Meet snooker s first gorgeous bachelor girl of the baize
Rita Holmes won four Women’s Amateur Championships in an extraordinary career that began in 1953 and ended in 2007
Rita Holmes honing her craft in training
At first glance Rita Holmes’s story belongs to a lost world. Burroughes Hall with its pillared entrance and gold signage at 19 Soho Square, the place where she won the first of four British Women’s Amateur Snooker Championships at the age of 19 in 1953, is long gone, demolished by property developers in 1967 and replaced by a nondescript office block.
Also gone is the Midland Billiards Club in Leyton, east London, owned by her father and the place where she learnt to play. Myriad other clubs and billiards halls that rode and sustained its boom as a participation sport, rather than a TV spectacle, from the 1920s through to the 1960s have also been torn down. And yet Rita is still with us, in her 88th year and doubtless ready, as one of the household gods of the wo