinished and had managed to overhaul Tom by 630 points. The only difficulty I had was in the cushion shots since it so fell out that I had to make them all left-handed. Meanwhile down at Thurston's Arthur Peall sat out the entire session as Tom Reece plodded to the 1,200 mark without disturbing the position of the object balls. Said Arthur at one point: 'If this sort of thing goes on, I'm off to the pictures to wait.'
That evening I felt all set to continue indefinitely when I hit the red fractionally too fully so that my cue ball was thrown off the white - and so Tom was back in the game. I had scored 2,501 - a world record.
Tom himself was playing a great many close cannons at this stage and achieved breaks of 354 and 253, largely by this method. At one point he caused some hilarity when, during a run of close cannons, he finished with the balls in the jaws of a pocket. He was just about to make his stroke when he lowered his cue and said to me over his shoulder:
'Is this the right corner?'
The spectators roared with laughter and I replied: That's between Reece and me.'
'You mean it's a secret?' countered Tom in mock surprise.
Later, towards the end of the session, when Tom was still 500 points behind, the marker inadvertently credited Tom with my score. The crowd shouted out: 'Wrong number' but before the marker could rectify his error Tom chimed in.
'It's all right, marker,' he said. 'I have no objection.'
After the session, referee Arthur Goundrill gave his verdict:
'In the interests of the game the pendulum stroke must be abolished or limited to a small proportion of the total which Davis secured. It may be effective in running up the score but it is extremely tedious to watch.'
Despite these sage remarks, the headlines next morning waxed lyrical, talking of a 'splendid effort', 'billiards sensation' and 'amazing record'. Tom Reece, thus relieved of his world record so rapidly after having secured it, challenged me to a match to see who was the best practitioner of the pendulum stroke. But we all knew that the stroke would be instantly barred from any serious match. I certainly agreed with this and with everything that Arthur Goundrill had said. My record was merely a freak - just as Tom Reece's 499,000 with the anchor cannon had been a freak twenty years earlier. Nobody wept as the stroke was rapidly buried by the legislators of the game.
I had had the last laugh on Tom Reece who had so publicly trumpeted the uniqueness and difficulty of his 'new' shot. But Tom Newman certainly had the last laugh of all. For, without resorting to the gimmickry of the pendulum shot, he pulled back the lead which the stroke had given me and finished the match the winner by 1,237 points. I had failed again to take the championship.
There was no doubt that Tom was on top form for the match - and at his best he was still, at this particular juncture, a little better than I was. However I think I can justifiably claim that one reason for my defeat, certainly for the fact that I fell so far behind in the early stages, was a disaster of nightmare proportions: my cue vanished.
Tom and I arrived at the Orme Hall together on the Tuesday afternoon and went to the dressing-room where we had, as usual, left our cues overnight. Tom's case was lying there; mine was missing. I looked all over the dressing-room - which did not take long - then went in search of the caretaker, but he was totally baffled and could offer no explanation as to what might have happened. It was only a matter of minutes from the time scheduled for the start of the session. I began to panic. I knew that my chances of beating Tom would be absolutely nil without my cue - and what of the future? All these thoughts rushed through my mind.
We delayed the start of the match by quarter of an hour and scoured the entire building without finding a trace of cue or case. Finally the manager of the hail telephoned for the police and I left the search to them; the show had to go on. My spare cue also was in the missing case so I was completely stranded. Tom kindly lent me his own second cue but it was so different from mine (for one thing it was, of course, significantly longer) and I was so flustered by the events of the previous half hour that I played that afternoon like a complete novice. I lost about 1,000 points to Tom and was plunged into a deep depression.
Happily, at the end of the session my cue was retrieved. The caretaker had found the case propped in a corner of the boiler-house when he went down to stoke up. I was so overwhelmed with relief that I was not over-concerned as to how and why it had so strangely disappeared. Perhaps it was just as well since the police were stumped. They could only conclude that someone in the betting world had hidden it in order to make sure that I did not beat Tom and dethrone him as champion.
I suppose, in a way, I should have been flattered....