At the World Conker Championships

The annual World Conker Championships take place every October in the grounds of the Shuckburgh Arms, a pub in rural Northamptonshire. The 2024 event was overshadowed by cheating allegations, which helped make this year’s competition – the sixtieth anniversary games – the biggest that anyone could remember.

I read that the BBC was dispatching eleven journalists to livestream the games, which were expecting 250 entrants. ITV was also sending a crew. I made my way to the village of Southwick (between Corby and Peterborough) and queued for a ticket in the mist behind a pair of Chelsea pensioners. Behind me was a man in a tree costume. Around two thousand spectators had turned up, a good number considering that only a few days earlier it had seemed the competition might not take place at all.

There had been fears of a conker shortage. The hot August followed by a string of early-autumn storms had caused premature ripening, and Britain’s horse chestnut trees had shaken off most of their conkers before they could grow to regulation size (between 32mm and 35mm in diameter). But a nationwide call went out for full-size conkers and by competition day around three thousand tournament-grade nuts, including a haul from Windsor Castle, had made it to Southwick to be drilled and strung onto 20cm leather strips.

Although the World Conker Championships began in 1965 (the game itself was first recorded in the 19th century), the competition seems to hark back to older forms of rural English merrymaking like wassailing or harvest suppers. The end of the tournament is marked by the crowning of a king and a queen. Last year’s king, David Jakins, an 83-year-old retired engineer from Warmington, was accused by his opponent, Alastair Johnson-Ferguson, of using a steel conker. An inquiry found that Jakins does possess a metal conker but had not used it in the competition. His victory could stand.

I followed the crowd to the bottom of the field for the opening ceremony. A volley was fired by musketeers from a Civil War re-enactment society. Dressed in a morning coat, mismatched rugby socks and a pair of shorts, the competition’s organiser, St John Burkett, a retired headteacher, was handing out flags to the players. Stephanie Withall, a two-time world champion in a bee costume, was given the Irish tricolour. A figure in a skull mask and a black cape took the St George’s Cross. A man in a Union Jack cap and jacket waved the flag of Mexico.

Jakins was there – he’s competed every year since 1977 – wearing a conker necklace and a bowler hat banded with a St George’s ribbon. ‘I’ll be saying no comment to a lot of people,’ he told me. He was leaning on a metal staff with conkers skewered on it. It incorporated a cup holder: he said the yellow liquid in the pint glass was ‘mostly gin’. After submitting to a pat-down, he staggered into the ring. He soon came up against Withall in her bee costume (the early rounds aren’t divided by gender). She destroyed his conker to howls from the crowd.

The family of the ITV Sport presenter Mark Pougatch were all wearing lederhosen. Maurice ‘Lord Conqueror’ Hurrell was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with his past triumphs: Fenland Finalist 2017, Scottish Champion 2016, Cambridgeshire Finalist 2015. There were Morris dancers and men dressed as nuns. At least one person was in a Star Wars stormtrooper costume. Someone else had a stuffed seagull on his hat.

Jasmine Tetley, a three-time world champion, was not in fancy dress. She told me she doesn’t practise much because of the physical toll. She rolled up her sleeve to show a forearm red from repeated impacts. The sport could be painful, but at least it was simple. ‘It’s just Newton’s third law,’ she said. ‘Every action has an equal and opposite reaction … I just wanted to be the best in the world at something.’

Most players swung the conker straight down on their opponent’s with full force. Others went in for an aggressive side swipe. A more successful approach, however, favoured caution: baiting your opponent into striking harder and harder and risking a ‘snag’ – a tangling of the strings. Three snags and you’re out. This tactical nous excepted, watching people play conkers for several hours gave me no insight into whether the game is more about luck or skill. There are a handful of seasoned champions, which implies that you can develop some expertise, but this year belonged to the newcomers: Matt Cross, a civil servant and first-time contestant, won the men’s final, and went on to defeat Margaret Blake from Corby, another first-timer and now Queen Conker, to claim the overall world title.

It was unclear whether anyone really believed there had been any misconduct last year. No one had imagined Jakins would cheat, an organiser told me, but the investigation had been genuine. Lots of people suspected the allegations were a publicity stunt. It didn’t much matter, since the whole championships are an elaborate gag. But there is something fervent about it all too, or carnivalesque, an atmosphere of misrule. Towards the end of the afternoon, Jakins, dethroned, walked away to the car park nursing a Mr Whippy ice cream (sans Flake). He will be back next year.