It could have come straight from the plot of a Shakespearean tragedy.
A king is challenged by a young pretender to a battle, where victory will only be achieved through the destruction of the other. The king emerges triumphant, but there is suspicion that he has acted shamefully in the battle for the crown.
Then a newcomer – a beautiful girl from a strange land – steps forward to defeat the king. But that’s not the end of the story. It’s just the beginning…
The story behind the controversy at this year’s World Conker Championships, which took place last weekend, has generated a lot of interest among the world’s media.
Conkers – a game in which players take turns smashing a chestnut, or ‘conker’, suspended from a lace threaded through the center using their own threaded nut – has been played mainly by children in Great Britain and Ireland.
It’s not as quintessentially British as, say, swamp snorkeling, cheese rolling or welly cheeks. In parts of the United States it is even played with a buckeye note, especially in Ohio.
Since 1965, the world championships, which take place once a year, have been held in Northamptonshire in England and the current location is Southwick.
According to the last national census, the village’s population was 181, but every year more than 250 adults and 100 children travel there to compete in front of 2,000 spectators to be crowned conker champions and raise money for charity.
The event was started by a group of fishermen who one day discovered that the weather was not suitable for their usual pastime, so they played conkers and raised some money for one of their relatives who was blind. That tradition has continued since, with £420,000 (€548,000) raised for charities serving the blind and partially sighted.
It is usually a light-hearted event that has attracted participants from all over the world. In previous years there was an overall winner from Canada and this year the child winners came from Germany and Latvia, the team winners from the Netherlands and the overall winner and new queen Conker of the event was Kelci Banschbach, a 34-year-old originally from Indianapolis, the first American to win the title. (The men’s winner will face the women’s winner in a grand final.)
Banschbach only arrived to work in Britain in 2022 and entered the competition to immerse himself in the local culture, but emerged as a surprise winner at this year’s competition.
However, the reason the 2024 edition has achieved so much fame is because of the man she defeated in the overall final, David Jakins, an 82-year-old tournament veteran who also serves as a judge at the championships.
This year marked Jakins’ 46th attempt to win the men’s event and he ultimately achieved his dream by beating Alastair Johnson-Ferguson – a 23-year-old civil engineer from London who had traveled with some Japanese friends to attend the event – in the male class. final.
Jakins crushed Johnson-Ferguson’s conker with his first swing (the competitors flip a coin to see who goes first), after winning his semifinal in two hits. An impressive feat, especially because the harder you hit, the greater the risk of crushing your own conker.
Later, Jakins showed a fake steel conker, painted and almost indistinguishable from a real conker, to a journalist who then informed the organizers and this is where the drama escalated.
An investigation is being carried out and video footage is being studied to see if anything unusual took place in the men’s final. After nearly half a century of trying, did King Conker cheat to secure his crown by using a steel conker so powerful and indestructible that it guaranteed victory? Were the judges, who watched each match intently to ensure strict rules were followed, fooled?
“We are a very serious organization and take conkers seriously,” said spokesperson St. John Burkett The Athletics. “We want to conduct the investigation properly. I don’t think we’ve ever had anything like this before. So we have to ensure that everything is clear and transparent.”
It is not unheard of for cheating to occur in conkers. It is believed that soaking your nut in vinegar, roasting it, or even injecting resin will increase its firmness.
“You could use a year-old conker, or my godfather, who was a two-time champion, always said the best conker is one that has been fed by a pig,” says Burkett. “He used to tell a long story about how to get a pig into a pig’s mouth without the pig chewing it. Then you have to follow him to find the conker when he comes out the other side.
So it’s clearly not unusual for people to go to great lengths to win a conker battle. But has King Conker also delved into the dark arts?
Rick Murphy, who has served as a judge at the competition alongside Jakins for 30 years, oversaw his semifinal victory and was just feet away from the action in the men’s final.
“It is very unlikely that you can cheat at the world championships,” he says The Athleticsexplaining that approximately 3,500 conkers, ready for battle after September 30, will be selected by the committee and prepared by volunteers, including Jakins, and then randomly placed in bags and taken to the various locations to be selected. This greatly reduces the chance that a rogue nut will be prepared and selected by a perpetrator. The judges also pay close attention to any sleight of hand.
“A steel conker would weigh about ten times as much,” says Murphy. “So if a player were to start hitting it, its dynamics would be so different from a normal conker that an experienced judge would notice it right away. It would swing very differently and much faster, otherwise the player would have to lift the conker a lot more to get a swing with it because of the weight. If you consider all these things, it is very unlikely that you can cheat.”
Murphy has known Jakins – who happily wanders around the event in his ornate robes and poses for photos – for three decades to be extremely skeptical of the 82-year-old, who denies all allegations and says he uses the steel nut to entertain children by challenging them to the impossible task of destroying it would tarnish the game’s image.
““I was in the ring for the men’s final, but I wasn’t one of the official judges,” he says. “I stood back a few meters to allow spectators and the press to see, rather than blocking their view and (as a result) my view was partially blocked.
“It all happened so quickly, literally the first swing and bits of conker were flying. That’s not as rare as people might think. My own conker was broken in the first round by the first blow. It was like, ‘Gosh, what happened? Is it over yet?’.”
But Murphy had no suspicions.
“I’ll tell you why,” he adds. “I was the referee for the semi-final and it was something similar: two strikes. Once again I saw him pull the conker randomly. I saw how the conker moved. I didn’t see him put his hand in his pocket, so I was confident there was nothing strange going on.
“I know David quite well and although he would love to achieve his ambition of winning the league, I am sure he would not cheat in doing so.”
This is where the story gets a bit murky, as the attention since the event, including television and radio coverage and reports in the print media, has caused some unrest – and not just from Jakins, who declined to comment when contacted by The Athletics.
Initial reports indicated that Johnson-Ferguson had complained to organizers after the event, prompting chairman Jim Packer to brand him a “sore loser.” However, the number two among the men now seems to have calmed down a bit.
“I hadn’t played since I was 10 and I just went along to have a laugh,” Johnson-Ferguson said The Athletics. “It was completely fair and I had no problems with anything.
“I saw him (Jakins) put the conker in one pocket and pick out another. That happened, but he probably only kept his winning conker as a souvenir. It was a fun day and there was a great atmosphere. I enjoyed it, but it has been tainted by what has happened since.
“It was not nice to be called a sore loser by the chairman. I thought it was a lighthearted story, and generally it is, but no one likes having their name dragged through the mud in the national news. If you had asked me the next day if I would go back again, I would have said yes, but I’m not sure now.”
The story is not over yet. At the time of this article’s publication, the investigation was still ongoing. But for now, the king keeps his crown.
But no matter what happens in the coming days, Jakins’ steel nut will live long in conker infamy.
(Top image: artwork by Meech Robinson; photos by Getty Images)