Julius Caesar could have famously said of Britain:

Veni, vidi, aesculus hippocastanumci

Which translates as:

I came, I saw, I conkered

Except of course he didn't because the horse chestnut tree was only introduced into Britain in the 1600s and the first recorded instance of a game of conkers being played wasn't until 1848. This begs the question what small boys (this is an almost exclusively male activity) did up to that time when the nights drew in, the air got cold, and they wanted some way of conveniently breaking their best friend's knuckles without starting a fight. For over a hundred years now, however, there have been conkers.

Why is the Game Called 'Conkers'?

Surprisingly, children played the game called 'conkers' long before horse chestnuts actually arrived in Britain. For this, they originally used snail shells. and it is the Latin word concha, meaning 'shell' which provides the link between snails and conkers.

How To Play Conkers?

Conkers, the small brown objects, are the seeds of the horse chestnut. Conkers, the pastime, is a game of skill and sublimated violence for two players. Each player is equipped with a conker, through which a hole has been drilled to allow a piece of string to be threaded.
The string used to suspend a conker, which is often an old bootlace or animal sinew is called a drangle¹. Strictly the drangle is measured from the conker to first contact with the hand and does not include the bit within the conker, the knot at the end or the bit around the hand.



The string is knotted to prevent the conker coming off, and the game may commence.

Whoever goes first may be decided by coin toss or priority. For example, the owner of a 'sixer' (ie, the victor in six previous games) will have priority over the owner of a mere 'two-er'.

The receiver holds up the hand, dangling the conker on the end of its string. The other player then attempts to hit the dangling conker as hard as he can with his own conker by swinging it overarm. If he hits, he gets another go. If he misses, play switches and the receiver gets a crack at his opponent. This continues until one or other of the conkers is so damaged that it falls off the string. The winner can then add the loser's conker value to the victory count of their conker, turning the above mentioned sixer into an eighter.

There are many arcane rules of conkers to do with glancing blows, hits on the string, specific techniques and so on, but they are very variable, and so are beyond the scope of this entry. However, the Official World Championship Rules can be found by clicking here.

World Conker Championships

The World Conker Championships are held each year on a Sunday in early October in the tiny Northamptonshire village of Ashton.

The conkers for use in the Championships are windfalls only, collected by members of the Ashton Conker Club. The conkers are measured, precision drilled and threaded with boot laces before use.

Going Conkering

Conkers are typically harvested in early autumn. The usual method is to find a good conker tree in a park or by a road and then stand under it throwing sticks up into the branches hoping this will dislodge the ripe fruit. Since the fruit is contained within green pods covered in sharp spines, there is a frisson of danger to this activity which most likely explains some of its appeal. It's often better to find conkers on the ground, as the ones on the tree probably won't be ready. It is worth noting that early in the autumn of 2001, Norwich City Council decided that this activity was too dangerous, and took steps to prevent children collecting conkers from several trees in the city by cutting them all down - this actually made the BBC Radio 4 main morning news show Today.

How to Win...

Although special preparation of conkers is banned under World Championship rules, there are still amateurs who go to exorbitant lengths to toughen their conkers. Such methods include soaking them for a week in vinegar, baking for several hours in a low oven (e.g. gas mark 1; 120°C for 2 hours), leaving them in the drying cupboard for a year or two in a cloth bag, or other more obscure chemical treatments such as the application of nail varnish. There are disadvantages to all these methods; baking makes them brittle, meaning they can be fractured and knocked off their string with a single blow. Although vinegar hardens the shell, the flesh softens leaving a gap between the flesh and the shell, thus rendering the conker useless. Varnishing is said to be ineffective. This Researcher can offer no authoritative advice on this subject other than to encourage players to experiment.

Wartime Use of Conkers

The following is the content of a notice that would have appeared on the walls of classrooms and Scout huts during World War 1:

'Collecting groups are being organised in your district. Groups of scholars and boy scouts are being organised to collect conkers. Receiving depots are being opened in most districts. All schools, W.V.S. centres, W.I.s, are involved. Boy Scout leaders will advise you of the nearest depot where 7/6 per cwt is being paid for immediate delivery of the chestnuts (without the outer green husks). This collection is invaluable war work and is very urgent. Please encourage it.'

So, the question arises, why did the War Department have this urgent need for conkers?

The short answer is that horse chestnuts were needed as a raw material for the Weizmann Process for the production of propanone (acetone); a solvent which, in turn, was needed for the manufacture of cordite - a smokeless propellant powder used in explosives. Indeed, demand for propanone soared dramatically at this time, and outstripped the existing supply.

At the time, propanone was imported mainly from North America where, until 1914 it had been derived almost exclusively from the dry distillation (pyrolysis) of wood. This produced 'pyroligneous acid', which was neutralised with lime (calcium oxide) to yield calcium ethanoate. This was then dry-distilled to yield propanone:

Ca(OCOCH₃)₂ ===> CaCO₃ + CH₃COCH₃

However, blockades of shipping lanes made imports difficult, and so Britain needed to manufacture her own propanone.

David Lloyd George, who at the time was Minister of Munitions, asked Professor Chaim Weizmann² of Manchester University to come up with an alternative way for making propanone. Weizmann was aware of a fermentation process, originally noted by Louis Pasteur and developed by others, whereby potato starch could be used as the feedstock, yielding propanone and butanol. Weizmann refined this process and was able to use it to produce propanone (and butanol, which was required for manufacture of synthetic rubber) from maize starch. However at the beginning of the war there was also a shortage of grain, and so Britain had to rely on imports of maize and even potatos for starch. Clearly, another source of starch had to be found that would not interfere with the already restricted food supplies.

Weizmann devised a process to produce the solvent not only from maize but also, by May 1917, from horse chestnuts - conkers. Factories were established at Poole in Dorset and King's Lynn in Norfolk, producing as much as 90,000 gallons (>400,000 litres) of propanone a year. When supplies of maize ran short, in a last desperate measure, children throughout Britain were asked to collect conkers.

Lloyd George's gratitude to Weizman was such that it led directly to the controversial 1917 Balfour Declaration which set out British approval for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people - the state of Israel.