Billiards and Snooker
The Australian encyclopædia v.1.1958
The English forms of billiards and snooker are popular throughout Australia. It is unlikely that billiards was played to any extent until an enterprising Melbourne furniture-manufacturer started making billiard tables in the early 1850s. From then on, the game rapidly became popular and visiting British champions encountered strong local competition. State and Australian championships were held and controlling bodies established; as a result, standards continually improved and Australia has produced a number of players of world class, culminating in Walter Lindrum, who completely dominated the game for more than 20 years.
It has been claimed that snooker, a variant of billiards, originated in Australia, but it seems more likely that it was brought from India by visiting army officers in the 1880s. It soon became even more popular than billiards and many Australian players have become world-famous, though none has attained such undisputed supremacy in snooker as did Walter Lindrum at billiards.
Billiards. Strangely, the man chiefly responsible for establishing the popularity of billiards in Australia was a non-player, Henry Upton Alcock, a Melbourne furniture-maker. While in London in about 1850 he acquired some experience in the making of billiard tables and in 1853 he started a small factory for their manufacture in Fitzroy, a suburb of Melbourne. Great difficulty was experienced in obtaining suitable slates for the beds of the tables, but the demand was partly met from a most singular source; houses made entirely of slate had been imported by settlers from England and these, mainly erected in Collingwood, were purchased and the slate was used. Whatever slabs of marble could be obtained were also bought. Seasoned timber was in short supply and in later years Alcock said, “What we had to use was pretty wet.” Nevertheless, many of his tables were still standing solidly 50 years later.
Demand for billiard tables increased rapidly and Alcock further stimulated interest in the game by arranging tours by leading British players. The first of these was John Roberts, Sen., the English champion, who came in 1864. His son, John Roberts, Jun., an even greater player and later known as “the grand old man of billiards”, made the first of three visits in 1876. Among the Australian players he met during his various tours were the amateurs L. J. Coleman, Sam Grimwood, S. Taylor and E. T. Campbell, and the professionals Charlie Memmott, Fred Weiss and Fred Lindrum, a brother of Walter Lindrum.
In a match with Memmott, Roberts gave him 4000 start in 18,000 and won by 1234 points. The actual time occupied in scoring 18,000 was at the rate of 525 an hour, which was considered to be a probable record; it is interesting to compare this with Walter Lindrum’s rate of scoring, for in 1930 he was reeling off 1000 points in half that time.
Fred Lindrum. In 1907 another noted English player, Melbourne Inman, visited Australia and was amazed at the prowess of Fred Lindrum, who was then only in his teens. Fred Lindrum toured with Inman and benefited greatly from the experience. He afterwards became professional champion of Australia and visited England, where he was rated the finest all-round player to come from Australia until the advent of his brother.
In 1910 Fred Lindrum, then Australian champion, played John Roberts in Melbourne. The match was played with bonzoline balls, which were then uncommon in England, and Lindrum, receiving 3000 in 18,000, had an easy win by 5704 points, his best break being 338. In a return match Lindrum, with the same start, again won, but only by 230. In a third game Roberts gave Lindrum 500 in 3000 and won by 252; since Roberts was at this time nearing his 63rd birth day, the shorter game was all in his favour.
George Gray. During his tour in 1907 Melbourne Inman was even more astonished at the play of another schoolboy prodigy, George Gray, who was already famous for having made breaks of 500 and more. Inman gave Gray a start of 2500 in a game of 4000 and won by 168, but not before the boy had shown something of his real form in a beautiful run of 159. Afterwards Inman said, “Although I had been warned what to expect, it was one of the shocks of my career to see this child, in knickerbockers and a turned-down collar, rattle up a confident 79 break almost at his first visit to the table.”
Gray specialized in losing hazards, at which he became so expert that he was dubbed “the red phenomenon”. In 1909 he reeled off a break of 836 (831 off the red) with crystalate balls against Fred Lindrum in Melbourne. His system had a widespread influence on the game, particularly among amateurs, who could easily comprehend and carry out the red-ball game. Scores became so great that in the 1920s various limitations were imposed on hazard-striking.
In a visit to England in 1911 Gray compiled breaks of 2196 (1620 off the red) with crystalate balls, and 1135 (against Claude Falkiner) with ivory balls. After defeating most of the English players, he entered the English championships as a strong favourite, but he had to play with ivory balls and was easily defeated by Tom Reece, who pocketed £1200 in bets apart from the stake money but was eventually beaten for the championship by Melbourne Inman.
During his English tour Gray also had a verdict of £1500 damages awarded against him for breaking a contract to play under the management of John Roberts. He met this debt by playing a match against Tom Newman, the future English champion. After this Gray disappeared from the picture, perhaps because he became bored with the monotony of the red-ball game.
Walter Lindrum. Bom into a famous billiards family in 1898, Walter Lindrum worked solidly at the game from early boyhood. His father, his brother Fred, and his sister Violet were all Australian champions, and later his nephew Horace became world-famous at both billiards and snooker. Walter Lindrum was introduced to the nursery cannon by die Englishman Claude Falkiner during his tour of Australia. Until then there were two great scoring media, the losing hazard and top-of-the-table play, with its “cannon-and-pot” technique. Lindrum adopted the nursery cannon, which requires such skill that scarcely half a dozen players in the world have ever mastered it to any useful extent; and he brought it to such perfection that he was able to hold a greater dominance in billiards than has any man in any other sport.
Having surpassed all challengers in Australia. Lindrum went to England in 1929 and during the ensuing five years broke all records for speed of scoring and size of breaks. He won the world championship by beating Joe Davis at Melbourne in 1934. At die end of 1953 Lindrum still held 47 world records and claimed a total of 800 four-figure breaks. His world-record break of 4137 was created in 2 hours 55 minutes in a match against Joe Davis on 18th and 19th January 1932. He made 11 breaks of more than 1000 in a fortnight’s match in 1930, and 65 breaks of more than 1000 during the 1930-1 season. In 1930 he had an average of 2664 in one session, scored 4815 points in four hours’ play, and had an average of 262 and an aggregate of 36,256 in a fortnight’s match (48 hours’ play).
On his first visit to England Lindrum beat Willie Smith, a noted British professional, by 22,000 points in a fortnight’s play. At Glasgow in 1929 he scored 100 points in 56 seconds; in London in 1930 he scored 663 in 15 minutes; in Melbourne in 1934 he scored 346 in eight minutes, and is credited with having scored 100 in 27-5 seconds in 1952.
Several new rules were introduced in an attempt to curb Lindrum’s pre-eminence, including a baulk-line regulation to limit the use of the nursery cannon; but none of these prevented him from piling up records and he retired undefeated champion of the world in 1950, when Clark McConachy of New Zealand took over the title.
Amateur Billiards. Australians have been almost as outstanding in amateur as in professional billiards. In the first Empire amateur tournament, held in London in 1926, George B. Shailer, a Sydney policeman, was runner-up to the winner, Joe Earlam of England, who turned professional shortly afterwards. The third Empire title event in 1928 was won by Leslie Hayes, a Sydney school-teacher.
Since 1936 Robert Marshall of Perth has dominated both Empire and world events. He first won the Empire title in Johannesburg in 1936, retained it in Melbourne in 1938, and, when contests were resumed after World War II, completed his hat-trick in London in 1951. In this last contest, while playing against the Welsh champion William Pierce, Marshall established three English records—1336 points in a two-hour session, 2580 match total (four hours) and a sessional average of 83. He made 42 century breaks during the series, the highest being 423.
Marshall has held many other titles, including the world amateur championship, which he lost to Leslie Driffield in 1952, and the Australian and Australasian championships. He already held the world record for an amateur with a break of 589 when he increased it to 702 in only 37 minutes in the final of the 1953 Australian championships. In this final Marshall defeated by 3155 to 2933 Tom Cleary of Victoria, another outstanding amateur who has twice held the Australian title. In 1954, when the world amateur championships were held in Sydney, Cleary won the world title, being undefeated in the series. Other competent amateurs of the present century have been Jack Belfield, Mal Spencer, Jack Hooper, A. Tricks and J. von der Luft.
Snooker. It was claimed by Frank Smith, Sen., who for many years managed the billiard room at the Hotel Australia, Sydney, that he and Henry Alcock, the billiard-table manufacturer, invented snooker at the request of members of the Indian army, who visited the Victorian Club in Melbourne in about 1887. However, it is generally accepted that snooker as it is known today was originated in 1875 by Colonel Sir Neville Chamberlain while he was a young subaltern at Jubbulpore, India, and took its name from the term applied to first-year cadets at the Royal Military College, Woolwich. John Roberts, Jun., met Sir Neville in India in 1885 and took the rules back with him to England.
Undoubtedly snooker was introduced into Australia by members of the Indian army during the 1880s and it may be that Smith had some part in regularizing it in its present form, while Alcock produced the necessary equipment. However that may be, the game soon caught on and in the present century has attained even greater popularity than billiards in Australia. Frank Smith, Jun., son of the snooker pioneer, was Australia’s fading exponent of the game until the early 1930s when Horace Lindrum defeated him easily.
Lindrum later went to England and in 1936-7 was runner-up to Joe Davis, who had held the professional championship of England since its inauguration in 1927. Davis was also undisputed world champion until he retired in 1946. Lindrum was never able to defeat Davis in championship tournaments, but became world champion when Davis retired, and had not been defeated by 1954. By that year Davis’s official world record for a snooker break still stood. This was 146 out of a possible 147 made at Manchester in 1950; but Horace Lindrum was credited with having scored an unofficial possible (147) in Sydney in 1941. Among other leading snooker players in Australia have been Norman Squires of Sydney and E. J. O’Donoghue of New Zealand; but Australia’s record in snooker does not compare with its standing in billiards, in spite of the great popularity of the game.
Amateur snooker championships have been held for many years in various States, but the first official Australian amateur championship was not held until 1953, when Warren Simpson of New South Wales took the title by defeating in the final Robert Marshall, former world amateur billiards champion.
An expert view as to why snooker is played more widely than billiards was given by J. R. Hooper, Australian amateur billiards champion from 1914 to 1920. He said, “The reason, in my opinion, is that the element of luck enters more largely into snooker than into billiards and that moderate players have a better chance with players much better than themselves, whereas with billiards a better player always outclasses his opponent.”