“Wisdom is knowing how little we know.”
Oscar Wilde
What is snooker? Or who is Snooker? Is it a first-year cadet from Woolwich? Or a pirate ship captain from Halifax? Or perhaps it’s the black cat from the famous series of children’s sketches? Or a lightweight boxer from San Francisco? Or maybe a horse that took a lot of prizes at the races? Or a character in a huge number of farces and comedies, alone or paired with Hooker or Pooker, who made audiences laugh out loud? Or lieutenant (and later captain) of the Bengal Cavalry?
This site aims to provide information by collecting and publishing mentions of the word ‘snooker’ from press archives and rare books. The snooker as sport is relatively young, having been played for approximately 150 years. The history of the word itself, however, goes back further than that. It is currently unknown who created the game, when it was created, or why it was named as such. It is hoped that irrefutable evidence will be found in the future.
All publications maintain their original style. The authors’ typos and grammatical errors have also been preserved in the publications. The digitisation process was facilitated by special OCR software. All documents and screenshots are checked before digitisation, and texts are reviewed after digitisation. Unfortunately, errors may be missed due to the similarity between the letter ‘I’ and the number ‘1’ (and other variants) in average scan quality for digitisation software. If a large amount of text is being processed, errors may go unnoticed. We apologise for any errors and kindly request that you inform us if you find any. Additionally, some document scans may be of poor quality, making it impossible to guarantee identical text. These posts are marked as ‘doubtful’.
Some articles can be downloaded from the Downloads page in PDF format with illustrations and printable layout. You can see the sources of information on the Source page. If you have original documents or scans of publications related to the term “snooker” and would be willing to share this information with the historical community, please contact us. Any help would be greatly appreciated.