By Elliott West
Introduction
I want to take you back to the black and white era of snooker, an age when someone who was playing billiards and snooker, a name that you will probably not have heard of. His name was Kingsley Kennerley. Between 1937 and 1940, Kingsley appeared in every final of the English Amateur Billiards and Snooker Championships, winning all four Billiards titles and two Snooker titles. An impressive record and one that stood for many years to come with no British Amateur managing to match or break his achievements.
Career
Billiards
Kingsley first started playing as a child but was only able to gain access to a table when he joined the Congleton Brass Band Club at the age of eleven. Playing the cornet in the band, Kennerley wasn’t exactly a roaring success with his newfound instrument. However, his membership did allow him to witness an exhibition by Jim Harris, a visiting professional. A display that made him become fascinated with this too of the table game and an artistic exponent of the ‘floating white’ technique.
By the age of 14, Kennerley was making double centuries in billiards and set an impressive record of going a whole season of local league Billiards undefeated. When he was 24, Kingsley lost narrowly in the quarter-final of the English Billiards Championship but the following year he achieved the Billiards/Snooker double and set a new aggregate record. Playing over four sessions, Kingsley made 3760 and a break of 549 which stood until the rules were changed in 1978.
He also retained the Billiards title in 1938 including a new English record of five centuries in a session but was beaten in the Empire Amateur Championship in Melbourne by the great Australian player, Bob Marshall. He would go on to win the English title in 1939 and set a new four-session aggregate record of 4324 which incorporated a new session aggregate record of 1218 but when he turned professional, he was thrown back into his second game, snooker due to the lack of billiards tournaments at the time.
Snooker
As a snooker player, Kingsley won two amateur titles and a high break of 69 in 1939 which stood as the English Amateur Championship title until 1950. Kennerley wasn’t as good at snooker as he was at billiards and sadly wasn’t able to cut it as a professional. He lost a very close finish against John Pulman in the English Amateur Championship qualifiers of the Empire News tournament and would go on to lose several other matches that would have been his passport to major events.
Kingsley Kennerley was one of the first eight players to take part in the first series of Pot Black in 1969 and took part again in series two and three. He also played in a few professional tournaments in the 1970s and 1980s with his last outing coming in the 1981 Coral UK Championship where he lost to Pat Houlihan in Group 5 of the qualifiers 9-1.
After a continued decline of bad form, Kingsley moved on to being a coach. A role that he carried on until the 1960s when snooker slumped as a popular game. A heart attack caused his best game to fall behind him but he continued to love both billiards and snooker and carried on coaching snooker until his latter years, gaining his income from a job unconnected with the game. Kennerley died suddenly from a sudden third heart attack, aged 68 in July 1982 at his Birmingham home.
