IN THE clubs and pubs of East Lancashire, snooker played a major part in life.

There were a myriad of leagues and championships, with working men’s clubs and local hostelries running their own teams and knock-out games.

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Snooker is generally believed to have started in the second part of the 1800s, when British Army officers stationed in India came up with a variant of the game of billiards, adding coloured balls to the table.

Snooker was then a slang term for cadets or inexperienced soldiers, and one story is that Sir Neville Chamberlain, of the Devonshire regiment, called his opponent a ‘snooker’ when he failed to pot a ball — and the name stuck.

Brought back to the UK by the officer class, it was a sport associated with gentlemen and slowly developed in popularity.

In 1927, professional billiards and snooker player Joe Davis organised the first World Championships, and he won every championship until he retired in 1946.

His brother Fred took over his mantle, wining in 1947, 1948 and again in 1951, wearing specially devised spectacles with swivel lens joints to overcome his poor eyesight.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the game remained popular with cue sports enthusiasts, but generated very little attention with the general public at large.

This changed in 1969, when David Attenborough, at the BBC, commissioned the programme Pot Black.

It was a televised snooker tournament designed to show off the benefits of colour television broadcasting — the green table and coloured balls making a striking visual spectacle in the early days of colour TV.

The programme helped generate increased interest in snooker as a sport, and the 1978 World Championship was the first to be fully televised.

Here in East Lancashire, E J Riley’s set up as a snooker table manufacturer in Accrington in 1912.

The specially constructed works had a production room, which was 120 yards long, and a local professional sprinter, Max Whittenburgh, used the first floor of the facilities to practise his 100 yards dash.

It soon produced 4,000 full-size snooker tables a year and exported to all parts of the globe.

After the First World War began in August 1914, its machines were turned over to war work, with rifle butts and aeroplane struts now its main products, By the mid 1920s, the Riley brand, based upon creativity, quality and craftsmanship, had grown into a leading premium snooker tables, cues and accessories brand, and owned nearly 40 billiard halls.