Celebrating snooker champion Vera Selby
Newcastle exhibition offers potted history of Tyneside world champion’s varied and vibrant life. Tony Henderson reports
Earlier this month, International Women’s Day (March 8) provided the perfect cue to celebrate the life and achievements of a Tyneside world champion.
It marked the opening of an exhibition at Newcastle City Library, which will run until April 28, on Vera Selby, multi-talented sportswoman, educator, snooker and billiards world title holder, coach and referee, qualified teacher, art and design lecturer, textiles artist and poet.
Vera, who lived in Gosforth in Newcastle, died aged 93 on her birthday in March 2023, having continued playing competitively into her 80s.
The exhibition in her memory has been curated by her friends Diane Greaves and Anne Peirson-Smith, professor and subject head of fashion, product and heritage in the School of Design, Arts & Creative Industries at Northumbria University.
Vera worked as a senior art and textile lecturer and then as head of art education at the university until her retirement in 1983. This followed teaching and lecturing posts at Gosforth Secondary Modern School, Newcastle College of Art and Kenton Lodge Teacher Training College.
She also wrote the book Creative Textiles for teachers and students.
Now Diane and Anne are working on an archive of Vera’s life which will be held by Northumbria University. In addition, trophies from Vera’s long list of awards have been gifted to Discovery Museum in Newcastle.
They include Veras’s 1981 Guinness Women's World Snooker Championship Winner cup; Women's Billiards Association Northern Championship which she won three times; the Vaux Award for Outstanding Achievement In Women’s Snooker; a plate presented to her In Appreciation of Her Loyal and Dedicated Services to Billiards and Snooker and the Burwat Bowl Women’s Amateur Billiards Championship, which Vera took home no less than eight times.
She was also the 11 times winner of the Northern Women’s Snooker Championship Cup and the Embassy Women’s World Open Snooker Championship in 1976.
Diane said: “Vera worked across a lot of mediums and was very creative and prolific in her work. She was and still is an inspiration to us all. She was very well known in such a wide spectrum of circles and was at ease in all of them.”
The library exhibition includes Vera’s sketchbook from the age of 12, her school needlework case and a handwritten book she compiled of landladies and lodgings she lived in her student years at Leeds Art School.
Also on display are examples of Vera’s textile work such as a jacket embroidered with pearls and a tunic made from knitted recycled plastic bags.
“Vera was well ahead of her time in using recycled material,” added Diane.
She also won awards from The Poetry Society and was the first female master in the history of the Fellmongers Company of Richmond in Yorkshire, is an ancient craft and trading company which has its origin in the Middle-Ages.
Vera was introduced to billiards as a child and played in Newcastle’s working men’s clubs, where she was noticed by Alf Nolan, the former British amateur billiards and snooker champion, who offered to coach her.
At a time when many snooker clubs enforced a ban on women competing, Vera was determined to break the mould as she perfected her game – often for hours in the evenings after teaching all day.
In 1981 she was named Newcastle’s Sports Personality of the Year. Throughout it all, she was immaculately dressed in trousers and waistcoats she made herself.
In 1982, the BBC invited Vera to commentate on the World Snooker Championship that year at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield.
She received an MBE in 2015 for her services to snooker and billiards.