“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?
The purpose of this site is to provide information by collecting and publishing references to the word snooker from press archives and rare books. Snooker is a relatively recent sport, with a history spanning approximately 150 years. However, the history of the word itself can be traced back even further.
The article “The Four Jolly Snookers” presents the All About Snooker team’s version of the creation and evolution of snooker in the late nineteenth century, while the article “The Birth of Modern Snooker” details the evolution of snooker from an entertaining commercial game into a modern sport. It is also recommended that readers interested in the history of snooker consult the article on the origins of the Sinuca Brasileira version of the game, as well as the first professional match between John Roberts Jr. and Tom Reece, which was played in 1908 and comprised one hundred and one frames.
It is also recommended that attention be paid to the debunking of the three main myths about snooker. The first myth is that “The wall of the English club is adorned with a painting of a game of snooker, which was created at a time considerably earlier than Chamberlain’s documentation of the rules.”
The second myth is “Young lieutenant Neville Chamberlain was experimenting on the officers’ mess table with the existing game of ‘Black Pool’ featuring 15 red balls and a black.”
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.
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our gratitude to Peter Ainsworth for his contributions to the research of the history of snooker, his seminal works, for granting permission to publish information from his personal archives on our website, as well as for his insightful comments and assistance in creating articles by the site team.
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 would like to thank Matt Tresco for permission to publish his works on the site, as well as for providing information from his personal archives.
We also wish to thank Mike Stooke for granting us permission to utilise 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.