The Four Jolly Snookers
By V. Mordan “Archivist” and the team of
Rev. 10th August 2025
This is a short version of the article. The complete version is available for download in PDF format at the following link:
The Four Jolly Snookers. By V. Mordan. Rev. 10th August 2025
The full version comprises all the arguments and hypotheses, quotations, links to primary sources, footnotes, a bibliography, illustrations, and a significant amount of unique information that was not included in the abridged version, but is of considerable value for enthusiasts of the history of the origin of snooker.
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19 March 1938, The Field published a letter from Colonel Neville Chamberlain in which he claimed to have invented the game of Snooker. The letter outlined the key stages in the game’s development. However, the publication of this letter sixty-three years after the event left many details vague. Likely, Chamberlain himself did not emphasize these details, nor did he consider them significant. His account was further muddied by the support of Compton Mackenzie, who published a note in The Billiard Player magazine in April 1939, thereby complicating the issue.
As a result, the exact process by which the game originally described by Chamberlain as a variation of Black Pool with coloured balls of higher value evolved into the modern form, featuring a pyramid of red balls and a single cue ball for all players, remains unclear.
Given the inconsistencies and inaccuracies in Chamberlain’s account, historians have raised numerous questions. Chamberlain himself was even accused of plagiarism, with some suggesting he took credit for a game that had existed long before 1875.
Peter Ainsworth’s seminal research, published in 2017, ‘The Origin of Snooker: The Neville Chamberlain Story,’ constitutes a comprehensive analysis of the various versions of snooker’s origins and the evidence surrounding their development. However, nearly eight years have elapsed since the publication of that work, and new evidence has been uncovered, thus necessitating a more comprehensive study that builds on both Peter Ainsworth’s work and the wealth of new evidence.
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In India, the rainy season is typically characterised by a period of precipitation that extends from June to October, with variations in the onset and cessation of this season depending on the specific geographical location. However, the year 1875 and the subsequent years were characterised by distinct developments. It is evident that contemporary society has largely overlooked the occurrence of a particularly severe drought that transpired between 1875 and 1878.
In 1875, experienced no drought, but the rainy season was shorter than usual. In the East Madhya Pradesh region, where Jubbulpore is located, there was an exceptionally high amount of rainfall in July, but by mid-August the rains had ceased, which was also atypical for this region and this time of year. In September, precipitation was observed, but the occurrence was brief and the rainfall was not substantial.
The research on weather anomalies are not abstract arguments unrelated to the subject of the article; on the contrary, they represent very important nuances necessary for understanding, although at first glance they may seem unnecessary and superfluous. However, it is precisely these seemingly minor facts that make it possible to accurately determine when, in the officers’ mess at Jubbulpore, Neville Chamberlain, as he himself stated in his letter, added several more expensive coloured balls to Black Pool and named the new game.
At the end of July 1875, four recent graduates of the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich (Lieutenant Arthur Pole Penton, Lieutenant Thomas Stanford Baldock, Lieutenant Owen Stuart Smyth, and Lieutenant William Frederick Cleeve) arrived in Jubbulpore on official business, where the 11th Foot Regiment (Devonshire) was stationed. In a letter dated 7 August 1875, one of the Lieutenants, Arthur Penton, reported observing a game that resembled Black Pool but featured yellow and green balls then the most common colors used in various forms of the pool.
It is regrettable that Lieutenant Penton did not elucidate whether the yellow and green balls were utilised in conjunction with the black ball, or whether they were employed as a replacement for it. This is a significant question, given that for almost two decades, in virtually every publication, the set of coloured balls changed and black was very rarely mentioned in conjunction with yellow and green. In the vast majority of cases, brown and blue balls were added to them, and in the Alexandria version of ‘The Four Jolly Snookers,’ the colour of the balls was not specified at all.
This implies that the version of Snooker described by Neville Chamberlain in his 1938 letter to The Field had already come into existence by that date. Furthermore, the fact that the four young officers had only recently graduated from Woolwich and were thus ‘snooker’ themselves supports Chamberlain’s claim regarding the origin of the game’s original name. It is most probable that the young artillery officer who imparted the significance of the term ‘snooker’ to Chamberlain was Lieutenant William Cleeve, the eldest of the four artillerymen (he graduated from Woolwich a year before the others) and, according to Arthur Penton, he repeatedly employed this sobriquet in jest in reference to his fellow officers.
In May 1875, a concise article was published in a local newspaper, which, among other subjects, reported on problems with the red balls for the pyramid in Jubbulpore. Confirming this information, in a letter dated 31 July 1875, Penton complains to his correspondent that three red balls are missing from the officers’ mess, rendering the game of Shell-Out (a game of Pyramids for several players) impossible to play.
These facts, seemingly unrelated to snooker, allowed Peter Ainsworth to hypothesise that it was precisely because of the absence of three red balls and the attempt to replace them with coloured ones when setting up the pyramid that the idea of modern snooker was born, that is, declaring coloured balls to be more valuable in the game than red ones, and then determining the order of shots: red, then coloured.
Following his departure from the 11th Foot and subsequent joining of the Central India Horse, Neville Chamberlain did not promote or develop the game he had created for more than five years. Consequently, snooker underwent a gradual autonomous evolution within several provincial clubs in Central India. In particular, the name, which was not universally understood (as not only artillery units were located in India), was associated with other characters, partially transferred to the coloured balls used in the game, and some rules differed fundamentally even in neighbouring clubs.
At the close of the summer of 1880, during the Second Afghan War, Neville Chamberlain met Major Frederick Keyser, a gifted amateur thespian who had been performing on stage since 1872 as a comedic character named ‘Snooker’ and was also an ardent enthusiast of the game ‘Pyramids’.
In December 1881, Neville Chamberlain, who had already transferred to the Madras Army Staff, repeatedly spent evenings at the billiard table with Frederick Keyser and assisted him in organising entertainment events. It is evident that these meetings were not without consequence, and Chamberlain accepted the changes that had occurred during his period of inactivity in promoting snooker. From the spring of 1882, he began to actively promote his game. It was during this period that he was accepted into the club in Ootacamund (Ooty), whose membership comprised the entire elite of the colonial forces in India, and it was probably for this reason that the attempt to rename Snooker to The Four Jolly Snookers (after the number of coloured balls) was unsuccessful, although it remained in some publications and, as it later transpired, in several clubs. It is plausible that the humorous version of the game’s title implied the presence of greater freedom in the rules.
And if Peter Ainsworth’s hypothesis regarding the integration of the pyramid of red balls into the game of snooker in August 1875 is founded on logical reasoning, it can be posited that a similar line of argumentation can be employed to demonstrate that the pyramid of red balls was incorporated into snooker in December 1881, under the influence of Frederick Keyser, an ardent aficionado game of Pyramid. This hypothesis is also plausible, since in addition to the introduction of the pyramid of red balls, the attempt to rename the game ‘The Four Jolly Snookers’ may signify a change in the association of the term snooker in Chamberlain’s mind from a Woolwich cadet to a comic character of the same name and, accordingly, the transfer of the name from the game to the coloured ball.
The influence of Frederick Keyser is confirmed by the fact that in 1882, Captain Chamberlain entered his bullock, named Jolly Snooker, in a race. However, as we can assume today, the humorous attitude towards the game did not find support among billiard enthusiasts, and it was decided to return to the name Snooker, although different sources already had their own variations.
First Snookers, followed by Snooker’s Pool and then Snooker Pool. However, Neville Chamberlain was no longer involved in the process, and all subsequent changes occurred independently of his control or participation. Evidence of his voluntary withdrawal from promoting snooker can be found in the fact that, from 1887 onwards when the game began to feature extensively in newspapers, no mention of its creator was made in the press, and correspondents competed in coming up with versions of the authorship of the new popular game.
On 10 October 1884, the Civil & Military Gazette published the rules of a game called Snookers for the first time. This version employed a pyramid of red balls, complemented by four coloured balls, namely yellow, green, brown, and blue. Prior to the introduction of the fifth coloured ball, followed by the sixth (there is a well-argued hypothesis that this happened in Australia, but that is a subject for separate research), this combination of colours was used in official snooker rule publications.
However, eyewitness accounts (e.g., Captain Sheldrick’s letter or Major General W. A. Watson’s memoirs), various clubs used alternative options. The balls that lost their colour fastest were the yellow and green balls, which turned into a dirty beige and therefore required more frequent repainting, and as a result, the billiard hall owners always had several of each colour and often replaced them, so that among the others these two colours seemed the brightest, yellow and green balls were always present, and only two additional colours were changed.
Between April 1886 and January 1887, Lieutenant Colonel Almeric George Spencer introduced a new game titled ‘The Four Jolly Snookers’ at the Cercle Mohamed Aly in Alexandria, Egypt. This game bore a strong resemblance to its Indian counterpart, albeit with one notable distinction: the value of the balls was not associated with their colour, but rather depended on the spot where the ball was located. One hypothesis suggests that Lieutenant Colonel Spencer may have learned the game from Captain Lefroy, who served in India in 1881 and part of 1882 before joining the 56th Regiment shortly before his retirement.
In support of this hypothesis, it is notable that in 1883 Captain Lefroy published a short note in French in a Canadian newspaper in which he used the word snookers with the verb ‘chasser’, which was rather strange considering that the name of the game was associated with a cadet from Woolwich. The term ‘chasing snookers’ is not attributable to the game itself; it is more probable that it refers to actions involving the balls.
In subsequent publications in British magazines, there are two mentions of a game called ‘The Four Jolly Snookers.’ However, the authors of the articles do not indicate their sources of information, and the published rules exactly repeat the rules of Snooker or Snooker Pool, in which the colour of the ball is strictly linked to its position on the table, that had been published many times before. Furthermore, the combination of colours – yellow, green, brown and blue – corresponds exactly to the very first publication of the rules of the game entitled ‘Snookers’.
Most likely, following its initial publication in 1884, or potentially slightly earlier, the set of rules was distributed in printed form, after the game began to be actively promoted at the Ootacamund Club in 1882, while the name was assigned to the game depending on how the owner of the copy of the rules understood the name and what they associated it with.
However, the genesis of these rules can be traced back not only to Neville Chamberlain, but also to the clubs and officers’ casinos where the game of snooker underwent independent development and evolution over a period of years, commencing in 1875. Chamberlain himself did not specify which colours were used in the original version, writing only, ‘[…] 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.’ It is conceivable that he simply failed to recall the specific colours that had been utilised, or alternatively, the relevance of these colours was not deemed significant from the outset, any balls present in the billiard room that appeared, in principle, to be acceptable were employed. This is the most plausible scenario, given that in those days, provincial clubs and officers’ messes in small-town garrisons frequently lacked either coloured balls or red balls, or even both, or the balls were discoloured and looked the same dirty beige colour, and players had to employ a high degree of ingenuity to play even the most common games, using the numbering of balls of the same colour or other methods. Consequently, over the course of several years of autonomous development, it is conceivable that traditions pertaining to the utilisation of their own set of coloured balls, with or without reference to the spots on the billiard table, have emerged within specific clubs.
It is conceivable that in the early 1880s, following his encounter with Snooker as played by Frederick Keyser and remembering the game of the same name but with a different meaning that he had created many years earlier, and finally having sufficient leisure time, Chamberlain initiated the active promotion and dissemination of not his original version, created in 1875, but rather one that had evolved and was popular in one or more clubs in central India.
Alternatively, he may have modified it in part, thereby creating a hybrid form that falls somewhere between his original conception and a set of rules that evoke those currently employed in the game of snooker. In any case, this period was ephemeral, lasting only a few years, after which Neville Chamberlain once again abandoned the toy that had flattered his ego and returned to more significant matters, such as his career and, after September 1886, family.
However, it is evident that he accomplished his mission, which led to his name becoming famous. Snooker was created and disseminated, with various iterations of the rules being published in newspapers in India and Great Britain, and following a period of approximately twenty-five years since its inception, the game attained formal recognition from the Billiards Association of Great Britain and Ireland.
And now, for a brief summary. The evidence presented confirms that it was Neville Chamberlain who, in 1875, added additional coloured balls to the game of Black Pool, created a new game and named it ‘Snooker,’ and in 1882 he attempted to rename the game he had created ‘The Four Jolly Snookers.’ This allows us to confidently assert that, firstly, it is evident that all statements made in Chamberlain’s letter to The Field dated 19 March 1938 are indeed factual, and, secondly, over the span of 63 years since the inception of snooker, Chamberlain had forgotten the intricacies and phases of the game’s progression, as well as the contributions of various persons in the refinement of its rules.
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Lastly, we would like to address a point that we consider particularly important. Some snooker enthusiasts have criticized Neville Chamberlain for failing to provide detailed information regarding the origin and evolution of Snooker and for not asserting his rights in the early twentieth century when the game had gained popularity in Great Britain and was beginning to spread internationally through major tournaments and world championships. His authorship was called into question since none of the officers who served with him could confirm that they had witnessed the game’s creation.
The response to these criticisms is straightforward. It is evident that Neville Chamberlain, in congruence with his fellow officers and other persons associated with the genesis and progression of snooker, did not regard the game in a serious light. The officers in question were all professional, with their priorities lying in their military service. Snooker, akin to other leisure activities such as billiards, horse racing, card games, sports, and hunting, was regarded as a mere diversion.
While Chamberlain had time during his posting to the staff of Field Marshal Sir Frederick Roberts to promote and develop snooker, following September 1886 this time was reduced, if not virtually non-existent. Neville Chamberlain had married, so he would have found it hard to visit the billiard room as often as before.
The officers referenced in the article exhibited diverse life trajectories, yet they all attained success. Arthur Penton pursued his career in India and later in New Zealand. Colonel Keyser preferred to perform as Snooker on stage rather than follow the game’s progress. Lieutenant Colonel Spencer found time in Egypt to introduce a new set of rules but likely had no interest to continue this work during periods of active service. Lieutenant Colonel Henry George Lefroy built a distinguished career in the British and Canadian armies, garnering a reputation as an exemplary officer and devoted family man.
None of these persons could have anticipated that a time would come when Snooker would supplant English billiards in clubs and pubs or that historians would scrutinize every surviving mention of a game they had once regarded as a passing amusement and write articles such as this constructed from assumptions and supported by logical inference.
This is a short version of the article. The complete version is available for download in PDF format at the following link:
The Four Jolly Snookers. By V. Mordan. Rev. 10th August 2025