Purple plaque will mark remarkable career of women’s snooker champion Agnes Davies

Wales’ 20th Purple Plaque will be unveiled in the village of Saron, near Ammanford, Carmarthenshire, to mark the remarkable career of a women’s snooker champion Agnes Davies.

Born in 1920, Agnes started out as a teenager on her father’s snooker table – which he’d bought with his miner’s pension – in their shop, a corrugated iron building next to their home. She went on to play snooker for decades of her life, beating men as well as women as both an amateur and a professional snooker player. She took part in her last game aged 82.

Agnes was Welsh Ladies Amateur Champion for three years from 1937 to 1939 before turning professional in 1940. After the war she won the British Ladies Professional Snooker Championship in 1949 at a glittering affair in Leicester Square. The trophy was presented by actress Valerie Hobson, who went on to marry notorious British politician John Profumo. All the women wore long gowns to play in.

After a gap in her career due to family commitments, in her 50s she returned to become a familiar name once again in the 1970s winning the Women’s Billiards Association snooker title in 1978. Aged 60, in 1980, she reached the final of the Women’s World Open Championship, losing to an Australian player in the final. She won the Pontin’s Ladies Bowl at Prestatyn in 1982. In 1985 she was elected president of the World Ladies Billiards and Snooker Association, a title she retained until her death in 2011, aged 90.

Agnes’ son, Eiddon Davies, said: “She was very determined. When she was on the table she turned into another being. The better the challenge, the more she came up to it.”

He grew up surrounded by snooker and both his father and mother taught him the game but, as he says, “My father would sometimes leave a ball on the edge of the pocket for me to pot, to encourage me I suppose. My mother never did. And I never beat her until she was in her 80s. She didn’t like losing even then,” he recalls. “She said, ‘You try playing with cataracts’.”

Agnes continued to play in her local league for the Welfare Hall in Ammanford and then Snooker World in Ammanford until she was 82.

Her friends from the snooker circuit included famous male snooker champions Terry Griffiths, Ray Reardon and Dominic Dale (who attended her funeral).

Purple plaques recognise and celebrate the achievements of remarkable women, particularly those who may have been overlooked in the past.

Jane Hutt, the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, who will attend the unveiling on Friday said: “Agnes Davies was a pioneer for women’s sport in her community, in Wales and on the world stage. Like all women who are honoured with a Purple Plaque, she showed determination and grit, and she never let being a woman in a man’s world deter her.”

Sue Essex, chair of Purple Plaques Wales, said: “In common with many of the women who are represented with Purple Plaques, Agnes was a champion among men and women – but her glittering career is little known. She beat both women and men at their own game, once winning a game with her wrist in plaster and beating a man several decades her junior. We take our hats off to her achievements.”