Later Life
After his retirement Chamberlain lived in Ascot, Berkshire, England. On 19 March 1938 he had a letter published in The Field in which he claimed to have invented the game of snooker at the officer's mess of the 11th Devonshire Regiment in Jubbulpore (Jabalpur), India in 1875. His claim was supported by the author Compton Mackenzie in a letter to The Billiard Player in 1939, and has been accepted ever since.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes the circumstances in which the new game came about:
While serving at Jubbulpore in 1875 Chamberlain developed a new variation of black pool by introducing coloured balls into the game. It was dubbed snooker—a derogatory nickname given to first-year cadets studying at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich that Chamberlain had heard about from a young Royal Artillery subaltern visiting the mess. Chamberlain later retorted to a fellow player who had failed to pot a coloured ball: ‘Why, you're a regular snooker’. While explaining the term to his fellow officers Chamberlain, to mollify the officer concerned, remarked that they were all ‘snookers at the game’ and the name snooker or snooker's pool immediately stuck.Chamberlain died on 28 May 1944 aged 88.
Read more about this topic: Neville Francis Fitzgerald Chamberlain
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