Snooker was first developed in India during the nineteenth century.
The game is generally traced to British Army officers stationed at the officers’ mess in Jabalpur in 1875. Lieutenant Neville Francis Fitzgerald Chamberlain is credited with devising the game by adding coloured balls to a form of pyramid pool played with reds. The new game was eventually called snooker.
The name reportedly came from a term used for inexperienced cadets. Chamberlain applied it to players unfamiliar with the new game, and the word later became the name of the sport itself. Snooker then spread through military and colonial networks before becoming firmly established in Britain.
Although modern professional snooker is strongly associated with England and the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, its origin story points to British military life in India. The sport’s later British identity does not change where it was first developed.