Who Invented Snooker?
Billiards and Snooker. April, 1937
By GEORGE NELSON
Some say it was invented at an officers’ mess in India, where the balls were so badly discoloured that they could only tell which was which by the shape.
Personally, I think, like “Topsy,” it simply “grow’d.” This theory is supported by the fact that in the pre-snooker days, “when I wor’ a lad,” we had several games near it, such as ” Black-pool ” and “Pink-pool,” and, after all, snooker is but a combination of those dear old games, pyramids and pool. “Dear” they were in more senses than one, for as a budding young cueist who fancied himself at potting a ball, it was for me generally like that other popular game of the naughty nineties “shell out.”
A well-known Leeds sportsman, Mr. Dunford Richardson, seems certain that he knows where snooker was first played; he avers that it originally came from America. Mr. Richardson, who in age is well past the allotted span, bases his knowledge on the fact that about 1887, he spent some time at Ventnor, Isle of Wight, and there he met some American officers who showed him how to play snooker. From this, Mr. Richardson, undoubtedly, first brought it to Leeds. I can only go as far back as 1890, but I do remember at that time what confusion there was about how snooker was played, and what the rules were.
Mr. Richardson, who, by the way, in his time was one of the most brilliant amateurs that we have had in Yorkshire, tells me he wrote to America for the rules of snooker, and obtained a set. And now my snooker query is ended in the hope that anyone with knowledge of how the game began will his tale unfold.
Harking back to its undoubted popularity, I went to see Davis play the two Snooker-Smiths, at Leeds and Doncaster, and found a refreshing atmosphere amongst the audience which accounts for its popularity. First and foremost I think snooker provides a good modern adaptation of the oldest joke in the world. That is that most people enjoy seeing the discomfiture of others, and so long as there is no real harm done, they laugh heartily at little hurts, as witness the old pantomime joke when the man at the right end of the big stick says “Shall I?”
Well, as soon as a professional player even looks round for a snooker, the audience brightens up, and gives a “titter” that means “Yes,” and when a real “Dartmoor” snooker is made they chuckle and laugh audibly. Then an air of “What’s he going to do now?” embraces the audience, and they sit up and take notice, and to their credit when the professional does play a clever “get-out,” they rejoice even more heartily that the tables are turned on the other fellow.
For years I have been preaching against the deadly dull monotony of long games of billiards, with their entire lack of interest for spectators, and I begged the professionals to make their matches a series of short games every session. Now snooker, with its infinite variety of half-a-dozen games every session, has captured the public. Fortnightly or weekly billiards as a professional entertainment looks as “dead as the dodo.”
[By way of helping the snooker symposium, we can vouch for a copy of “The Rules of Snooker;” a framed copy in very neat handwriting, in an officers’ mess in England in 1895. The game, so regimental tradition ran, was invented by a “Colonel Snooker,” in India. The only difference between the rules of 1895 and those of the present is that the BETTER GAME was played under the old rules.—ED.]