This scan was sent to me after I said it was odd that there were two sets of billiards that looked pretty much the same - and here we have a third!
This was a rather crafty clue, but we were after "Six Degrees" which was the first ever social media. The "six" came from the fact that this is a "six shot", and the "degrees" remind us that getting the ball into the pocket very much depends on the degree on which it is struck by the cue.
There was a brief bit of confusion with John Roberts, the billiards player cited - for there are two.
John Roberts Senior was born on the 12th of June 1823, in Liverpool, but of Welsh stock, and he always insisted he was a Welsh player. He was a carpenter who, by some chance, found himself called in to perform the service of marking for a billiards match. Then there is some fog, as he turns up managing the Union Club Billiards Room in Manchester, without any note of how this came about. He then started to run, or owned the George Hotel in Liverpool, or maybe it was just the billiards room. Then, in 1849 a man called Jonathan Kentfield, who declared himself to be a better player than anyone in the world, and John Roberts challenged him to a contest. This was all set to take place when Mr. Kentfield decided he did not want to play after all, so our man, rather cheekily, started saying that he had beaten the World Champion - and this led to him going off to Australasia in the 1860s on a billiards playing tour, which also seems to have netted him quite a lot of money, some of it, reputedly, on side bets.
However he died on the 27th of March 1893.
More research, though, has discovered that he had three children, including a son who was known as John Roberts Junior, and who was born on the 15th of August 1847, in Liverpool. Some of the confusion about the names seems to have resulted from the fact that in 1870 John Roberts Senior was beaten in a game by William Cook, who went on to call himself the World Champion, but in the same year John Roberts Junior won his first World Professional Title, and many people think, incorrectly, that this was the same person regaining the title. Also, in 1885, it is recorded that John Roberts was part of the squad who rewrote the rules of the game - but actually both father and son were amongst this group.
John Roberts Junior had started playing billiards very young, in the George Hotel billiard room, and it looks like there was some betting involved with that too, perhaps even wagers that this small child could beat any man. also had a pretty lucrative sideline, as he made billiard equipment, anything from a ball to a complete table and set up. Now he won his first contest in 1866, and then also toured the globe, holding exhibition matches and entering contests. And he also fought , and beat, William Cook, in 1873.
The only thing I do not know is how he came to be allied with this set. He died in 1919 aged seventy one, and it was recorded then that he won the Championship almost twenty five years before. So he was not really a household name by the time our set was issued in 1909, though he was featured in Vanity Fair on the 25th of May 1905, as a cartoon by Sir Leslie Ward, which is titled "The Champion of 1885". Maybe he was therefore on the Wills set of "Vanity Fair", and the connection was made when this set was mooted?
Sadly this set is very scantly described in our original Wills reference books, simply :
49. 50. BILLIARDS by John Roberts. Fronts lithographed in colour ; backs in blue grey with descriptive text. Home issue 1909.
And if you thought this short, our World Tobacco Issues Indexes have just :
BILLIARDS. Sm. Nd. (50)
We get the month of issue from the list which was printed in the Wills` "Works Magazine", and reprinted at the front of our reissued Wills book which contained the texts of all the separate ones beneath a hard cover.