The Royal Billiard Hall

On 22 November 1963 a thirteen-year-old called Chris Dickenson was playing snooker at the Royal Billiard Hall when the gaffer flicked the table lights off and on and turned the radio up loud. That is how he heard that President Kennedy had been shot.

The Royal stood on Kingstanding Road beside the police station, just off the Circle and across the road from the old Co-op. Brian Rumbold remembered that its owners had a second snooker hall on Hawthorn Road. For forty years and more it was, in David Mitchell’s words on Voices of Kingstanding, “a great meeting place”.

Harold’s hall

Chris Dickenson remembered the gaffer, Harold Mosley, “who looked after the hall as though it was his home”. He ran three teams, A, B and C, and in Chris’s memory the A team was the best in Birmingham: Alan Howarth, Brian Walton, Bunny Lewis and Alan Stringer among them. Martin White, who delivered the Evening Mail there as a paperboy for Clare’s, knew “the old man Harold” and remembered Pete Moseley taking over from him. In the 1980s Paul Ashby’s father, John Ashby, managed the hall.

Its players go back to the 1940s. Shirley Thain’s uncle, Richard “Dick” Taylor, was a star there in the late 1940s and 1950s. Dawn Burke’s father, Ray Burke, “was part of the furniture”; she remembered the place as “so dark and smelly, (fags)”. Don Hallett admitted lying about his age at fourteen to get in during school hours, “for the wag man never looked in”.

The young man on table 12

Several regulars remembered the same young player. Chris Dickenson watched Graham Miles play his friend John Shepherd on table 12; Martin White remembered him on table 11. Phil Brown’s family had him as a lodger on Kings Road, and Phil worked on the burger van Miles parked outside, which helped pay for his practice. Miles, born in Birmingham in 1941, went on to win the BBC’s Pot Black in 1974 and 1975, and reached the world championship final in 1974, losing to Ray Reardon. Ray Burke, Chris remembered, used to watch him and say, “If only I could play like that.”

Sandwiches and a one-armed bandit

Phil Brown’s abiding memory was “the incredible large fresh crusty wedge cheese and onion sandwiches” served at the desk. His mother, Jean Brown, worked there for a few years. Chris Dickenson remembered a one-armed bandit that paid £20 for three stars: “a lot of money back in 1965.” Voices of Kingstanding also recorded Ken Shelley talking about the hall; in 2023 his son John wrote that it was “so lovely to hear my father’s voice again”.

The Library of Birmingham photographed the hall in 1984. By about 2011 the building was used as function rooms, and Martin White, who looked in around 2019, believed it was no longer a snooker hall. “Blimey, what a change,” he wrote. “But fond memories.”

Then and now

1984

2010