By Elliott West
“The sense of history was very strong, to see the artefacts they have including the letter from Sir Neville setting out the rules in a glass case. I remember being quite emotional when I went inside and saw the snooker table. To be the first and only World Champion to have visited the club is something really special”.
Dennis Taylor
Introduction
The history of snooker dates back to the late 1800s, widely thought to have been invented by a British army officer, Sir Neville Chamberlain not on British shores but in the warmer climbs of India. Born out of the predominant game of the day billiards, the earliest mention of this fascinating cue sport can be cited in the Straits Times, a weekly magazine in Singapore that in October 1884, reproduced an article published in the Englishman, a Calcutta-based newspaper. This gives an account of how snooker evolved from the British army station of Ooty.
“A Darjeeling correspondent sends a copy of the rules of a new game called ‘Snookere,’ which he ventures to prophesy will soon supplant both Pool and Pyramids in every club and mess room throughout the northern provinces. Its nomenclature would indicate a transatlantic origin, but it has travelled from Ootacamund to these breezy heights, and has speedily become very popular with cueists of all degrees of strength”.
Although this article doesn’t give any specific dates, it is significant and is considered to be the earliest contemporary reference to snooker, which can be accurately dated.’ A crucial timeline that helps to establish a place of origin.
The Ootacamund Club
The Ootacamund Club is situated in Udhagamandalam or Ooty as it has become to be known, a resort town in Western Ghats mountains, in Southern India’s Tamil Nadu state. A location that experiences snowfall and still retains many echoes of its colonial past including a working steam railway, the Government Botanical Garden and St Stephen’s Church.
With the original building dating back to 1833, the club itself was first registered as a limited company under the India Companies Act and remains in existence for 188 years. Recently featured in the BBC programme The Real Marigold Hotel, Dennis Taylor and Paul Nicholas visited the billiards
room where the first game of snooker was played on the table that still exists. The club has over 900 members with a membership base that spans the major cities of India. It also has 22 rooms to stay in where a strict code reigns, meals are eaten with Mappin and Webb cutlery and a Christmas lunch is served in December.
Still adorned with various animal heads and skins from hunting expeditions from the days of the British Raj, the Ooty Club is a blast from India’s past, instrumental in the formation of the game of snooker, a game that transformed since these initial steps into creating a new game that could ha for easily failed and been confined to the archives of time.
Known locally as ‘snooty Ooty’, this private member’s club certainly isn’t easy to reach. In order to reach this hidden paradise, you have to travel via steam train and other transportation on a road that has 36 hairpins and the temperature decreases the further you rise into the mountains, 18 degrees cooler in fact. This hidden paradise is heavily protected and those that run are reluctant for it to be filmed or photographed but those lucky enough to witness it and stay there will experience a touch of snooker history.
