Vera Selby

Pioneering snooker champion who shrugged off male chauvinism on her rise to the top

VERA SELBY, who has died on her 93rd birthday, was a trailblazing snooker and billiards player who came to be profoundly respected in those male-dominated sports; she was the women’s world snooker champion twice, the second time aged 51; British women’s billiards champion nine times; British women’s snooker champion five times; and she went on to be an international referee in the men’s game into her 80s.

But it was a struggle to break into such a men’s preserve, and Steve Davis’s words after he had won his first world title, in 1981, illustrated the attitudes women faced: “It’s not women’s bodies that are the problem, it’s their minds. They just don’t seem to concentrate as well as men … Admittedly their shape doesn’t help – big breasts can make the game very awkward – but it is that lack of mental control which finally prevents them becoming top class.”

Vera Selby spent decades disproving that theory.

She was born Vera Danby on March 13 1930 in Richmond, North Yorkshire, where her father managed the local branch of the Freeman, Hardy & Willis footwear chain.

She was introduced to billiards aged six by her Uncle Jack, who had a table in his cellar; her father, too, had a table above the shop, where she was allowed to watch her brother and his friends play.

She studied art and design at Leeds University before embarking on a career lecturing in textiles. In her mid-20s she married a Newcastle hairdresser, Bruce Selby, who was 28 years her senior – and, she said, “a bit of a character”.

He played snooker regularly, and when Vera asked him to take her with him he sounded out the Coxlodge Club in Newcastle. “They didn’t allow women in,” she recalled, “but they said: ‘You can bring her in at six, as long as you’re out by seven.’ ”

Having gained admittance to the Coxlodge’s hallowed hall, she was potting a shot when the former British champion Alf Nolan walked in. He watched her for a while, then told her that although she handled the cue powerfully for a woman she had no idea what she was doing with it. Seeing her potential, he offered to coach her.

She bought a full-size snooker table, which she installed in her garage, and put herself under Nolan’s tutelage. His teaching style was simple and direct, she told the Northern Echo: “He’d pot a red and say: ‘Now that’s a shot! You couldn’t play a shot as good as that.’”

As her garage was only three feet wider than the table, she made herself a cue that was two feet long, half the usual size. It had the advantage, she said, of training her to keep the ball away from the cushions.

Vera Selby became obsessed with the game, and after a month, Nolan 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 said. “The men kept muttering, ‘She hasn’t got a clue’.”

But she and Nolan persisted, and after 18 months he entered her for the English Women’s Billiards Championship at the Windmill Snooker Club in Soho.

“I found it wedged between a strip club and a cinema showing porn,” she recalled. “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’.”

She finished second – only for Nolan to tell her: “That’s no good to me. I want winners.” The following year, she obliged. “The standard must have been pretty low,” he told her.

Playing in Soho did have its downside. On one occasion she was practising in a club there when a fight broke out between two Chinese players. One of them snapped his cue in half and chased his opponent up the stairs.

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

Back home in Newcastle, she was soon beating good male players across the city, and she broke through a significant barrier when she was allowed into the Gateshead Railway Club, going on to captain the team – a position she held for several years.

Even then, several clubs barred her, and when she and her playing partner Ray Lomax reached the semi-finals of the North-east snooker championship, the venue, a working-men’s club, tried to turn her away. “They had to send for a committee man,” she recalled. “Ray told them that if they didn’t let me in, there wouldn’t be a semi-final.”

Nolan continued to coach her for 10 years; his best advice, she said, was never to show emotion.

Away from the baize, Vera Selby taught aspiring art teachers and became a senior art, textile and dress designer lecturer at Newcastle Polytechnic, later going into teachertraining and taking early retirement at 53. By then she was established as a respected referee; she became the first woman to officiate in a men’s international, and in her 70s she refereed the final of the men’s European Snooker Championships in Latvia.

She was a sought-after instructor of would-be referees and became a popular speaker, often on the subject of “A woman in a man’s world”; she also commentated for the BBC at the 1982 men’s World Championship won by Alex “Hurricane” Higgins at the Crucible in Sheffield – despite the reservations of one BBC executive, who said: “It’s like letting a mother superior on to a professional football pitch.”

She played four times a week into her ninth decade and even became a late-life model, doing catwalks and shoots (“I was thinking it would be glamorous but my first job was for a stair-lift company,” she recalled). Back in her home town of Richmond she was made the first female warden of the Company of Fellmongers (a fellmonger is a dealer in sheepskins or “fells”).

Vera Selby was appointed MBE in 2016. She received her gong from Prince Charles. “You don’t look like a snooker player,” he said. “We’re not all big, butch male people,” she replied.

She carried on playing into her ninth decade, saying: “It’s a wonderful game. I like the peace of it.”

Bruce Selby died in 1990.

Vera Selby, born March 13 1930, died March 13 2023