Conkers at Make, Bake and Grow - Armley, Leeds

Having visited the Make, Bake and Grow fete at Charlie Cake park in Armley a district of Leeds in Yorkshire I soon discovered what the most popular thing to take part in was.. Playing conkers.

On this table you can see everything needed to play the traditional British childhood game of conkers. I notice that there is a also a printed version of the rules of the noble game of Conkers (never had written rules in my day, conkers was very much alive and well and I think every child knew the rules). Using the seeds of horse chestnut trees – the name conker is also applied to the seed and to the tree itself.

The game is played by 2 people each having a conker with a hole drilled through the centre and then threaded with a piece of string. Each player takes it in turn to hit the others with their conker until one breaks and the person with the surviving conker wins. The winner then has a conker that is a one-er and so on.

As a boy growing up in Oxfordshire conkers was a favourite game, played every autumn when the conkers were ripe and falling off the horse chestnut trees. Indeed every boy in a village or town would know where the horse chestnut trees were growing and would encourage the chestnuts to fall by throwing sticks at the branches where the conkers were bunched together.

As I write this there is a large horse chestnut tree a few yards from the window and I have watched quite a few people, both young and old scour around among the fallen leaves looking for conkers on the ground.

Oddly I discovered at the fete all the young boys there had not ever played the game of conkers and were hopeless at it. We the adults discussed this and thought that this was most likely due to "Elf n Safety" rules at schools. After all one of the boys might be injured by playing this game, however none of us had ever heard of this ever happening. According to Wikipedia there are also schools that banned the playing of Conkers due to fears over nut allergies. You could not make this up!!

There will be more pictures and stories of adults playing the game of Conkers at Charlie Cake park, Armley on the Leeds daily photo over the next couple of days.