Who invented snooker according to the traditional account of its origin?

Neville Chamberlain is traditionally credited with inventing snooker.

The game is said to have been devised in 1875 by Lieutenant Neville Francis Fitzgerald Chamberlain, a British Army officer stationed in Jabalpur, India. He and fellow officers adapted black pool by adding coloured balls to the reds, creating a more demanding scoring game.

The name reportedly came from the military slang term “snooker”, used for an inexperienced first-year cadet. Chamberlain applied it to a player who was new to the developing game, and the term eventually became the name of the sport itself.

This Chamberlain was not the later British prime minister of the same surname. The inventor’s military background and the Indian setting are central parts of the traditional origin story, although accounts of the earliest rules and naming differ in detail.