Pocket dynamo

BACK in the Sixties, Vera Selby was lucky to get through the doors of a snooker club, let alone get her hands on the cue.

Today, however, she is as much a part of the furniture as an extended rest.

After breaking the world record and winning several snooker championships, she even has strangers stopping her in Asda saying, “Vera Selby? I played you 30 years ago!”

For 80, she’s incredibly sprightly and still plays snooker in her jeans four times a week. What’s more, she is showing no sign of stopping. “It’s a wonderful game,” she says, fondly. “I like the peace of it.”

Born in Richmond, North Yorkshire, Vera’s life took a new direction after meeting her late husband Bruce.

She was in her mid-twenties at the time. Bruce was a hairdresser in Newcastle, 28 years older, and “a bit of a character”.

But the age gap didn’t bother them.

Two years later, they were married.

They were out one evening when a chap came up and asked Bruce if he could have his permission to take his daughter for a date. “That ‘daughter’ is my wife!’”, he’d retorted.

It was through Bruce that Vera got involved in billiards. Bruce played at a snooker club regularly and one day Vera asked if she could accompany him.

“He rang the Coxlodge Club in Newcastle,” she recalls. “They didn’t allow women in, but they said, ‘you can bring her in at six, as long as you’re out by seven’.”

Vera’s uncle had taught her how to use a cue when she was seven, and 30 years on, she still had the knack.

She was just about to pot a shot when ex-British snooker champion Alf Nolan walked in. After watching her knock a few balls, he told her she handled the cue quite powerfully for a woman, but had no idea what she was doing with it.

Knowing potential when he saw it, Alf offered to coach her.

Vera bought a full-size snooker table for £20 from an ad in the local paper, installed it in the garage, and Alf went around to offer a few tips.

She says he’d pot a red and say: “Now that’s a shot! You couldn’t play a shot as good as that.”

Vera became fixated on proving him wrong. The minute she’d finish her job at the college, lecturing in teacher training, she’d go to the garage and practise. “Like any sport, you don’t get anywhere unless you put the time in,” she notes.

After a month, Alf put her name down for a match at the Dudley Miners’ Welfare Hall. “I was the only woman there and I missed every pot,”

she says. “The men kept muttering, ‘she hasn’t got a clue’.”

Vera was close to tears, but Alf was on a mission and wasn’t prepared to give up without a fight. He stepped up the coaching and Vera found herself playing the regulars at some of the toughest clubs in town. Soon she was wiping the floor with the competition, prompting cries of ‘Good shot, Vera!’ from the crowd.

It wasn’t long before she was breaking tradition, not only gaining entry and playing at the Gateshead Railway Club, but captaining the team – a position she held for several years.

“Once in a while the skills would reappear and, to my surprise, I found I could wipe the floor,” she says.

Alf, though, had his eye on bigger things and after 18 months, he put her down for the English Women’s Billiards Championship in London. The venue was the Windmill Snooker Club in Soho. Vera set off on her own, not knowing quite what to expect.

“When I arrived I found it wedged between a strip club and a cinema showing porn,” she recalls. “There was a sign above the door that read ‘Windmill Snooker Club’ and another underneath, in glowing neon, that read: ‘SEX – morning, noon and night’.”

Armed with a look of determination, Vera ventured in and came second.

Bruce was delighted. Alf was distraught. “That’s no good to me,” he grumbled. “I want winners.”

The following year, Vera went back to London and won the championship.

She went on to win nine Women’s Billiards Championships, five Women’s Snooker Championships and two Women’s World Snooker Championships (the second at the age of 51), earning a place in The Guinness Book of Records.

The trips back and forth to Soho proved an eye-opener, but it took more than a few peep shows and men in long macs to put Vera off. She even played at the scene of a murder at one point.

Eager to get some practice in before a big match, she had gone into the basement of a snooker club a few doors down, and was just about to strike the ball when a scuffle broke out between two Chinese lads. One of them snapped his cue in half and chased the other up the stairs.

“He jammed his cue into the other lad’s throat and killed him,” says Vera. “There was blood splattered all over the walls.”

Back up North, Alf stayed on as her coach for ten years. His best advice, according to Vera, was never show any emotion.

FEMALE players often burst into tears when the game didn’t go their way; some even walked off in disgust and refused to shake hands.

But Vera always kept her cool.

“I can honestly say, in all the years I have been playing, I have never had any problem with the men,” she says.

“Some looked a bit sheepish when I won, but they always shook my hand, and that says a lot for Northern fellas.

Some people think they’re a bit rough, but I admire them for that.”

Vera went on to become a professional referee – mending the odd bow tie, even sewing up a player’s trouser zip which came unstuck in the middle of one match.

So what was the secret to her success on the snooker table?

“I can only put it down to Alf,” says Vera. “The calmer you keep, the more you can concentrate on the game. You just have to go in feeling you’re going to win.”