The story of Billiards & Snooker, Clive Everton, 1979

In 1875 Colonel Sir Neville Chamberlain was a young subaltern with the Devonshire Regiment stationed at Jubbulpore. During the rainy season the officers’ long afternoons were spent at the mess Billiards table where the parent game was less popular than various round games which were more suitable for more than two players and to which it was easier to add a modest gambling element.

Pyramids, perhaps Snooker’s most obvious forerunner, was a game played with fifteen reds, initially placed in a triangle, with the apex red on what is now the pink spot but which was then known as the pyramid spot. Each time a player potted a red, all his opponents paid across the agreed stake money per ball.

In Life Pool, each player was given a cue-ball and an object-ball (e.g. white on red, red on yellow) so, for the second player, his object-ball was the first player’s cue-ball and so on. The object was to pot one’s specified object-ball three times. Each time a player’s ball was potted, he lost a life and had to pay an agreed stake. When he had lost three “lives” he paid an extra sum for a “star” (or extra life) and when that was gone he was “dead”. When only one player remained he scooped the kitty.

Black Pool was a development of Pool in that a black ball was added. When a player had potted his allocated ball, he could attempt the black. If he was successful, each of his opponents paid across an additional sum and he could then attempt the nearest ball. Joe Davis spent many of his youthful hours playing a similar game, Pink Pool.

Black Pool was the preferred game among the Devonshire officers but it was Chamberlain’s inspiration gradually to add other coloured balls so that Snooker came to be played with fifteen reds, yellow, green, pink and black. Blue and brown were added some years later.

These new colours produced a game whose variety (and variety of monetary forfeits) immediately caught on. The concept of break building was much in the future and even the point values of the balls were not established until a little later; but it was in these casual and almost chance beginnings that the game undoubtedly had its origin.

When Compton Mackenzie, the novelist, interviewed him in 1938, Chamberlain recalled that the Devons one afternoon received a visit from a young subaltern who had been trained at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. In the course of conversation, the latter happened to remark that a first year cadet at Woolwich was referred to as a “snooker” with the implication that this was the status of the lowest of the low. The original word for a cadet had been the French “neux” which had been corrupted to “snooker”.

Chamberlain said: “The term was a new one to me but I soon had the opportunity of exploiting it when one of our party failed to hole a coloured ball which was close to a corner pocket. I called out to him: ‘Why, you’re a regular snooker!’

“I had to explain to the company the definition of the word and to soothe the feelings of the culprit 1 added that we were all, so to speak, snookers at the game so it would be very appropriate to call the game Snooker. The suggestion was adopted with enthusiasm and the game has been called Snooker ever since.”

In 1876, when Chamberlain left the Devons to join the Central India Horse, he took the game with him. After being wounded in the Afghan War, he served with the Commander-in-Chief of the Madras Army and was with him every summer when he moved to the hill station at Ootacamund. Snooker came to be recognised as the speciality of the Ooty Club and the rules of the game were drawn up and posted in the Billiards Room.

During the 1880’s rumours of this new game reached England and when John Roberts went out to India on one of his tours he had it in his mind to find out the rules. One evening in 1885 in Calcutta, Chamberlain was dining with the Maharajah of Cooch Behar when Roberts was introduced to him. Roberts duly brought the game back to England. It was many a long day before Snooker became widely played. Not every hall nor every club could afford a Snooker set of twenty-two balls though it was not long before the manufacturers appreciated Snooker’s superior commercial possibilities. Even so Billiards remained such a popular game to play that not until the Second World War could a Billiard hall risk carrying fewer sets of Billiard balls than they had tables.