Trinity student celebrates 70 years of competitive tiddlywinks

Trinity student Emmy Charalambous celebrated the 70^th anniversary of the Cambridge University Tiddlywinks Club, of which she is President, with the founders of the competitive game recently.

Tiddlywinks is a game that involves flipping small plastic discs or ‘winks’ into a pot by pressing one piece against another to make them fly through the air.

In 1955 Cambridge students – including from Christ’s and Trinity – made it a competitive ‘sport’ by introducing strategy and tactics, devising a set of rules and making their own vocabulary.

It all started just before Christmas 1954 with two former RAF colleagues – Richard Martin at Trinity (now deceased) and Bill Steen at Christ’s – wondering how they could achieve a Cambridge Blue, when they hit up upon the Victorian parlour game of tiddlywinks.

A few weeks later in January 1955, the Cambridge University Tiddlywinks Club (CUTwC) was formed. Professor Bill Steen, who studied Chemical Engineering and is now an Honorary Fellow at Christ’s, said:

The real joke is that we started this for the fun and to try and get a blue at Cambridge – and it turns out to be a really nice game.

The first Varsity tiddlywinks match took place in 1955, when Cambridge beat Oxford.

Recently the Christ’s alumni met current students, including Emmy, and reminisced about the early days over a game of, what else, tiddlywinks.

‘Squidging’ was flipping a wink,’ Mr Lawford said: “If you covered an opponent’s wink, it couldn’t be played – that’s squopping.”

The founders had fun designing the club tie – showing the wink and the cup – and approached many companies for sponsorship, but the real challenge was finding opponents as new version of the game wasn’t widely known.

They wrote to other universities, nearby airbases, newspapers, and even the House of Commons, inviting them to a game, but without success.

In 1957, inspired by a story in The Spectator magazine, they wrote to the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip, and were surprised to receive an answer from the husband of the late Queen Elizabeth II.

Prince Philip nominated the Goons in his place, saying he had hoped to join his champions, ‘but unfortunately while practicing secretly I pulled an important muscle in the second or tiddly joint of my winking finger,’ he wrote.

The Goons, a popular comedy group, starred Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. Christ’s alumnus Peter Downes recalls receiving a leather gauntlet at Christ’s Porters’ Lodge with a note accepting the challenge signed by ‘Sir Spike the Milligan’.

The Royal Tournament on 1 March 1958 at Cambridge Guildhall sold out in two hours and the event received national media coverage. Despite Prince Philip saying he hoped his champions would win a ‘resounding victory’, Cambridge won 16 games to nil.

‘It was like living a fairytale story,’ said Professor Steen. ‘We had huge fan mail, including from Prince Philip and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Secretary. The match was reported in just about every newspaper. It was also reported during news bulletins on BBC television, and on Pathe and Gaumont News in the cinemas.’

The game flourished, with The English Tiddlywinks Association founded in 1958 and clubs springing up around the world.

The first British Universities Championship took place in 1961 and this time the Duke of Edinburgh presented the trophy he had gifted – the Silver Wink – which universities still compete for today.

Today, the original ‘Tiddlywinks Anthem’, to the tune ‘Men of Harlech’ is still regularly sung and tiddlywinks remains a hotly contested sport with players in Varsity matches awarded a ‘quarter blue’.

Emmy, who had not heard of tiddlywinks before coming to Cambridge, said:

It’s important to know our history – how they took a Victorian parlour game and turned it into a competitive sport. It’s a great way to represent your University and have fun while you’re doing it. Part of the joke is how seriously it actually gets taken. There are people who have been playing for decades, who show up at tournaments, who still live and breathe tiddling.

The Cambridge Open, when anyone can come along to try competitive tiddlywinks, is 25-26 January 2025. More details will be available soon.

Photos: Nick Saffell, University of Cambridge.