Pots of Gold

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Singin' in the Rain

For Dennis Taylor, it was a glimpse of colour in a black-and-white world.

Three decades before he potted the most famous ball in snooker history, Taylor was a boy growing up in the 1950s, a time of hardship and struggle as Britain rebuilt after the war. By chance one afternoon as he walked to his home in Coalisland, Northern Ireland, he saw something that changed his life for ever.

'I was eight or nine,' he says. 'There was a club next to the police station. The door happened to be open one day. I saw a snooker table for the first time, and it fascinated me, the colours.'

They have fascinated multitudes ever since. In 1985, 18.5 million people were tuned to BBC2 to watch Taylor pot the last black of the World Championship final and beat Steve Davis 18-17 a few minutes after midnight. By then, snooker had taken a grip on the national consciousness. A sport that had seemed to come from nowhere had become part of the country's collective bloodstream.

Yet it had been a long journey, full of false starts and wayward turns, a very British story of success and failure infused with disputed provenance, organisational chaos, egos, class, eccentricity and ultimate triumph against the odds. A century on from its establishment as a professional sport, it is now played all around the world, while its major competitions draw global audiences in the hundreds of millions.

How did this happen?

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As Samuel Johnson put it, 'When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.' For a sport that would become so ingrained in the British national psyche, it is fitting we have the rain to thank for snooker coming into being.

In 1875, the Devonshire Regiment was stationed in Jubbulpore (known today as Jabalpur), an Indian city in the state of Madhya Pradesh. The British Raj had been established 17 years earlier, following a rebellion against the East India Company, the trading group that had taken power across much of the country. Control was transferred to the Crown, and Queen Victoria became the Empress of India.

It was the rainy season, and officers gravitated towards the billiard table in the mess. Billiards has become a catch-all term for cue sports, but at this time English billiards was a well-known game, with a heritage stretching back centuries. Played with three balls, scoring was through a variety of pots and cannons.

There was a romantic theory espoused for a while that it was invented by William Kew, a London pawnbroker, who was said to enjoy taking down the three gold balls that identified his profession and pushing them around his yard with a stick - hence Bill-yard. His surname could explain the name of the equipment used to strike the balls. Clive Everton, the highly respected snooker and billiards journalist and commentator, took a more pragmatic view in his 2012 book A History of Billiards. 'This picturesque version of the origins of billiards must be discarded in favour of a series of more fragmentary clues,' he wrote. Everton contended that the word 'billiards' descends from the Latin and old French words for 'ball' - billa and bille respectively - and that the game has its roots in croquet, a sport played on lawns, where coloured balls are manoeuvred through hoops with a mallet. Early versions of billiards saw players use a mace - a cue with a flat end rather than a tip - to strike the balls.

Cue sports have a rich history. Louis XI of France had a billiard table in the fifteenth century. Mary, Queen of Scots was a keen player and complained that her captors had kept her from her table. They responded by tearing off its cloth and wrapping her beheaded corpse in it following her execution in 1587. In Act II, Scene V of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, the latter tells her servant, Charmian, 'Let's to billiards.'

The game of billiards began largely as a pursuit for the gentry but would permeate wider society. According to Everton, 'At the turn of the eighteenth century, billiards was still largely the pursuit of the French, English and indeed Americans. The game had almost certainly been exported in the 1600s by the early English colonists - the nobility and well to do - but by 1800 there were enough public tables in French cafés, English ale houses and everywhere in America from private houses to the toughest frontier outposts to justify the claim that it was now a game for all classes.'1

Billiards remains a highly skilful game, but in time the best players became too good and a degree of dramatic tension was lost from public matches. The cradle cannon, in which two balls are positioned close to a corner pocket, made scoring easy for the most talented exponents and led to Tom Reece making a break of 499,135 over the course of three weeks in 1907 against Joe Chapman, who did not have a single shot throughout the entire time.

Although cradle cannons were banned a few months later, Reece's marathon break underlined the repetitive nature of billiards at the top level and how this threatened the game's capacity to provide entertainment for the public. Later, billiards came to be regarded as so arcane that it was one of the niche British touchstones the Village Green Preservation Society sought to save in The Kinks' eponymous record of 1968.

In between the Reece break and the Ray Davies ditty, billiards had been thoroughly overtaken by the game fashioned while the Jubbulpore rain hammered on the windows of the officers' mess. A general boredom with billiards had led to the military personnel experimenting with other established games, with interest added by introducing wagering. Pyramids involved 15 reds set up initially in a triangular frame. Each time a player potted a red, his opponent had to pay the pre-agreed stake money for each ball. Life pool saw players designated with a cue ball and an object ball, the latter of which became the next player's cue ball. For instance, player A would use the white ball to try and pot the yellow. The yellow would be player B's cue ball, and he would try to pot the pink. Player C had pink as cue ball and green as object ball, and so on. The object of the game was to pot your own object ball three times. Every time it was potted, the player whose cue ball it was would lose a 'life', until only one player remained. Money changed hands as each ball was potted. Players could buy back in with an extra life in exchange for cash. At the end, the remaining player scooped all the money. Black pool added a black ball to life pool, meaning an additional gambling element because there was another ball to be potted after the initial object ball had been sunk.

The commonly accepted theory is that Neville Chamberlain, just nineteen, a second lieutenant with the Devonshires, mashed the various elements of pyramids and life pool together to forge a new game with scope for a greater variety of bets among the soldiers. He kept the 15 reds of pyramids, added the yellow, green and pink of life pool and the black of black pool. Brown and blue would be added later.

In conversation with a visiting subaltern from the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, Chamberlain learned that a first-year cadet at the institution was known as a 'snooker', essentially implying that within the rigid hierarchy of the army, they were at the bottom of the pile. So it was that the name of a game that would become a multimillion-pound global sport began as an insult.

The derivation of the word 'snooker' is disputed. The term 'cocking a snook' would logically describe a disdainful relationship between the officer class and young cadets, and this may have been adapted to form the word. Another theory is that 'snooker' was derived from the original name for a cadet, 'neux' (from the French term les neux). There was also an 1850s music-hall act called Hooker and Snooker, popular in London, which may have helped the word gain common currency.

Chamberlain was 82 when he wrote to The Field magazine in 1938 to claim responsibility for snooker's birth, following speculation that it had actually been invented at the academy in Woolwich and that Lord Kitchener - the veteran military general whose face adorned posters bearing the slogan 'Your Country Needs You' at the outbreak of the First World War - was responsible for handwriting the rules. Chamberlain wrote:

One day it occurred to me that the game of black pool, which we usually played, would be improved if we put down 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. The term 'snooker' 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 I added that we all were, so to speak, snookers at the game so it would be very appropriate to call it snooker. The suggestion was adopted with enthusiasm.2

The following year, the famous novelist and essayist Compton Mackenzie wrote an article for Billiard Player magazine titled 'Origins of a Great Game', which promised to be 'For the first time, the fully authenticated story of the origin of snooker.' Mackenzie supported Chamberlain's claim with further evidence from other distinguished military figures who served in India which he described as...