This pub is closed permanently. Your nearest Wetherspoon pub: The Court of Requests, Oldbury
This pub was purpose built as a snooker and billiard hall, with its original façade retained. Billiards has been played since the 16th century, when it was the sport of British and French royalty. The exceptional skill of the Australian player Walter Lindrum (1898–1960) defied competition and helped to kill the game in favour of pool and snooker in Britain.
Photographs and text about The Billiard Hall.
The text reads: This Wetherspoon pub was purpose built in 1913 as a snooker and billiard hall for Willie Holt, the billiard table manufacturer. It has retained its original façade. In its heyday it had 23 full size snooker tables available.
Billiards has been played since the 16-17th centuries, when it was the sport of British and French royalty. There have been public tables since the mid 17th century.
The exceptional skill of the Australian player Walter Lindrum (1898-1960) defied competition, and helped to kill the game in favour of pool and snooker in Britain.
Right: The Billiard Hall is just visible behind this number 16 bus in the 1960s
Left: William Cook, champion billiards player, demonstrates the ordinary cuing position, 1884
Above right: A serious game in progress, ‘nursing the balls’, c1896.
Photographs, a print and text about the history of the Black Country.
The text reads: The rapid expansion of mineral extraction in this area, along with the production of iron and steel, chemicals and gas, glass, brass, guns, bricks and soap, nails and chains, engines and boilers, all helped provide a solid manufacturing base for the expansion of Imperial Britain. It also earned the area the nickname of the Black Country.
When Queen Victoria passed through here by train in 1865, she purportedly asked for the blinds of her railway carriage to be drawn because she found the area so dirty. Whether this is true or not, the region came to be called the Black Country. The first published reference to it was in 1892 – by an American Consul, Elihu Burritt, who described it as a “black by day, red by night”.
Top: A ‘Puddler’ at the Johnson’s Iron & Steel Co. Ltd., Church Lane, c1910
Right: A 19th century advert for George Slater’s
Above: Izons, one of West Bromwich’s oldest firms, ordered the second of Boulton and Watt’s revolutionary beam engines.
External photograph of the building – main entrance.
If you have information on the history of this pub, then we’d like you to share it with us. Please e-mail all information to: pubhistories@jdwetherspoon.co.uk