Lives in Cricket No 40 - Edwin Smith

124 Chapter Twenty One Master on the baize Despite a 20-year playing association with Derbyshire County Cricket Club, followed by three more as coach, this is dwarfed by Edwin’s snooker career, that started in 1948, when he was able to join the Grassmoor Snooker Club. That association has continued for 66 unbroken years; he has won most trophies that have been worth winning. When I asked to see his trophies he laughed and told me that he would look ‘some’ out for my next visit, the following day. I walked in to a room where the table was laden with impressive trophies, boxes with more in them on the floor to the side. The anecdotes were soon flying. I remember when I played Cliff Thorburn. He had just won the World Masters and I got to play him because I had won a competition to mark the centenary of the Derbyshire National Union of Miners. The final was played at the old Ashgate Drill Hall, where they got a table in especially for the event. I played a chap from Shirebrook in the final and beat him, four frames to one, winning a week’s holiday at the miners’ holiday camp in Skegness for my family. Well, Mike Watterson, who started the Embassy World Masters at the Crucible, in Sheffield, got Cliff to come through for an exhibition match against me, as another part of the prize. I had played Mike a few times at Grassmoor and he had won the National Club and Institute All England Snooker Competition, but I used to beat him. When the professionals played these exhibition games on promotional tours, it was traditional to give the local man a 25-point start. Mike told Cliff that if he gave me a start, I would beat him! So we played on a level basis and he won – but only narrowly, so I guess Mike was right ... It is little more than one would expect from a man with a record break of 130. The stories come thick and fast. Mike and I played in a pairs competition at Cannock and had we won we would have been in a televised competition. We lost in the end, but one of the chaps we played against asked me why I wasn’t playing as a professional. The answer was simple. I was playing cricket in the summer at the time when I was really good and snooker was very much a closed shop in the 1950s and 1960s, when Fred and Joe Davis carried all before them.