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All this interest in conkers ultimately came down to individual combat. This was done in pairs o combatants. The combatants took turns. There always seem to be a ggod crod assembled for the combats. This very often seems to take palce atnor near theirb scvhools. We are not sure how it was decided who went first. Then one boy held is conker still so it dangled. The other boy than gave it a good wallop. I believe there were restrictions on how this was accomplished. Hopefully our British readers will provide us more details about these conker fights. The boy in the photograph here is giving in a flick rather than hauling back and swinging at it (figure 1). Some dictionary definitions use the term 'swing'. I'm not sure if the boy was allowed to really swing. A miss at a full swing could be very painful. A reader writes, "I'm not aware of ANYONE simply smashing their conker to hit the other one. You have no aim whatsoever with this - the flicking technique used in the photograph was universal." Another reader tells us, "Many a time in the Cub scouts I got a wallop on the thumbnail doing this activity!" Another reader tells us, "As far as I know the only way to hit a conker was as shown in the photograph here. This is how we all did it. You stayed in the game as long as you hit the opponants conker. Once a miss occurred then it was the other guy's turn. Boys kept score on how many strikes their conkers survived. Some claims of course had to be taken with a grain of salt. Conkers were 'named' depending on how many fights they had lasted. The whole object was to destroy your opponant's conker - the game was not finished until one of the conkers was irretrevably damaged. If you had destroyed 20 conkers with yours, it would be a 'twenty-er'... 21 a 'twenty-one-er' etc.
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