By Elliott West
“She never had a hair out of place”.
Brian and Audrey Jarvis
Introduction
Sport has been defined by many women over the years and one fantastic example in billiards and snooker was the late Joyce Gardner. When Joyce died in 1981, she left a treasure-trove of items, cataloguing her long and successful career in both sports. Left to friends and neighbours, the collection gives a true insight into a previous age when billiards and snooker were in their infancy but women such as Joyce were determined to break the stereotypical gender barriers and make an impression in the annals of time.
The Collection
Her neighbours, Brian and Audrey Jarvis who lived in Pinner, were lucky enough to be given a large amount of the mementos from Gardner’s career and they certainly were impressive, including press scrapbooks, trophies, posters and personal letters from the time. One memory that stands out is a photograph of Joyce in a billiard hall in 1927, described in the album as her first public appearance at the age of 17.
It was of course a billiard match, played at Holt’s Billiard Room, Hyde Road, Holborn against the champion Tom Reece. A game where she got a 400 start and won by 182. Gardner was lucky enough to play every male player of the time, from her debut in 1927 against Tom Reece, right up until the 1970s when she played the likes of John Spencer and Ray Reardon. Most of these were charity fundraisers, collecting for the Red Cross and Guide Dogs For The Blind, charities which she collected in excess of £250,000 during her lifetime.
The club exhibitions would always end with an auction with Joyce using her female charm in what was then a highly male attendance. However she sold it, it worked because she always managed to sell off all the items including a single bottle of whiskey for £1,100.
However, these exhibitions were certainly not always plain sailing. All these clubs at the time had a men-only policy and when Joyce tried to attend the Hemsworth Conservative Club in November 1924 with Jack Rea, she received a letter from the club secretary that would definitely breach today’s sexual discrimination legislation. In it, the letter states that the club had to make a collective decision to break their men-only policy, one that had stood for 50 years to allow Joyce to attend and stipulate that she can be the only female there.
The Journey
Gardner was also fortunate enough to be offered a stint as a commentator, providing ten minutes of commentary during the World Snooker Championship final on the final day’s play between Joe Davis and Horace Lindrum. A segment that was squeezed into the Light Programme between 3.15 and 3.25 but earned her the princely sum of six guineas. She would go on to work on the 1946 World Snooker Championship and received a cheque for £60 to cover her expenses from W.Jelks and Sons who supplied the table and funded the event. Joyce was good at her job and so good that Joe Davis personally wrote to her after the tournament, thanking her for all the match data that she had collected during the tournament.
Joyce would later go on to marry Arthur Williams in 1937. Known as Bill, he would travel everywhere with her, organising everything away from the table and Gardner would go on to keep playing until her late 60s, becoming the only female member of the WPBSA. Someone who appeared with Fred Davis and Rex Williams in the Watney’s Red Barrel Tour in the late 1960s, playing each one at both disciplines. A lady who attended many of the World Snooker finals of the 1970s including the Embassy Championship of 1978, a final contested between Perrie Mans and Ray Reardon and won by Ray 25-18.
