Pots of Gold E-Book

David Hendon

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 428

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'THE UNDISPUTED NUMBER ONE OF SNOOKER BOOKS' BARRY HEARN 'Terrific' Phil Yates, snooker broadcaster 'Must-read … Enthralling' Neal Foulds, former world no.3  'Perfection!' Alan McManus, former Masters champion  'A truly great read' Hazel Irvine, sports presenter 'Read this book for the story, which is spectacular; the analysis, which is surprisingly cogent; and for the deep knowledge and love of the game, which are hard to resist' Spectator Snooker is a British success story, a working-class game which became a multi-million pound professional sport, exported to the world. A sublime test of skill and nerve, it has fascinated succeeding generations of players and spectators. In this new history of the sport, David Hendon shows how the fortunes of snooker have mirrored wider changes in British society. Beginning as an upper-class pursuit invented in the British Raj, snooker was taken up in the working men's clubs of industrial Britain. It nearly ceased to exist as an organised sport in the late 1950s, before reviving and becoming big business in the Thatcher era: 18.5m people watched the famous 1985 World Championship final. Since then, it has become a global sport, most notably in China and the Far East. Weaving the big picture with the personal stories of snooker's big characters, from Alex Higgins and Jimmy White to Ronnie O'Sullivan, anyone who has ever wielded a cue or breathlessly watched a marathon safety exchange will love this book.

Leseprobe

For June and Alan Hendon

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Singin’ in the Rain

2. The Man Comes Around

3. Here Comes the Sun

4. Clubland

5. Like a Hurricane

6. The Modern World

7. Brothers in Arms

8. Back to Black

9. This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us

10. My Generation

11. All Around the World

12. Read All About It

13. Common People

14. Girls Just Want to Have Fun

15. Rocket Man

16. For Tomorrow

Bibliography

Notes

Plates Section

‌Acknowledgements

Pots of Gold contains interviews I have conducted with the following: Peter Ainsworth, Stuart Bingham, Steve Davis, Ding Junhui, Ken Doherty, Trevor East, Peter Ebdon, Reanne Evans, Clive Everton, Neal Foulds, Barry Hearn, Stephen Hendry, John Higgins, Hazel Irvine, Joe Johnson, Alan McManus, Shaun Murphy, Ronnie O’Sullivan, John Parrott, Ray Reardon, Neil Robertson, Mark Selby, Dennis Taylor, Cliff Thorburn, Judd Trump, John Virgo, Mark Watterson, Mark Williams and Phil Yates.

My thanks to them all for their time and insight. Thanks also to Ivan Hirschowitz, head of media at World Snooker Tour, for his assistance in setting up several of the interviews.

I would like to thank the Swift Team – Diana Broccardo, Mark Richards, Lucie Ewin, Rachel Nobilo, Kathryn Jarvis, Jess Gulliver, Ian Bahrami and Liz Hudson – for their enthusiasm, support and professionalism, and also George Owers, who originally commissioned this book.

‘Let’s to billiards.’

Cleopatra to Charmian, Act II, Scene V, Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare (1623)

‘Pot as many balls as you can.’

John Virgo, Big Break (BBC TV, 1991–2002)

‌Introduction

It is September 1987, and I’m eleven years old, standing in front of my new classmates on the first day of ‘big’ school. We have been asked to introduce ourselves by talking about our favourite hobbies. I have chosen snooker.

1987. The year President Reagan told the USSR’s Mikhail Gorbachev to ‘tear down this wall’ in Berlin. The year Margaret Thatcher’s imperious reign as prime minister continued with a third general election triumph. The year of a terrible ferry disaster in Zeebrugge, a deadly hurricane British weather forecasters failed to predict, a shocking fire at King’s Cross Station, the debut of The Simpsons on Tracey Ullman’s comedy show and the stock market crash of Black Monday.

That is the outside world, but my world is snooker. Steve Davis is the reigning world champion. Alex Higgins cannot play in a ranking event for another two months after being banned for assaulting an official the previous year. Stephen Hendry, at eighteen, is a month away from winning his first major title. Ronnie O’Sullivan is an eleven-year-old prospect who regularly beats adults. And here’s me, shuffling to the front of the classroom, clutching a few notes and hoping not to stumble over my words.

As I shyly begin to speak, I detect no scorn or even surprise in the eyes of those staring back at me. To be British and interested in snooker in 1987 is nothing out of the ordinary, whatever your age. The game is prominent on all four television channels, enjoying an unlikely honeymoon with the public, having emerged from obscurity to become the biggest sport on TV. Its leading players are household names, regular fixtures on newspaper front pages and in demand for chat shows, entertainment and children’s programmes, endorsements and personal appearances.

It’s a far cry from the first flowerings of the professional game in the 1920s, when snooker appeared likely to be nothing more than a sideshow, a curiosity with its own distinct subculture and no threat to the established sports, many hewn from public schools. But that was before television, before everything.

This book is a look back at the first hundred years of professional snooker and something of a love letter to a sport which has continued to fascinate me long into adulthood. A British game, exported to the wider world over time, it has survived and adapted to changes in society and its attitudes throughout the past century, retaining a relevance through healthy television audiences and, in its way, revealing something about the national character.

Ten years after that nervous presentation to the class, I began working on the professional circuit, first as junior press officer for the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association, then as a freelance newspaper and radio journalist, and later as a television commentator for Eurosport and ITV. In almost 30 years spent embedded in the world of professional snooker, I have borne witness to memorable moments, controversies and farcical interludes and got to know many of the biggest names in the sport, a large number of whom kindly gave me their time for this book. Pots of Gold is not a Wikipedia-style recitation of who won what and when. I wanted those who were there to tell their personal stories and share their reflections on snooker over the past century.

‘The games of a people reveal a great deal about them,’ said the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan. For decades, snooker has been full of apparently ordinary characters with extraordinary stories to tell. It has been a privilege listening to them and to now bring their tales to a wider audience.

Four decades on from that September day in 1987, I feel I am still standing before the class.

So, let me tell you about snooker.

‌1

Singin’ in the Rain

For Dennis Taylor, it was a glimpse of colour in a black-and-white world.

Three decades before he potted the most famous ball in snooker history, Taylor was a boy growing up in the 1950s, a time of hardship and struggle as Britain rebuilt after the war. By chance one afternoon as he walked to his home in Coalisland, Northern Ireland, he saw something that changed his life for ever.

‘I was eight or nine,’ he says. ‘There was a club next to the police station. The door happened to be open one day. I saw a snooker table for the first time, and it fascinated me, the colours.’

They have fascinated multitudes ever since. In 1985, 18.5 million people were tuned to BBC2 to watch Taylor pot the last black of the World Championship final and beat Steve Davis 18–17 a few minutes after midnight. By then, snooker had taken a grip on the national consciousness. A sport that had seemed to come from nowhere had become part of the country’s collective bloodstream.

Yet it had been a long journey, full of false starts and wayward turns, a very British story of success and failure infused with disputed provenance, organisational chaos, egos, class, eccentricity and ultimate triumph against the odds. A century on from its establishment as a professional sport, it is now played all around the world, while its major competitions draw global audiences in the hundreds of millions.

How did this happen?

● ● ●

As Samuel Johnson put it, ‘When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.’ For a sport that would become so ingrained in the British national psyche, it is fitting we have the rain to thank for snooker coming into being.

In 1875, the Devonshire Regiment was stationed in Jubbulpore (known today as Jabalpur), an Indian city in the state of Madhya Pradesh. The British Raj had been established 17 years earlier, following a rebellion against the East India Company, the trading group that had taken power across much of the country. Control was transferred to the Crown, and Queen Victoria became the Empress of India.

It was the rainy season, and officers gravitated towards the billiard table in the mess. Billiards has become a catch-all term for cue sports, but at this time English billiards was a well-known game, with a heritage stretching back centuries. Played with three balls, scoring was through a variety of pots and cannons.

There was a romantic theory espoused for a while that it was invented by William Kew, a London pawnbroker, who was said to enjoy taking down the three gold balls that identified his profession and pushing them around his yard with a stick – hence Bill-yard. His surname could explain the name of the equipment used to strike the balls. Clive Everton, the highly respected snooker and billiards journalist and commentator, took a more pragmatic view in his 2012 book A History of Billiards. ‘This picturesque version of the origins of billiards must be discarded in favour of a series of more fragmentary clues,’ he wrote. Everton contended that the word ‘billiards’ descends from the Latin and old French words for ‘ball’ – billa and bille respectively – and that the game has its roots in croquet, a sport played on lawns, where coloured balls are manoeuvred through hoops with a mallet. Early versions of billiards saw players use a mace – a cue with a flat end rather than a tip – to strike the balls.

Cue sports have a rich history. Louis XI of France had a billiard table in the fifteenth century. Mary, Queen of Scots was a keen player and complained that her captors had kept her from her table. They responded by tearing off its cloth and wrapping her beheaded corpse in it following her execution in 1587. In Act II, Scene V of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, the latter tells her servant, Charmian, ‘Let’s to billiards.’

The game of billiards began largely as a pursuit for the gentry but would permeate wider society. According to Everton, ‘At the turn of the eighteenth century, billiards was still largely the pursuit of the French, English and indeed Americans. The game had almost certainly been exported in the 1600s by the early English colonists – the nobility and well to do – but by 1800 there were enough public tables in French cafés, English ale houses and everywhere in America from private houses to the toughest frontier outposts to justify the claim that it was now a game for all classes.’1

Billiards remains a highly skilful game, but in time the best players became too good and a degree of dramatic tension was lost from public matches. The cradle cannon, in which two balls are positioned close to a corner pocket, made scoring easy for the most talented exponents and led to Tom Reece making a break of 499,135 over the course of three weeks in 1907 against Joe Chapman, who did not have a single shot throughout the entire time.

Although cradle cannons were banned a few months later, Reece’s marathon break underlined the repetitive nature of billiards at the top level and how this threatened the game’s capacity to provide entertainment for the public. Later, billiards came to be regarded as so arcane that it was one of the niche British touchstones the Village Green Preservation Society sought to save in The Kinks’ eponymous record of 1968.

In between the Reece break and the Ray Davies ditty, billiards had been thoroughly overtaken by the game fashioned while the Jubbulpore rain hammered on the windows of the officers’ mess. A general boredom with billiards had led to the military personnel experimenting with other established games, with interest added by introducing wagering. Pyramids involved 15 reds set up initially in a triangular frame. Each time a player potted a red, his opponent had to pay the pre-agreed stake money for each ball. Life pool saw players designated with a cue ball and an object ball, the latter of which became the next player’s cue ball. For instance, player A would use the white ball to try and pot the yellow. The yellow would be player B’s cue ball, and he would try to pot the pink. Player C had pink as cue ball and green as object ball, and so on. The object of the game was to pot your own object ball three times. Every time it was potted, the player whose cue ball it was would lose a ‘life’, until only one player remained. Money changed hands as each ball was potted. Players could buy back in with an extra life in exchange for cash. At the end, the remaining player scooped all the money. Black pool added a black ball to life pool, meaning an additional gambling element because there was another ball to be potted after the initial object ball had been sunk.

The commonly accepted theory is that Neville Chamberlain, just nineteen, a second lieutenant with the Devonshires, mashed the various elements of pyramids and life pool together to forge a new game with scope for a greater variety of bets among the soldiers. He kept the 15 reds of pyramids, added the yellow, green and pink of life pool and the black of black pool. Brown and blue would be added later.

In conversation with a visiting subaltern from the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, Chamberlain learned that a first-year cadet at the institution was known as a ‘snooker’, essentially implying that within the rigid hierarchy of the army, they were at the bottom of the pile. So it was that the name of a game that would become a multimillion-pound global sport began as an insult.

The derivation of the word ‘snooker’ is disputed. The term ‘cocking a snook’ would logically describe a disdainful relationship between the officer class and young cadets, and this may have been adapted to form the word. Another theory is that ‘snooker’ was derived from the original name for a cadet, ‘neux’ (from the French term les neux). There was also an 1850s music-hall act called Hooker and Snooker, popular in London, which may have helped the word gain common currency.

Chamberlain was 82 when he wrote to The Field magazine in 1938 to claim responsibility for snooker’s birth, following speculation that it had actually been invented at the academy in Woolwich and that Lord Kitchener – the veteran military general whose face adorned posters bearing the slogan ‘Your Country Needs You’ at the outbreak of the First World War – was responsible for handwriting the rules. Chamberlain wrote:

One day it occurred to me that the game of black pool, which we usually played, would be improved if we put down another coloured ball in addition to the black one. This proved a success and, by degrees, the other coloured balls of higher value followed suit. The term ‘snooker’ was a new one to me, but I soon had the 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 all were, so to speak, snookers at the game so it would be very appropriate to call it snooker. The suggestion was adopted with enthusiasm.2

The following year, the famous novelist and essayist Compton Mackenzie wrote an article for Billiard Player magazine titled ‘Origins of a Great Game’, which promised to be ‘For the first time, the fully authenticated story of the origin of snooker.’ Mackenzie supported Chamberlain’s claim with further evidence from other distinguished military figures who served in India which he described as ‘incontrovertible’.

Chamberlain left the Devonshires in 1878 to join Central India Horse, a cavalry regiment, and moved to the hill station at Ootacamund, in western India. Its club, known as the Ooty, was where the rules of snooker were formalised. They still hang on the wall of the billiard room to this day.

In 1903, the Madras Weekly Mail reported on the grip snooker had taken on members of the army:

There was a time in Waltair when men played cards till the sun was high in the heavens and their thoughtful wives sent up their solar topees for them. Now we cannot get a game of bridge at all. There has only been one game this month so far and no prospect of better things. Snooker is the rage. If you go into the Club at 8am, you will find two or three men playing and every evening there is one table of snookers going on and often two.

Chamberlain was not related to the British prime minister of the same name but enjoyed a successful military career, becoming a colonel in 1894 and being knighted in 1903, having served as inspector-general for the Royal Irish Constabulary. He left the RIC in 1916, after his warnings about an Irish uprising were ignored.

That he left it until his 80s, with snooker by then established as a professional sport, before claiming the credit for its invention have led some to question the accepted narrative. Peter Ainsworth, a renowned billiards and snooker historian, is of the belief that Chamberlain should be credited with developing snooker but that ‘There are two major problems with Chamberlain’s description of the birth and development of the game of “snooker”. Firstly, there is no single cue ball used, with each player using one of the balls on the table as his own, and secondly, there is no reference to a pack of red balls. It may be assumed that the reds were added later, had not Chamberlain said that the balls added were of a “higher value” and, significantly, the red ball was already established in the sequence, being the very first colour to be used in the standard sequence.’

Ainsworth’s argument is that two distinct games were developed, before one was finally established, probably at the Ooty Club. It is not clear whether sole credit for that should go to Chamberlain, but there is no clear evidence that anyone else played a greater role in the birth of the game.

‘His description of “snooker” as he invented it at Jubbulpore is not snooker. It bears no relationship to it,’ Ainsworth says. ‘He was very keen to be associated with the name when he was in India. There are several instances where he’s entering gymkhanas with animals called Snooker. In December 1882, he entered the Ooty gymkhana with a bullock doing a chariot race, and he called the bullock Jolly Snookers.’

In 1885, Chamberlain met with S. W. Stanley, the billiards coach to the maharajah of Cooch Behar, in Calcutta. ‘He was introduced as the inventor of snooker,’ Ainsworth says. ‘He was associated with it until he left India. He had other things to think of. He went off to South Africa, and then got appointed as inspector-general of the Royal Irish Constabulary in Dublin. He was there 16 years, coinciding with the Easter Rising. He was busy.’

Meanwhile, Stanley returned to Britain in 1887, where Ainsworth believes he passed on Chamberlain’s rules of snooker to the billiard-table manufacturers Burroughes & Watts, who published them in 1889. John Roberts Jr, a leading billiards player of the time, has also been widely credited with exporting the new game to the UK.

Whoever was responsible, when the game first reached Britain, it was widely known as ‘snooker pool’. Until the rules were formally understood and accepted, variations of snooker pool abounded, including at the Garrick Club in London. One of the more idiosyncratic conventions of ‘Savile and Garrick snooker’ stated: ‘In the event of the yellow ball being involved in a foul stroke, it is custom for the watchers to cry out the word “bollocks”.’3

The balls in these early days were made from ivory. In the late nineteenth century, 12,000 elephants were killed each year for their tusks, in order to meet demand in the UK. Thankfully, in time chemical compounds were developed so that balls could be manufactured more humanely. They played an unwitting historic role in 1902, when Harry Jackson stole a set of billiard balls during a burglary in London and became the first person in Britain to be sentenced using new fingerprint evidence.

Meanwhile, snooker, having made its way to British shores, was not immediately adopted by billiard halls. According to Everton, ‘Not every hall or every club could afford a set of 22 balls though it was not long before the manufacturers appreciated snooker’s superior commercial possibilities.’4

Although Chamberlain’s version of how snooker came to be may have been neatened up by the time he wrote to The Field, it seems largely believable as there is no trace of the melded-together versions of life pool and pyramids before 1875.

‘There was a lot of speculation about who had invented it,’ Ainsworth says. ‘Lots of people were asking the question, and no one was answering, until a series of correspondences came up in The Field magazine, which prompted him to come forward. He’d been retired in Ascot prior to that, so why he decided to respond at that time, I don’t know. I expect he was encouraged by some of his friends, who were aware of his claim. The Mackenzie connection closed the discussion, and probably correctly. Chamberlain has an excellent claim to have invented snooker.’

So this new game was born, ostensibly to give British Army officers something to do while it rained. Gambling made it interesting, but it was also equal parts fun and challenging, a different game entirely to billiards, with more variation. It remained in its earliest days the province of the upper classes.

‘It was played in the officers’ messes. That was the only place there was a billiard table,’ says Ainsworth. ‘It was officer classes, therefore, so that was the class who originally knew it and played it. When it came to England, it was through army servicemen’s clubs, so it’s that level of people. It wasn’t working people, it was officers, gentlemen, high-ranking types like politicians. When Burroughes & Watts put the rules together in 1889 for jolly snookers – that was the name, the same as Chamberlain’s bullock – they promoted it as rules for country-house parties. That was the level it was aimed at.’

Indeed, in 1901, The Field reported:

Very few country houses of any size are now without a billiard table. As a consequence, the standard of play all round – especially in the amateur ranks – has become much higher . . . The Billiards Association, which has been doing good work of late, has given us the rules for billiards, pool, pyramids and snooker pool.

As if to prove that it was a sport for rarefied society, the Dundee Evening Telegraph reported in 1902 that ‘Two billiard tables and all the fittings for the games of pool, pyramids and snooker pool were purchased by the Shah [of Iran] when he was in London.’

By the following year, 1903, snooker had gained sufficient traction that it had won over Charles Vidal Diehl, winner of a billiards tournament for journalists, who wrote a column in the Liverpool Evening Express, stating:

The game is much superior to pyramids, and in restarting the championship of the potting game among professionals the Billiard Association from my mere personal point of view as to what I should like to have seen played, might very well have gone one step further and made the championship one of the game of snooker.

The rules of snooker had been codified by the Billiards Association in 1901. The concept of break-building developed as the game became more competitive. In 1910, Tom Aitken, Cecil Harverson and Phil Morris made centuries. There were no tournaments until 1916, when the English Amateur Championship was formed.

In 1919, the rules were revised. Drawn frames would from now on be decided by a respotted black. The free ball was introduced, in which a player could nominate a different ball if snookered after a foul. An in-off foul – the cue ball finding a pocket – was worth only one point, however. It would not result in a four-point penalty for several more years.

Snooker was gaining a profile through its inclusion at the end of billiards matches, and it was therefore inevitable that ordinary working people would want to try it. ‘It started to become popular at clubs and institutes,’ says Ainsworth. ‘It was always part of the entertainment with billiards that you’d have a game of pyramids after the main event. Snooker just slotted in and filled that place, as an exhibition of something else.’

Gradually, snooker’s popularity led to an increase in the number of places where it could be played. ‘The temperance movement was key in starting the clubs around the time of the General Strike in 1926,’ says John Virgo, a player and later a popular television commentator. In time, the game would become associated with trades such as mining and steelworking, with organised leagues – a way for men to enjoy their leisure time together after long days at work.

However, between the wars snooker was still very much in the shadow of billiards. What it needed was innovators who could recognise and develop its potential: someone good enough at the game to showcase it, and someone savvy and proactive enough to promote it.

In fact, these two pioneers turned out to be the same man.

‌2

The Man Comes Around

John Bright Street in Birmingham is located in the heart of the city centre, a short walk from New Street railway station. Among its attractions are the Alexandra Theatre, the Victoria pub and the Grosvenor casino. At the far end is a craft-ale bar and apartment complex, the exact spot where, a century ago, the first professional snooker champion was crowned.

Without Joe Davis, this moment may have arrived much later than the roaring twenties – or not at all. The foremost player of the first half of the twentieth century, Davis possessed a formidable zeal for promotion, of both himself and snooker, kicking down doors to achieve recognition for a game that was still widely regarded as inferior to billiards. Yet he was also fiercely protective of his own reputation, and his iron grip on the sport, on and off the table, ultimately led to its decline and near extinction.

Davis was born in 1901 in Whitwell, a mining village near Chesterfield, in Derbyshire, to Fred and Elizabeth. Fred chose to end his years at the colliery and move into the pub trade, purchasing the Travellers’ Rest and, later, the Queens Hotel in Whittington Moor, a bigger establishment, which boasted a full-size billiard table. The eleven-year-old Davis quickly became fascinated by both billiards and the still new sport of snooker, his natural childhood shortness negated to a degree by the fact that the previous owner had lowered the table below floor level to afford spectators a better view of matches, so young Joe was less reliant on using the rest than in a normal set-up. Thoroughly smitten, he would practise each morning before school and charge home during lunch hour for another knock.

Davis described his father as ‘a bit of a character’ who opened a cinema, where Davis’s sister would accompany silent pictures on the piano. ‘My mother looked after the pennies because my father was very capable of spending the money,’ he added.1

Unlike the champions who followed in his wake and who benefited from being able to watch snooker on television, he had nobody to study or try and emulate, but his natural prowess was clear to his father, who engaged a local coach, Ernest Rudge, to instil the rudiments of technique into his son. ‘A great benefactor’ was how Davis described Rudge. ‘He taught me to play and many other things in life.’

Rudge arranged for professional billiards players to play matches at his club, with the young Davis fetching the balls out of the pockets. By thirteen, he was the local amateur billiards champion, having made his first 100 break at the age of twelve, and turned professional in 1919, aged eighteen. There was no professional game in snooker, but the English Amateur Championship had been inaugurated three years earlier and won by Charles Jacques at Burroughes Hall, in Soho Square.

Davis was heavily left-eye-dominant in terms of sighting, which was considered unorthodox at the time, but increasingly he was gaining a reputation. He was yet to become world billiards champion but saw an opportunity with snooker, the young upstart of the cue-sports family, to make a name for himself and, more widely, for the game. Others had tried, with little success. In 1924, Tom Dennis, a player and billiard-hall owner, wrote to the governing body for billiards, asking them to consider promoting an open snooker tournament. The sniffy response he received read: ‘It seems doubtful whether snooker as a spectacular game is sufficiently popular to warrant the successful promotion of such a competition.’

In 1925, Davis made a 96 break at Burroughes Hall, beating the previous record of 86 by Tom Newman, set in 1922. He was improving all the time and was determined to demonstrate his prowess in a proper event. The following year, Davis, supported by the promoter and table-maker Bill Camkin, managed to persuade the authorities to reconsider. Ten players entered the first-ever professional championship – the word ‘world’ would be added later – and a silver trophy was purchased using half of the entry fees (it is still presented to the world champion to this day).

The tournament’s first match began on 29 November 1926, the week after F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby. Melbourne Inman lined up against Tom Newman at Thurston’s Hall in London’s Leicester Square, but the shadow of the three-ball game loomed large as the snooker match was tacked on to a billiards contest between the pair, which was promoted as the primary entertainment. Inman won 8–5, and matches continued over the following months. Davis beat Irishman Joe Brady 8–6 in Liverpool and would play Albert Cope at Camkin’s Hall in Birmingham, the co-promoter’s own club, in the semis. A local newspaper, the Daily Gazette, ran a short preview:

There will be tremendous interest taken in the semi-final of the professional snooker championship at Camkin’s rooms, Birmingham, next week, when Albert Cope, our local ‘hope’, will oppose Joe Davis, and there is great conflict of opinion regarding the chances of these players, for in snooker, to quote the words of the sage, ‘anything might happen’.

What happened was a comfortable win for Davis, 12–4. He advanced to the final, where he would play Tom Dennis, also at Camkin’s Hall.

In May 1927, Princess Elizabeth, who would reign as queen for seven decades, had just celebrated her first birthday. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which would annually bestow Oscars for achievements in cinema, was formed. Charles Lindbergh piloted the Spirit of St. Louis from New York to Paris, the world’s first transatlantic flight. And in John Bright Street, four days were set aside for snooker’s historic first professional championship final. It was a 31-frame match, with all frames to be played, even if one player reached the winning target of 16, such was the desire to maximise gate receipts, which would be divvied up by the players as prize money. Davis dominated, winning the first seven frames and leading 12–4 by the end of the second day. On the third, he pulled away to lead 16–7 and therefore could not be caught. The final score was 20–11.

Davis received £6 10s from his share of ticket sales. He was snooker’s first professional champion, but his victory failed to make much of a splash with the public or even the cue-sports cognoscenti. The Billiard Player, the game’s leading organ of the time, gave the event four paragraphs of coverage.

However, what lent the event credibility was Davis himself. ‘He transformed the game from a rather crude potting contest to one of tactics, developing break-building and safety play,’ according to Clive Everton, the long-serving journalist and television commentator who edited the game’s primary magazine, Snooker Scene, for 51 years.

Davis had become snooker’s first king, a status in which he revelled, although there was no grand plan. ‘We were all scrattin’ and scrapin’ to make a living,’ he said in later life.2 His title defence in 1928 involved only one match as, part of a field of just seven entrants, he was put straight into the final, beating Fred Lawrence 16–13.

Billiards still dominated as a public entertainment, and when Davis won the three-ball game’s 1928 world title, thousands of people lined the streets of Chesterfield on his return home. Proud though he was of this achievement, he was keen to showcase snooker as much as possible. That year, he made his first century break in public, during a match in Manchester. In 1929, entries for the Professional Championship dwindled to just five. Davis beat Tom Dennis 19–14, and then defeated him 25–12 in 1930 to become champion for a fourth successive year.

Despite his best efforts, interest in snooker was not growing at an appreciable rate. In fact, in 1931, only two players entered the championship, Davis beating Dennis 25–21 in the Lounge Club, Nottingham, which was owned by Dennis. The closeness of the scores in some of these finals was perhaps due to the fact that gate money was the primary source of income, so it was to the benefit of Davis to keep the match ‘live’ for as long as possible to sustain the public’s interest. The championship bumped along. Davis won from an entry of four in 1932 and five in 1933.

These were very different times. Davis had never driven a vehicle, but a rail strike in 1934 meant he could not get from Nottingham to Kettering to play Tom Newman, the only other entrant that year. Davis duly purchased a car, was given rough instructions from the salesman on how to drive it and set off for the match. He beat Newman 25–22, and went on to retain the title, his ninth in total, the following year, from five entries, making a record break of 110 in the process.

Davis had established an iron grip on the game, and, as the years passed, it only tightened. Younger players were overawed just by being in his presence, as John Pulman, a future world champion, confirmed: ‘He had a tremendous aura about him, he was the complete professional player. Not only had he talent, he had showmanship, personality, business acumen, and he towered above everyone else in the game to such an extent that most of the players were virtually beaten before they started playing. He was so overpowering that he put everybody else in the shade.’3

Rex Williams, who became world billiards champion in 1968, concurred: ‘Playing against him was very difficult. Joe never seemed to worry about his opponents. This was one of the great things about him, the tremendous confidence he had in his own ability. Players never played as well against Joe as they did against other players.’4

On 10 December 1935, snooker made its debut on the radio, as the BBC broadcast a 15-minute running commentary of a match between Davis and Horace Lindrum, nephew of the Australian billiards great Walter Lindrum. The following year saw the establishment of the BBC’s television service, and on 14 April 1937, a ten-minute broadcast, An Exhibition of Play, featured Lindrum and Willie Smith demonstrating the intricacies of snooker. The programme was the first to be transmitted that day – at 3 p.m. – and it was followed by a ten-minute item on daffodils. It would be another 13 years until snooker troubled the national broadcaster’s schedules again.

It was strange that Davis had not been selected for the demonstration programme. He was by then an 11-time world champion, winning again from a record field of 13 in 1936 and beating Lindrum 32–29 in 1937. For that year’s tournament, a qualifying match was staged, with the winner to join the main draw. It featured Davis’s younger brother, 23-year-old Fred, of whom much was expected after he had won three junior billiards titles, but he was suffering from myopia and was too self-conscious to reveal his condition, especially to his all-powerful brother, whose first comment on watching him knocking balls around as a ten-year-old had been ‘take that bloody grin off your face’.

Widely expected to win, it was not a lovely day for Fred when Bill Withers defeated him 17–14. Joe saw it as such an affront to the family name that he hammered Withers 30–1 in the next round – gate money be damned. ‘Not being able to see and having to endure Joe’s fury afterwards made it all so much worse that I felt more depressed than I ever had before,’ wrote Fred in his autobiography, Talking Snooker, published in 1979. ‘Worst of all, in my own mind, I had virtually written off any future I might have had in the game.’

Embarrassed, he consulted an optician. Wearing glasses, he reached the semi-finals in 1938, but Joe still reigned supreme. In 1939, they met in the semi-finals. Joe won 17–14 and beat Sidney Smith 43–30 in the final at Thurston’s Hall.

It was clear that Fred looked up to Joe, not just as a big brother but as the first person to master the intricacies of snooker:

Joe always had been a very good potter but when he started to utilise his billiards knowledge and skill to work out, on his own, the sort of break-building sequences and techniques which have become part of every leading player’s armoury, none of his contemporaries could extend him. As he was in the position of being an excellent player before anyone else had even realised how to play the game properly, that he would win those early championships was really a foregone conclusion.5

In 1940, the Davis brothers met head to head in the final. Fred had made a championship-record break of 113 in 1939 and was clearly improving, whereas Joe was now 38 and mindful that his hegemony could not last for ever. The likelihood of a passing of the fraternal baton was increased when Fred won ten frames in succession on the third day of the best-of-73-frames final to lead 20–14, but Joe recovered on day four to draw level at 24–24. ‘Away from the table, Joe and I got along well and he was pleased that I had established myself near the top of the profession,’ wrote Fred. ‘But at the table our rivalry was intense. Having been in his shadow for so long it was my burning ambition to beat him while Joe, who had informed me more than once that I never would, was determined to give me no assistance to do so.’6

The match remained close, before, leading 36–35, the elder brother saved his best for last, making a break of 101 in the clinching frame. ‘Spectators, crammed into the hall and overflowing lobby, cheered for nearly a minute when Joe put down the blue to make the 112th century of his career and won the final with one game to spare,’ was how one news agency reported the moment of victory.

The Second World War had broken out a few months earlier, and Fred joined the British Army as the championship took a pause. London was an obvious target for German bombers. Several months after Joe won his 14th world title, the capital was subjected to a sustained wave of attacks, commonly known as the Blitz, which claimed the lives of more than 40,000 civilians. Thurston’s itself was destroyed by a bomb in October 1940, reopening seven years later. The World Championship was not held again until 1946, when Davis made it 15 successive title victories with a 78–67 defeat of Horace Lindrum. He compiled his 200th century break during the match.

There was no elation, only relief. ‘I am glad it is over,’ Davis was quoted as saying in the London Weekly Dispatch. ‘This has been a big strain. I feel very pleased with myself at hitting my best form at 45 years of age.’

The 12-day final brought in 22,500 spectators. The promoter, Bob Jelks, had put up £6,000 to stage the match, with profits estimated at £1,400, the players talking half. Davis was a large part of this success. Through sheer longevity, he had achieved a certain celebrity, even if snooker itself was not yet a mainstream sport. The fact he had never lost a match played on level terms gave him a definite cachet, and with Fred and others snapping at his heels he decided to retire from playing in the championship – though not from the game altogether. Thus, a 20-year unbeaten reign remained unsullied by defeat.

By now, Davis had become sufficiently well known as a personality that he had his own snooker-and-billiards-based music-hall act, touring the country with famous comedians and entertainers, including a spot at the London Palladium, where he met his future wife, June, a dancer. A large mirror was erected on stage so that audience members sat in the stalls could follow the action. In this new world of show business, Davis was at first ill at ease. On opening night, he missed his first three shots, causing comedian Tommy Trinder to run on stage and ask, ‘Where can we get hold of your brother, Fred?’

Once he settled into his act, it became popular and enhanced his reputation as a star, with a constituency much wider than snooker itself. He raised well over £100,000 for charity during the war and was awarded the OBE. He was the face of snooker, and remained so long after his retirement, a period in which his dislike of losing remained.

Ray Reardon, who became world champion six times in the 1970s, won a Joe Davis cue at the age of fourteen in a BBC competition, receiving his prize from the man himself. Several years later, he played him in an exhibition and saw his competitiveness at first hand, even in a supposedly friendly environment.

‘I’d won the English amateur title and was in the police force,’ Reardon told me shortly before his death in 2024. ‘Worcester Conservative Club engaged Joe to play and got in touch with our chief constable for me to go and play him over two frames. We had a couple of safety shots each in the first frame, then I knocked a long red in and made 96. He refused to play the next frame. I said to him, “Mr Davis, I assure you that if you play the next frame, you will win it. They’ve come here to see you, not me.” But he wouldn’t play the frame.’

This pride in always being seen to be top dog seemed even more acute in relation to his own brother. In 1946, Fred made a 139 break against Joe at Blackpool Tower Circus, then a record. In a 1990 interview with The Times, Fred explained what happened next:

Joe was adamant that the table was not up to the required standard. An official of the Billiards and Snooker Control Council examined it and said he could not ratify the record because, would you believe, the pockets were too big by the width of a piece of tissue paper. I was speechless. The truth, of course, is that he was frightened to death of Joe and guess who held the record at 138? Joe was the Big I Am in those days and got his way in everything. I had a dreadful time in my early days because I was in Joe’s shadow. No matter what I did I had no recognition, but it hardened me.

Fred, in fact, beat Joe four times on level terms in his career, but never in the World Championship. When Joe retired, Fred was the obvious favourite to inherit his mantle as world champion, but was beaten to the punch in 1947 at the newly reopened Thurston’s Hall by Walter Donaldson of Coatbridge, Scotland, whose preparation for the tournament involved an intensive period spent practising in a friend’s loft. Donaldson, whose father had owned a billiard hall, beat the junior Davis 82–63. He was not a flair player. Everton said he ‘inexorably ground out victory’, with few risks and excellent safety play, adding, ‘It was not artistic, exciting or fluent.’

Even so, he was champion and engaged in a rivalry with Davis that would see them contest a total of eight successive world finals. Davis prevailed in 1948 and 1949, before the final moved in 1950 to Blackpool Tower Circus, where Donaldson was the winner, 51–46. Close it may have been, but this was not a classic. According to Everton, ‘There was an inordinate amount of safety. The pockets were brutally tight. Pots along the cushion were impossible. Several sessions each took four hours.’ In 97 frames of snooker, the highest break was 80.

Though the championship continued as a duel between Davis and Donaldson, it was the elder Davis who enjoyed most attention and acclaim. As far as the general public were concerned, Joe was still number one, a status he encouraged through exhibition appearances and, in 1950, a televised challenge match on the BBC against Donaldson, which was given 45 minutes of airtime. A spate of further challenge matches followed, amid eclectic TV schedules. Before one such broadcast, 20 minutes were given over to Mrs Dorothy Kiltoey, a farmer’s wife from Yorkshire, to extol the virtues of tripe.

Snooker had by now become popular as a leisure pursuit for men employed in manufacturing trades such as mining and steelworking, but the image was still one of upper-class refinement. A typical television appearance saw Davis alongside the plummy-voiced Raymond Glendenning, a doyen among sports broadcasters, demonstrating various billiards and snooker trick shots. Dressed in shirt and tie, the pair appeared to be in the plush billiard room of a stately home, giving the impression of an after-dinner game among members of polite society.

Britain at the time was rebuilding after the war. Rationing continued until the mid-1950s. Television sets were not commonplace in British households until after the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, a national event that proved the power of the medium to provide a collective experience. With demand high, two years later the government licensed the first commercial channel, ITV.

The BBC gave some coverage to the News of the World tournament and to a few frames of the 1952 Davis vs Donaldson world final, although this year uniquely boasted rival champions, following a dispute over money. The Billiards Association and Council Control (BA&CC), the game’s governing body, took the view that being world champion was primarily about honour. The professionals – the clue being in the name – wanted to make a decent living. After Davis had beaten Donaldson in 1951, it was revealed the finalists had shared just £500, so the players decided to boycott the official World Championship and stage their own version, the World Professional Matchplay Championship, in which Davis beat Donaldson 38–35.

As a face-saving measure, the BA&CC put on their own world final between Horace Lindrum and New Zealand’s Clark McConachy. Lindrum won 94–48 and therefore has his name engraved on the silver trophy, but his daughter Jan later revealed he had been declared technically blind at the time by a specialist from Harley Street, while McConachy was suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

Fred won four more world titles between 1953 and 1957, making it eight in total. Joe had meanwhile compiled the first 147 maximum break in competition in 1955, and his television appearances had increased, confirming him as by far the best known figure in the still-fledgling sport. The fact he was not playing in the World Championship therefore seriously devalued it – like Hamlet without the prince – and interest, such as it was, dwindled to the point that by 1957, only four players entered. Even Fred was not among them. The final took place in Jersey, where John Pulman defeated Jackie Rea 39–34, after which there were no takers for hosting the 1958 event.

‘No promoter was prepared to stage the World Championship between 1957 and 1964,’ said Everton. ‘It just wasn’t worth it then. There was no television, no sponsorship, and there were only four or five active professionals, who spent their time giving club exhibitions.’

Joe Davis’s idea for reigniting enthusiasm for snooker was to introduce two new coloured balls: an orange, worth eight points, and a purple, worth ten. He called the game snooker plus, and the 1959 News of the World tournament, featuring Joe, Fred and Pulman, was played under these new rules, but it failed to capture the public imagination and was never heard of again.

And so, as a new decade dawned, an era that ushered in The Beatles, John F. Kennedy and great social change, the game entered uncertain times. The 1960s may have swung, but snooker as a professional sport lay dormant. These were grim times for the players, who retreated back into normal life. Fred Davis ran a hotel in Llandudno, Rex Williams a family printing firm in Staffordshire. Walter Donaldson became so fed up with the lack of opportunities that he smashed up the slates of his snooker table and used them to pave a path outside his house. Players still undertook exhibitions, but making a living was hard, with the sport enjoying very little exposure outside of a few matches on black-and-white television, usually involving Joe and Fred and acting as filler on the BBC’s flagship Saturday-afternoon sports programme, Grandstand.

‘It was very slim pickings,’ according to Everton. ‘Just club exhibitions and the occasional television gig. Grandstand would have snooker as a standby if other events were dependent on the weather, or as a sandwich between race meetings, where frames had to last a certain amount of time.’

ITV offered a lifeline in 1961 by organising an event that pitted four professionals against four amateurs. The amateurs, who were enjoying more competitive opportunities, all won. One, Mark Wildman, made the first televised century break in 1962.

By 1964, Williams, who at seventeen had won the English amateur title, was 30 and restless. This should have been the prime period of his career. He took it upon himself to revive the World Championship on a challenge basis, with the reigning champion – in this case, Pulman – taking on a single opponent. The governing body gave their sanction, and Pulman beat Fred Davis 19–16 in the first World Championship to be staged for seven years. Pulman would win six further world titles on this basis against a series of challengers, Williams included, until 1968.

Britain changed profoundly during this period. The Conservatives had been in power from 1951 to 1964, led first by Winston Churchill, who won a surprise election victory after his career in front-line politics had seemingly been drawing to a close. He was replaced in 1955 by Anthony Eden, who resigned two years later over the Suez Crisis. Harold Macmillan was prime minister from 1957 to 1963, before aristocrat Alec Douglas-Home renounced his place in the House of Lords to preside over the final year of Tory rule.

The new Britain, in which deference for authority was in retreat, was summed up by the satirical BBC programme That Was the Week That Was, which poked fun at those in power through monologues, sketches and songs. Presented by David Frost, it featured the likes of Frankie Howerd, Willie Rushton and Millicent Martin. Audiences enjoyed its mocking of an establishment hitherto considered beyond reproach. The new Labour prime minister was Harold Wilson, whose government oversaw reforms in education, housing and other social areas, abolishing the death penalty, decriminalising homosexuality and abortion and legislating against racial discrimination in the workplace.

As change raged, snooker on television stuttered on in its role as filler material, offering up contests of little meaning or narrative designed purely to plug a hole in the schedules. On 8 September 1968, the Sunday Times exposed the truth behind these matches, under the headline ‘Great TV Snooker Frame-Up’. Its report began: