When Hashim won it again, his distant relative Roshan Khan, who had once been a street sleeper, came to England with £5, a borrowed overcoat and warnings that he would starve.
Instead, his capture of the British Open title by beating Hashim in the 1957 final opened a door to a better life and did much to begin the Khan legend. When Roshan’s son, Jahangir Khan, won the British Open for a record tenth time in 1991, he had already become one of Pakistan’s greatest ever celebrities and a well-known name everywhere, eventually being named the Sportsman of the Millennium, and having his image cast on postage stamps, whence it stared into the eyes of billions in every corner of the globe.
Nothing better symbolises the influence the 76-year-old tournament has had, not just as a catalyst for one of the UK’s most fashionable leisure activities, but as a title conferring global status upon its winners.
This unique character and history has inspired a sequence of rescue bids during the dramatically changing economic circumstances of the new millennium. Now, under the ownership of internationalSPORTgroup™, the British Open is evolving, successfully, in a very different age.
No-one should be in the least bit surprised that so much effort should be taken by so many people to keep the British Open at the forefront of the sport. It was ahead of its time from the start - or at least those who competed in its forerunner, the British Championship, were.
When this was inaugurated in 1922, it was for women only. Though for a long time it was just a domestic event, the remarkable thing was that a full six years before women gained equal voting rights a squash championship was created in which the men did not partake.
There have also been moments when its women champions have generated more excitement than its men. Susan Devoy, British Open Champion eight times in the eighties and nineties, was always special – so much so that in her native New Zealand she was once made Sportsman of the Year before four times being voted Sportswoman of the Year too, thankfully.
Devoy would escape school by hiding underneath her house so she could play squash. No-one dreamed the truant would become a Dame Commander of the New Zealand Order of Merit and described as her country’s greatest sportswoman of the century.
Heather McKay, however, sits alongside the world’s greatest sportswomen of the century. It is hard to believe that when she first arrived in Britain she was almost a chain-smoker. The extraordinary Australian remained unbeaten throughout a 16-year sequence of British Open successes, eventually having her name listed alongside such greats as Fanny Blankers-Coen, Wilmer Rudolph, and Billie-Jean King, in the United States’ International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame.
McKay’s compatriot Geoff Hunt was also astonishing. He was Mr Adaptable, becoming three distinctively different types of player during a 16-year career in which he won eight British Opens and was awarded the MBE.
Hunt, mark I, was a scorching driver and volleyer who morphed into Hunt, mark II, the rallier and then to mark III, the slowballer, revolutionising squash with his professional approach to training. Initially he did that in competition with the wonderfully charismatic and contentious Jonah Barrington, the man with the Irish father and Welsh mother who became synonymous with the British Open to British audiences of the seventies. Jonah Barrington and Geoff Hunt shared one of the sports greatest rivalries and fourteen British Open titles.
Nobody from these islands has won it six times, and nobody did more to yank it into the professional era, or into the entertainment era which followed it. Once a student dissipate, Barrington made himself into the embodiment of disciplined purpose, a mesmerising raconteur, and the sport’s greatest celebrity. He also soldiered on until he was almost 40, by which time entrepreneurs had become British Open pioneers too.
Presented on stage at Bromley in 1981 with a glass back wall, the Open was then given a court with three transparent walls two years later at Derby, and had a show-court with all four walls allowing one-way viewing the following year, at the Wembley Conference Centre.
But there were hitches. The stage at Wembley where the court was located in 1984 was so far from the hospitality boxes that one correspondent described it as like “watching a couple of cockroaches copulating on a distant beach.” By the following year however the court had been moved to the floor of the arena, and the cockroaches were transformed into extraordinarily athletic players witnessed from vantage points never previously enjoyed.
Technology developed fast. Panics with falling panels, uneven floors and all-night construction became less frequent, and soon the fish-tank arenas pioneered by the British Open began to spread.
Balls changed too, altering in colour and even possessing luminous strips on the outside, which affected the bounce. The British Open eschewed those, relying instead on dialogues with TV producers about how to make the action clearer.
Doing so in the digital age, with smaller and more sensitive cameras on the way, may help open up squash’s close quarter duels more clearly to a prying eye.
If so, the best is still to come. This glimpse of the past suggests how exhilarating that should be.