Three friends who helped start competitive tiddlywinks so they could represent Cambridge University at sport have marked the 70th anniversary of the prestigious institution’s tiddlywinks club. Bill Steen, 91, said the group were “hopeless as athletes” and saw the game as their chance of obtaining a prestigious blue – the highest honour that can be earned by a Cambridge sportsperson.
This is most often by participating in a Varsity match or race against Oxford University – such as football, rugby or rowing. They focused their attentions instead on tiddlywinks – a game in which players try to get small plastic discs into a cup by pressing one piece against another to make it fly through the air – seeking to turn it into a competitive sport.
Mr Steen and 90-year-old Lawford Howells co-founded the Cambridge University Tiddlywinks Club (CUTwC) with others at Christ’s College in January 1955, with 86-year-old Peter Downes joining later. They established competitive rules, wrote a thesis The Science Of Tiddlywinks, coined new terminology, designed club ties and later oversaw the creation of the Tiddlywinks Anthem.
The young students captured imaginations as they wrote to stars, royalty and national newspapers to seek matches. A challenge was accepted by the Daily Mirror newspaper and a match was played in the Cock Tavern in Fleet Street in June 1955, when the club was introduced to the world.
