In 1977, at the final of the Men’s British Open, the referee kept score on the inside of a cigarette packet.
When the match ended, Jack Giles, the renowned coach who had officiated it, handed the packet in to the event’s organiser. The organiser glanced at it, and that was that.
Nearly 50 years later, that organiser, Andrew Shelley, still cannot let it go.
“Why didn’t I keep it when he handed it in to me?” he says.
It is a surprising regret from the man who now runs the World Squash Library, an independent archive that has become one of the only real records of the sport’s past.
But the packet is more than an anecdote. It is the whole story in miniature: a piece of history nobody thought to save, because nobody thought anyone would need it.
Shelley’s own path into squash began by accident. When he joined the Squash Rackets Association in 1976, he told his new wife he would do it for a couple of years and then get a “proper” job.
“I never did!” he laughs.
Instead, he spent four decades climbing the sport’s ladder. He managed the British Open 20 times and became the Association’s Operations Manager. In 1994, he left to run the Women’s International Squash Players’ Association (WISPA), where he oversaw a 300% growth in the women’s pro tour over 15 years.
In 2010, he was appointed CEO of the World Squash Federation (WSF), a post he held until 2019.
Along the way, he watched squash change shape.
“I managed twenty British Opens alongside other events during a period when squash moved from glass backwalls, to demountable glass backwall showcourts to four sided viewing courts,” he recalls, with ball development, broadcast innovation and rule changes arriving in between.
He had a front-row seat to all of it, and kept almost none of it.
“I had never thought that I would be starting the Library,” he admits, “so I didn’t collect in the way I wish I had.”
The Library began as soon as he stepped down from the WSF. He had hoped for some part-time or consultancy work, but Covid arrived shortly afterwards and the offers never came. So he turned to a thought he had been carrying for years: giving something back to the sport.
By April 2020, with much of the world shut indoors, he was publishing the first of the Library’s compendiums, a free-to-download record of every Men’s World Open since 1976.
What he found was a sport with a patchy memory.
“What material there was seemed to be fragmented,” he tells us. “There was no resource development, gap filling etc.”
Nobody had been given the job, and nobody had taken it on. Shelley, however, had spent years getting to know the people who might hold the answers.
“I felt that through my long years in the sport, knowing many people, who to ask and where to look to try to find answers, I could develop a freely available archive. All I needed was support to cover the cost of housing the physical archive, the website and other limited expenses. My time was free!”
The deeper he dug, the more he found missing. By the time he had documented the major world championships, he was already saying publicly that squash needed to protect its history before more of it slipped away.
Some early match results at those events had simply not been kept, and good photographs of them did not exist. Even the British Open, the sport’s oldest major title, had a hole in its records. For its first few decades, the dates of individual editions had never been listed, and many of the years attached to them were plain wrong, because they followed a season that ran from September to April rather than the year the event was actually played.
The problem gets more personal the further down the records you go.
“Detailed results of so many past events were not recorded,” Shelley says, including regional team events and international championships from as recently as the 1980s. Many countries have no record of who represented them at all.
Then there are the names. Until around the same period, men appeared in the records by initials only, which makes first names a challenge. For women, it was more difficult. “Worse still for women,” he says, “who were referred to as Mrs and then the husband’s name!”
He points to the Women’s British Open of 1928, which he has been entering into squashinfo.com. “
I have not been able to find out whether Vickers and Slagg are maiden or married names,” he says, nor what the first names behind the initials C and P might be. Asked whether some of these players are lost for good, his answer is short. “Sadly, yes.”
It raises an obvious question: why did a sport this old leave its own record so thin? Shelley never gave us a single answer, but his own examples point in one direction. Results went unrecorded. Names went unrecorded. Programmes and scorecards were handed in, filed, and forgotten, because no one’s job was to keep them.
The obvious fix, a proper squash museum, has never appeared either. The cost of premises, collecting and curating is simply too high, Shelly says, which is why nobody has done it.
So the work fell to the Library, which now sits in a room at the Walker Ground in Southgate, North London, open to anyone who books a visit. Its shelves hold books, handbooks, magazines, programmes, documents and photographs, with videos on its YouTube channel.
Shelley is careful to say what it is not. “It is an archive rather than a museum,” he explains.
Equipment, balls and trophies are welcome, but only to be kept “ready to pass on to a squash museum when one emerges.”
He is just as firm about who it belongs to. “Neither PSA or anybody else owns the Library,” he says. “I have set it up as a completely independent form of charity.”
That independence sits alongside a growing web of partnerships. Since 2021, the Library has worked hand in hand with squashinfo.com, the results database, and it now has research and data agreements with the WSF, the PSA and the European and Asian federations.
They pay for the work, but none of them hold the keys. The Library’s closest thing to a landlord is not a federation at all but a club: it lives at the home ground of Southgate Squash Club. Add the occasional donation, and Shelley has also pledged all his male-modelling and body-parts sales to the cause.
“So far, somewhat surprisingly, I have not received any modelling assignments, and my battered body parts are not in demand either.”
Independence has a cost, and Shelley is plain about it. There is no committee, no management structure and no one to tell him no.
“Size, priorities, policy and time considerations are mine to evolve,” he says. It is also what keeps the Library free, and what makes it hard to picture without him.
The money, too, has always been tight. From the beginning, the Library’s plan to digitise its most important material has depended on financial support turning up. Until it does, a great deal of what Shelley has saved exists in only one place, on paper, in one room.
The room is full of stories. Ask him to pick a favourite and he cannot. “I wouldn’t know where to start! Events have stories, innovations too.”
There is the retro-reflective ball of the 1980s, designed to make squash easier to follow on television. It came about, he says, because two dentists in England drilled little dimples into balls, like golf balls, and stuck in material like cat-eyes.
And there is the programme for the 2001 US Open, which looks like any other until you remember that the event was cancelled after qualifying, following the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York. (American writer James Zug recalls the event in this great read)
His most lasting contribution may be a book. Written with co-author Bas van Hoorn and published in 2024, Squash Then and Now: A Celebration is a 240-page illustrated history of the sport, with forewords from Jonah Barrington and Nicol David.
It debunks myths, including the popular claim that squash began in Fleet Prison, and gathers the dates, details and visual record of the game’s evolution in one place. A benefactor underwrote the costs, since the Library could never have afforded to produce it, and whatever the book earns goes back into the archive, even if it never breaks even.
“I knew so little, even though I was steeped in the sport,” Shelley admits, which makes it all the more striking that he was also the man asked to fact-check the squash in Chetna Maroo’s Booker-shortlisted novel Western Lane.
For now, the nearest thing squash has to a museum is a half-measure. Collector Bert Armstrong has set up a set of display cases at the Kooyong Club in Melbourne, which Shelley calls “a half-way house in terms of cost and management.”
He lives in hope of something larger.
“I live in hope that an international squash museum will be developed, perhaps initiated by the WSF,” he says.
What happens to the Library when he is no longer there to run it is a harder question, and it is one Shelley did not answer when we asked. In public, he has only ever pointed forward. When he was awarded an MBE for services to squash at the end of 2020, he said he looked forward to many more years of developing the Library. He has also said from the start that it can never be complete, only closer to complete. An archive that can never be finished needs someone to keep going, and for now, that someone is still him.
His visitors, meanwhile, are mostly fellow “squash friends” who want to thumb through the old programmes and reminisce, along with the odd researcher. The rest, he says, simply ask him to find the answers for them.
Somewhere, perhaps, a cigarette packet is still out there, scored in pencil. If it ever turns up,
Shelley knows exactly where it belongs.
