Forest Hill cue makers have supplied their wares to some of snooker’s all-time greats

BY JAKE EGELNICK

If you’ve ever walked out the back entrance of Forest Hill station and taken a right, there’s a high chance that you’ve walked past an elite level snooker player. World Snooker and Forest Hill. An unlikely pairing but a formidable one, thanks to John Parris and his company Parris Cues.

Parris Cues can be found on a quiet residential street in SE23, next to a hand car wash and a grocer. From the outside all you can see is a name and number on a small shop front, coloured snooker cloth green. Unless you were in the know, you would have no idea that the cues used by some of snooker’s all-time greats, like Steve Davis and Ronnie O’Sullivan, were made in this shop just off the south circular.

For John Parris being inconspicuous isn’t an issue. Smiley, wise, quick to crack a joke – like your favourite grandad – he’s been making snooker cues for almost 40 years. During this time he’s perfected the craft to a level where he doesn’t have much need for marketing. He said: “We advertise in a snooker magazine more to just support the snooker magazine than anything else. We’ve got a website and that’s it. The product sells itself.”

And sell itself it does. He recently returned from China, where snooker has had a surge in popularity over the last 20 years. While there he said: “the response was brilliant. I spent all day shaking hands and taking pictures. Everyone wants to talk to you.”

Parris reckons that more than a quarter of the cues used at the last world championship were made in his shop, and that figure is still on the rise. A young pro walks in and Parris shakes his hand. There is no middle man, he deals with his customers directly.

“There was something wrong with his tip,” explained Parris. “He’s in here to try some new ones.”

It’s this close relationship and deep understanding of both the product and what his customers want from it that has elevated Parris cues to the level it is at today.

Walking through the small workshop, Parris runs through the process. It begins with a plank of wood and ends with a cue fit for the crucible.

Parris starts by going out looking for wood at what he calls his “top-secret spots”. He jokes that if he was any more specific “there wouldn’t be any wood there”. This isn’t the only part of the process hidden from the public eye – he asks me not to take a photo of a machine he calls “his secret weapon” and folds down some handwritten notes that are slotted into a stack of shafts, so they are hidden from view.

Cue making is a high stakes process. ‘Trees don’t like growing in a straight line,’ said Parris, who has the impossible task of finding wood that does. “I look at mountains of wood and come away with a small pile. By the time it gets to be a shaft shape we probably only use 40-50 per cent.

“With a board you can see the outside but you can’t see on the inside. Once you’ve got it all cut up and you start making shafts some will look great but feel wrong. With others, a blemish will come out or there’ll be a knot you didn’t see before. It’s heart breaking really.”

From start to finish it takes approximately a year to make a cue and many get discarded along the way. But there’s a sense from everyone in the workshop that there’s a real chance the product could end up in the hands of a championship winner. Parris describes this is “the icing on the cake. You see them holding up the trophy and you think, cues had a little part in that.”

From Alex Higgins in the 80s to Mark Selby and O’Sullivan today, Parris Cues has had a massive part in world snooker and it doesn’t feel like this will change anytime soon.

Parris says he overdoes his hobbies and with his team – which includes his wife – running smoothly around him, he will continue to overdo this “hobby” of his.

And he won’t be leaving South London any time soon.

“We could probably do with more space but we don’t really want to move out. It took us a long time to build the team that we’ve got and it might not suit them. To expand it’s about finding the material, you could always do with more but where would it come from. We don’t want to drop the quality just for the sake of production, it’s always something I’ve resisted.”

PICTURES: JAKE EGELNICK