By Elliott West
“It’s an excellent game for navvies to play in their lunch hour or to be played in corduroys and clogs”.
Tom Reece
Introduction
Nestled in the heart of Wales lie the Welsh Valleys. A place that for generations, chapel, the coal mine and the buzz of the Miner’s Institute was the bread of heaven of a working-class Welshman. Caked in coal dust, these brave men used to emerge like blackened gods from the heat and sweat of a dark and dank coal pit, greeted by the light of a fading day. The whirring colliery wheel forever turning with the blackened coal carts and pit ponies in the backdrop, the wrought iron gates were the only method of escape. Walking up the winding streets and as they did, producing rhythmic music in their hobnail boots, these men of coal whistled, laughed and joked. Their day was done, only to be ended by a scrub with carbolic soap in a battered tin bath by the fire and a well-earned meal, washed down with a mug of tea.
With their mining clothes tossed aside and now in their civvies, these coal Titans pounded the Welsh streets to the Miner’s Institute, their chapel of snooker. A game that they worshipped in their own right, a game that was fascinating as well as frustrating. It was here that all the greats of snooker had a misspent youth. Dilwyn John, Alwyn Lloyd, Des May, Doug Mountjoy, Ray Reardon, Cliff Wilson and Terry Griffiths. Some were played by a flickering gas light, and others were rewarded with an electric light. The Miner’s Institute had a cloud of cigarette smoke as thick as London smog, an old-fashioned bar where the beer glasses were suspended on hooks above it, looking like mini chandeliers as they reflected the light of the room. A hub of laughter, entertainment and snooker, washed down with a cold pint of mild, darker than the coal they had just mined. A place that acted as a substitute for there being no cinemas nearby.
It’s like bowls, played on a table instead of the floor”.
Unknown source
The Devil’s Kitchen
In Wales, they have had their finger on the pulse of life, knowing what makes life tick. Forever imaginative, able to organise a dance, jazz band or a game of snooker at the drop of a hat. A feverish pulse that runs redder than the rugby shirts that J.P.R Williams and Barry John once wore. In the Miner’s Institute and working men’s clubs, you would soon be found out if you played a bad shot. You just had to view the audience and you could pick out snooker greats of the past, amateur and professional. Their hardened stare, pierced the back of the players’ waist oats as they inhaled the intensity of the match. The rhythmic click of the snooker balls was observed in deathly silence, only occasionally broken by the odd cough, groan or smatter of applause. This is a ghost of the past that was left to dereliction and decay. The once buzzing tables were left to gather dust, broken up or sold to private collectors. Whose baize was enriched with the DNA of Joe Davis and other greats. The old, heavy snooker balls still lying static in the pockets, with a cascade of cobwebs suspended from the shade.
Yet these dusty buildings, some still here and others pulled down to make way for the advancement of society, these mining heroes flocked to watch the rivalry of Ray Reardon and Cliff Wilson. The suave break builder against the fastest potter you had ever seen. Reardon who had been granted permission on a Thursday afternoon as a boy of 8 years old by his father for an hour, turned a blind eye to let his son experience the game. A game that his father, Ben and best friend Tom Hughes loved to play after a hard day down the mine. Reardon would go on to have an aversion to morning matches, describing them as “unnatural”, preferring the darkness of the evening session. Reardon was a true night owl.
The Split
In Tredegar, the town was split between the worlds of Reardon and Wilson. Names that would always be rubber-stamped with a miner’s bet when they played. You dared utter your preferred candidate for fear of being lambasted by a passer-by. Wilson’s world was dominated by gas lamps and woe betide if they were cooking lunch because the gas pressure would drop and would be lucky to see the end of the table. Yet when Ray Reardon decided to move to Stoke on Trent, this rivalry met a timely end and caused Wilson to pack up the game for 12 years, spurred also by the death of his father and a snooker widow of a wife who preferred her husband at home rather than being in a billiard hall. A snooker door that temporarily slammed shut unlike the gates of Ty Trist Colliery that were permanently padlocked. A game that Wilson described as “not being about eyesight but about guts”. A bare-knuckle snooker fight occurred whenever Wilson played Reardon. Misspent youth in its finest form.
Retrospection
Terry Griffiths, Doug Mountjoy, Ray Reardon and Cliff Wilson once played a frame of snooker in a field in a desolate Welsh hillside. An October day when the sun came out and the players glided around a table, placed in the mud with only nearby sheep and ponies who preferred the green grass to snooker. A barmy idea but one that had to be done. A fragment of a delightful part of Welsh snooker history that enthrals and fascinates, an age when life was hard and leisure time precious. A time when snooker was the bread and butter of the Welshman’s table.
