Darlington has produced champions in many sports and pastimes, and I am intensely proud of having contributed my quotum to the sporting fame of the "Rocket" town. I am one of Darlington's very own. There I was born on January 25, 1886, and until I had turned twenty-six I hardly ever slept a night anywhere else.
Like most boys of very tender years I was always on the look-out for mischief, and my particular "weakness" was to steal surreptitiously into the billiard room attached to my father's house. At first I was well spanked when caught, but never "cured," and in the end persistency won. I suppose I must have had a natural aptitude for the game, because when twelve years of age I was making my fifties, although I had to stand on a gingerbeer box to do it. Before my fourteenth birthday I had a "century" break to my credit, and at sixteen I was playing first "man" for the North-Eastern Railway Institute billiards team, and also for the Darlington Conservative Club.
About this time I was winning local handicaps of 100 up from 300 behind scratch.
Stevenson and Diggle—then touring in the district—strongly advised my people to let me take up the game as a profession, but I had just been apprenticed to the printing trade, and, very wisely I think, it was decided that I should stick to my trade. So I continued to tap the keys of a linotype in the mechanical department of "The North Star," and in my spare time tapped the billiard balls in the North-Eastern Institute or the Junior Unionist Club, learning all I could in business and in my favourite pastime.
In those youthful and, to me, cherished days my absorbing ambition was to become amateur billiards champion of England, and from what I read of the performances in that competition I thought I could win it. But the ambition had to remain unfulfilled. I could not afford the expense or the time off work, and the rules of the competition would not permit my friends to reimburse me for any portion of the expense. I thought then, and still think, the rule was grossly unjust and unfair, because it favours one section of amateurs—that section which is endowed with this world's goods and enjoys leisure time.
However, fate, chance, or luck—call it what you will—ordained that I should occupy the greater niche in the temple of billiards fame.
The famous Australian, George Gray (who had not then known defeat in this country) happened along Darlington way in the September of 1911. I was picked out to hold the other cue whilst young George showed the natives how it was done. Of local sympathy I had plenty, but one fancies it was of the pitying quality. Whilst the match was on I had to continue operating at the linotype most of the night, but despite this disadvantage I staggered the whole billiards world (and myself a little) by inflicting the first defeat upon Gray.
This result was regarded more or less as a "fluke," but—well, I repeated the performance a few days later. These two victories over the Australian prompted me to make the plunge into professionalism, with the world's championship as my beacon. In the intervening period I had my ups and downs (including one or two serious illnesses), but ever tenacious and determined to "get there," I had the honour and supreme satisfaction of gaining the title in May last, and at the same time creating a new championship record with a break of 785.
[Writing in 1911, just after he had beaten Gray, to the editor of this journal (who is also the editor of The Newspaper World) Smith (then 25) gave other interesting details of his early billiard career. After mentioning that he was a teetotaller and non-smoker, he said:— "I made my first 100 break (102), after many failures between 90 and 100. A challenge was put out for me to play any boy in England of my age, but no one accepted. I continued to improve, and could make too breaks regularly.
Just before I was fourteen years old I started work at The North Star newspaper office, where I am to this day. I was made an honorary member of the N.E.R. Institute.
" My ambition was to become amateur champion of England, but when I was between 18 and 19 years old there was such a demand for my services for exhibition games that I had to give up all thought of amateur honours. I was not able to pay my own travelling expenses, and as the rules did not even allow me train fares, I became classed as a professional."
[So perhaps The Billiard Association, in Smith's case, builded better than it knew.— Ed., B.P.]