Bob Marshall

Who was Bob Marshall?

Robert James Percival Marshall, OAM was a noted Australian amateur player of English billiards. He won the World Amateur Billiards Championship in 1936, 1938, 1951 and 1962 and was runner-up three times, as well as a national snooker champion.

Marshall was born in Kalgoorlie, the same town as another legend of the game, Walter Lindrum. Throughout his career he was compared favourably with Lindrum who, in 1954, himself declared that Marshall was one of the greatest amateur players he had ever seen. Ten years later, the contemporary English snooker professional Fred Davis said of Marshall, "Most noticeable about his style is his compactness, so like Walter Lindrum, and the shortness of his back-swing, hardly more than a couple of inches."

Marshall dominated amateur billiards before and after the war with a career that spanned six decades, broken by retirements in 1963 and 1970 followed by come-backs.