Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  As a middle-aged, middle-class woman who did not generally like watching sport, Mrs Thatcher was precisely the sort of person for whom snooker had been redesigned. On television, its past in the smoke-filled working man’s club was discreetly forgotten. As the journalist Hunter Davies remarked in 1982, snooker had become a ‘feature of many family lives these days, that awkward table cluttering up suburban living rooms’. Thanks to television, he wrote, ‘the game now crosses every social barrier and has made superstars out of young boys with nice manners and clean clothes’.

  What was most striking, though, was its appeal to women. Indeed, snooker was reputedly the first televised sport watched by more women than men. ‘Women,’ Hearn said a year later, when asked if the boom could possibly continue. ‘Women. They’re only just coming into it. There’s another 50 per cent of the market to go.’ It was this insight that underpinned his decision to launch a range of toiletries with the Goya perfumery firm, based on the principle that wives and girlfriends tended to buy men’s toiletries for them. The advertising campaign showed Steve Davis, Terry Griffiths and Tony Meo grinning in their dinner jackets above the inevitable snooker table. ‘After Shave for Men Who Play to Win’ read the slogan, which was true in Davis’s case, at least.26

  Yet although snooker embraced women as viewers and consumers, the idea of women as players was far from universally popular. Indeed, nothing better captures the tension between old-fashioned attitudes and newfound freedoms than the story of Sheila Capstick, a taxi driver from Wakefield, who found herself at the centre of a long-running saga involving the snooker table at the local working men’s club. A mother of three, married to a local miner, Sheila was a paid-up member of the club, which, like many such clubs, had recently started admitting women. For three years she had been happily using the table, signing her name on the board and taking her turn. She did not claim to be especially good, but ‘just played because I enjoyed it’.

  But one day in 1979, another member complained that a mere woman should not have been using the table when he wanted to play. Under the Club and Institute Union’s rules, women were only second-class members. They could join at cut-price rates, but could not serve on the committee, propose new members or use their membership cards to visit affiliated clubs – on the grounds, said an official from Birmingham, that they would ‘want to go gallivanting’. Many clubs had rooms from which women were barred and even carpets on which they could not step. Above all, women were not allowed to play snooker. ‘They said I might rip the cloth,’ Sheila told Polly Toynbee. ‘They say that in almost all clubs or pool halls, “women rip cloths”. Bloody daft. No one ever rips the cloth, except in films, unless they do it on purpose.’

  Sheila refused to give in. First she collected 2,000 signatures on a petition urging the management to let women become equal members. The committee tore it up, but she proved an indomitable adversary. She had T-shirts printed with the slogan ‘Snooker for Women’, organized a mass picket outside the Wakefield club and even took her complaint to the Club and Institute Union’s Blackpool conference in June 1981. There, dressed as a suffragette and supported by four coachloads of sympathizers, she managed to sneak into the gallery, where she made such a racket that stewards had to drag her out. In the months that followed she was hounded by obscene phone calls, as well as letters accusing her of being a lesbian. Surprisingly, though, she continued to drink at the Wakefield club, despite the hostility of some male members. The campaign, she told Toynbee, had ‘opened her eyes to a lot of things’. She even joined her local Workers’ Educational Association Women’s Study Group. And in the end she won. First the Wakefield club gave in; then, at last, the Club and Institute Union. The only downside was that it took them almost thirty years.27

  As snooker’s defenders might reasonably point out, this was really a story about working men’s clubs rather than one about snooker. But since professional snooker was so deeply rooted in this world, it inevitably shared its attitudes. Only days after Steve Davis’s moment of glory in April 1981, the Daily Express ran a long interview with the ‘attractive, brown-haired’ Ann Johnson. A receptionist from Cheltenham, she was one of the world’s most accomplished female players. Now she was about to partner Davis in the Guinness World Mixed Pairs, one of his first engagements since becoming world champion. But although Ann was keen to emphasize snooker’s appeal to women players, the article inadvertently told a different story. The opening lines read like Jilly Cooper on a bad day:

  They ‘kissed’ gently across the table, the white ball and the red ball.

  Then she smiled as the white delicately nudged the red into the pocket.

  She paused to rechalk the tip of her cue, the lightest of dustings, as if she were putting on face powder.

  Down at the table again, a click, a thunk, and I was hopelessly snookered.

  Ann Johnson, the world No. 3 woman snooker player, smiled charmingly at me and moved discreetly aside.

  She was so good, the Express remarked admiringly, that she had ‘been refused entry to only two clubs in this country’. Even Ann thought it was ‘easier for her to play in certain clubs because she was a “name”’.28

  The truth is that although snooker was eager to embrace television, commercialism and even the Asian market, the notion of admitting women on equal terms with men was a step too far. As Barry Hearn put it, the ‘aggressive male thing’ was part of snooker’s heritage. ‘I’m a real traditional working-class lad,’ he said. ‘I believe in men in one role, women in another.’ Most club managers agreed with him. The 1982 women’s national champion, Vera Selby, a lecturer at Newcastle Polytechnic, complained that there was still ‘tremendous resistance from clubs’ to letting women play. She had taken up the game at the age of 37, purely because she ‘fancied a go’. At the time, her first club told her that she had to come at six and be out by seven, because the men would not be happy. About a quarter of the clubs in the north-east would not even let her in, which meant that when her team (the rest of whom were men) played away fixtures, she had to drop out. And since private clubs were exempt from the Sex Discrimination Act, there was nothing she could do. It was a common story: across the country, no fewer than nineteen of the twenty-four main snooker leagues openly discriminated against women.29

  As much as Mrs Thatcher enjoyed watching snooker, then, her chances of actually playing it were much smaller than if she had been a man. In the unlikely event that, inspired by Steve Davis’s admiration for her politics, she had driven out to Essex for a few frames with one of the Downing Street secretaries, she might well have found the door closed politely in her face. Perhaps her best bet would have been to head down to what the Express called the ‘luxurious Topspot Snooker Club’ in Balham, south London, co-owned by Wally West, who also ran the Women’s Billiards and Snooker Association. West was a great fan of female snooker players, although his explanation might not have won much admiration from ardent feminists. Men should welcome women, he thought, because ‘in competition they are more ruthless than any man … What’s more, they add grace and sophistication to snooker.’

  Mrs Thatcher would surely have agreed with that, but she might not have liked what came next. For when the Express asked if the top women would ever rival their male counterparts, West shook his head. ‘Never,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s physically impossible. Without getting too personal or technical, boobs get in the way.’30

  21

  To Think This Is England

  POLICE OFFICER [Rowan Atkinson]: Savage, in the space of one month you have brought 117 ridiculous, trumped-up and ludicrous charges … against the same man, Savage … a Mr Winston Kodogo of 55 Mercer Road …

  Savage, would I be correct in assuming that Mr Kodogo is a coloured gentleman?

  CONSTABLE SAVAGE [Griff Rhys Jones]: Well, I can’t say I’ve ever noticed, sir.

  Not the Nine O’Clock News, 3 November 1980

  Yesterday, in a feat of miraculous technology, man took a further step in his conquest
of space by launching the first reusable spacecraft, the shuttle.

  Surely, it cannot be beyond his ingenuity back here on earth, in Britain, to create a society – black, brown, yellow, white – that can live together in peace and harmony?

  Daily Express, 13 April 1981

  On 2 March 1981 a demonstration set off from New Cross, south London. It had been planned by black activists protesting against what they saw as the cruelty of the Metropolitan Police, the indifference of the justice system and the racism of Britain’s politicians. And as the crowds assembled, even the organizers were taken aback by the turnout. They had hoped for a thousand people, yet by mid-morning some 4,000 had gathered in Fordham Park, defying the forecasts of heavy rain. As far as the eye could see there were banners and placards: ‘Equal Rights and Justice Now’, ‘Ain’t No Stopping Us Now, We Are on the Move’. ‘Masses of people, masses and masses of people,’ one marcher later recalled. ‘It was real … It was awesome, it was just amazing.’ Another remembered ‘waves and waves and waves and waves and waves of black people coming down that hill. It was a Charge of the Light Brigade.’1

  The march got underway just after eleven, bound for Hyde Park, the mood determined but buoyant. The rain fell, yet the crowd continued to grow, coachloads of supporters from Bristol, Birmingham and Manchester swelling the ranks. But when the first marchers reached Blackfriars Bridge, the mood changed. According to the next day’s papers, several hundred young men broke away from the main group and charged ahead. When the police tried to hold them back, scuffles broke out, and stones were thrown. By the time the marchers reached Fleet Street the atmosphere had become downright ugly; by the time they reached Regent Street the fringes of the march had degenerated into a rolling battle between young black men and mounted white policemen. ‘In Wigmore Street’, claimed one report, ‘a gang snatched shovels and bricks off a builder’s lorry and started attacking police. One constable was felled, helmet flying. Car and taxi windows were smashed. A black policeman was taunted by the mob. A white one lay on the pavement, his face bloody.’

  With seventeen policemen injured, six with head wounds, the next day’s papers made bloodcurdling reading. ‘RAMPAGE OF A MOB’, shrieked the front page of the Express, which reported that ‘hundreds of youths’ had ‘rampaged along pavements, kicking cars, knocking down people and smashing shop windows’. The Daily Star called it a ‘terror riot’; the Sun, beneath the headline ‘DAY THE BLACKS RAN RIOT IN LONDON’, claimed that a ‘frenzied mob’ had indulged in a seven-hour ‘orgy of looting and destruction in the West End’. Here was Middle England’s worst nightmare: a savage horde loose on the streets of the capital, terrorizing ‘home-going commuters’ and ‘mothers with children’. And to those who had long warned that Britain was nurturing an enemy within, it was a gift. ‘Can my right hon. Friend think of anything more overtly racist and criminal, or a clearer demonstration of a breakdown in public order,’ Alan Clark asked the Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, three days later, ‘than the behaviour of the young blacks in the march through Southwark on Monday, when they broke into and damaged shops, terrorised the white population and shouted objectionable slogans about the monarchy to try to provoke the police?’2

  There was, of course, another side to the story. What lay behind the march was widespread outrage at one of the most dreadful domestic tragedies of the decade. Late on Saturday 18 January, more than a hundred teenagers had gathered at a house in New Cross Road to celebrate Yvonne Ruddock’s sixteenth birthday. The party went on all night, but shortly before six the following morning, a fire broke out. In the smoke and chaos, thirteen partygoers were killed, including Yvonne herself. The oldest victim was 22, the youngest just 14. After initially suspecting arson, the police concluded that the fire had started inside the house. But many local residents, including most of the victims’ parents, saw things differently. Racial tensions were running high: the far-right National Front were on the march, while many New Cross residents saw the police as an army of occupation, who preferred harassing local teenagers to hunting for the racists who had started the fire. ‘We have got our own Jack the Ripper’, the activist Mike Phillips told a local meeting, ‘wiping out a dozen black people at a time.’ How could the police expect them to believe it had been an accident?

  To make matters worse, the reaction to the fire suggested that black lives were cheap. As the New Cross activists pointed out, the Queen had sent a message of condolence after forty-eight youngsters were killed in a nightclub fire in Dublin, but she had sent no such message to her own people in south London. Even their protest march on 2 March, they claimed, had been grossly misrepresented. Yes, a few hundred youngsters had misbehaved. But the organizers maintained that the police had overreacted and the violence had been enormously exaggerated, a view supported by The Times two days later. The tabloids were only too keen to report the fighting, but some did not even bother to report the marchers’ refrain, ‘Thirteen dead and nothing said.’ As one protester remarked, she just wanted to say, ‘We’re here. Look at us. We’re here. We’re hurting, and you’re not doing anything about it.’ And yet still white Britain refused to look. Indeed, many protesters were shocked by the indifference or hostility of white passers-by. ‘As we came up Fleet Street’, the lawyer and future politician Paul Boateng recalled, ‘the taunting and abuse that rained down upon us from the Express building in particular, I will never forget that.’3

  The irony is that the police were almost certainly right. The New Cross fire was not a racist attack. Two decades later, a new forensic study concluded that the fire had indeed started inside the house, probably after a fight among the partygoers themselves. But the fact that so many black Londoners believed the allegations of a wider racist conspiracy could hardly have been more ominous. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir David McNee, told the press that the tragedy was being exploited by militant extremists, ‘motivating and urging the black community to confront the police’. But as the weeks went by the anger intensified. When the inquest opened at County Hall in April, barely half an hour passed ‘without some interruption from the public, whether … hissing the police, applauding the young black witnesses or yelling at the coroner’.

  And when, on 13 May, the jury unanimously returned an open verdict, the court exploded with rage. When the coroner tried to express his sympathy, people shouted ‘Shame!’ and ‘Murder!’ Far from being deterred, the New Cross activists announced that they would redouble their efforts to expose the police cover-up. ‘STAND UP AGAINST THE MASS MURDER OF BLACK PEOPLE,’ read their leaflets. ‘STAND UP AGAINST ATTACKS BY WHITE RACISTS ON BLACK PEOPLE. STAND UP AGAINST THE LIES AND CONFUSION SPREAD BY NEWSPAPERS, RADIO AND TELEVISION.’ In the words of one man who wrote an angry letter to the Guardian, ‘some black British have had enough’. As events were to prove, he was right.4

  At the beginning of the 1980s, Britain was one of the most racially diverse countries in Europe. Although immigration had slowed since its peak twenty years earlier, just under 3½ million of the United Kingdom’s 56 million people had been born abroad, almost three-quarters of them from the Caribbean and South Asia. Having been attracted by the plentiful jobs and cheap housing of the major conurbations, about half lived in Greater London, with a further quarter in the West Midlands. And by the time Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister, many inner-city areas had long since acquired a distinctive multicultural character. When Beryl Bainbridge visited Sparkbrook, Birmingham, she found the high street full of ‘men in turbans, women in saris and baggy muslin trousers, children dressed as fairies. Trinkets and rings and bangles in the windows of the shops, yams and roots of ginger and pomegranates laid out on the pavements.’ But places like Sparkbrook were not exotic to the people who lived there, and least of all to the children for whom they were home. The writer Sathnam Sanghera, who grew up in the 1980s, later recalled the inevitable conversations with taxi drivers who asked where he was from. ‘Wolverhampton,’ he would say, to which the driver would invariably s
ay: ‘I mean, where are you from originally.’ And invariably Sanghera gave the only accurate answer: ‘I’m originally from Wolverhampton.’5

  Although millions of people lived in areas with very few black and Asian Britons, anybody with a television could see that Britain was more racially diverse than ever before. As a boy, I grew up watching the Trinidad-born Floella Benjamin on Play School, as well as Lenny Henry, born to Jamaican parents, on Tiswas. Trevor McDonald, born in Trinidad, had been reporting for ITN since 1973, while in August 1981 Moira Stuart, whose parents had been born in Dominica and Barbados, became the first black woman to read the BBC news. The first black England footballer, Viv Anderson, made his international debut in November 1978; the first black England cricketer, Roland Butcher, made his Test debut in March 1981. And even people who hated immigration now accepted, very grudgingly, that British-born black and Asian children were not immigrants but natives. The disabled war hero Sir Douglas Bader had spent twenty years campaigning against immigration and in support of the white-dominated regime in Rhodesia. Yet when the Express invited him to issue a new broadside in 1978, even Bader conceded that there were ‘many coloured British citizens who have been born and brought up in this country who are just as proud and patriotic as any of us’.6