“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 exists to collect, preserve, and publish such references to the word snooker from press archives and rare books. While snooker as a sport is relatively young — its history spans roughly 150 years — the history of the word itself reaches much further back, across geography, social classes, and cultural contexts.
The articles collected here form a body of original research by the site’s authors exploring the origins and early development of snooker. “The Original Snooker” presents the results of a practical experiment conducted by the All About Snooker team to reconstruct the game’s earliest form. “The Four Jolly Snookers” examines the emergence and evolution of snooker in the late nineteenth century, while “The Birth of Modern Snooker” traces its transformation from a commercial pastime into a modern sport. Related historical topics include the origins of Sinuca Brasileira and the first professional match between John Roberts Jr. and Tom Reece in 1908.
A separate and essential part of the site is devoted to re-examining — and, where necessary, dismantling — persistent myths that continue to shape popular narratives about snooker’s origins:
The first myth is “The Myth of the Painting on the Wall.”
The second myth is “The Myth of the Red Ball Pyramid in Black Pool.”
And the third myth is “The Myth of the Meeting between Roberts and Chamberlain in 1885 at a Dinner with the Maharaja.”
All publications on this site retain their original style. Authors’ spelling and grammatical errors have been deliberately preserved. Digitisation is carried out using specialised OCR software: all documents and screenshots are reviewed prior to processing, and texts are checked afterwards. Nevertheless, due to the limitations of scan quality — particularly confusion between characters such as “I” and “1” — some errors may remain, especially in large volumes of text. Where scan quality prevents reliable transcription, such materials are marked as doubtful. We apologise for any inaccuracies and would be grateful if readers inform us of errors they encounter.
Selected articles are available for download from the Downloads page in PDF format, complete with illustrations and a print-ready layout. Source references can be found on the Sources page. If you possess original documents or scans related to the historical use of the term snooker and are willing to share them with the research community, please do get in touch — any contribution is greatly appreciated.
Acknowledgements
We are deeply grateful to Peter Ainsworth for his foundational research into snooker history, for granting permission to publish materials from his personal archives, and for his generous advice and commentary during the preparation of site articles.
We are immensely appreciative of the invaluable assistance rendered by Dean Howell in the form of proofreading and editing texts, providing constructive feedback, and generously offering information from his personal repository for publication on the website.
Stephen J. Cox, a snooker history researcher from Australia and our good friend, deserves the deepest gratitude for his help in finding unique archival materials and providing information from his personal collection for publication on the site and for use in author’s articles.
With immense gratitude to Dr Janne Clara Lindrum BA (Hons) First Class, DCA, BA Laws (Hons), website https://lindrum.com, for permission to publish material from her personal archive dedicated to her great ancestor Horace Lindrum on the website.
We also thank Matt Tresco for allowing us to publish his work and for access to materials from his private archive, and Mike Stooke for permission to make use of the information collected on his website.
Special thanks to the contribution of our correspondents in Brazil, Cristiane B. and Lucas M., for their invaluable contribution of comprehensive translations from Brazilian Portuguese.