TIDDLYWINKS AND LITERATURE

[This is an adaptation of articles I wrote in 1981 for Newswink 13 and Winking World 38.]

We owe much of our literary heritage to the Classics and the Bible, and I, as a Classicist, am disappointed that the Greeks had no word for Tiddlywinks, and that if the game existed at all among them, it died out at an early stage when it was tactically undeveloped. ‘Potter contends against potter’ says Hesiod (c. 750 BC) at Works and Days 25, showing no appreciation of the risks involved in an early attempt to pot out.

When we look at the Bible, we find one reference in the Old Testament. The people exclaim to Elisha at 2 Kings V, 40, ‘O man of God, there is death in the pot', thus stating for the first time a strategic truth that was not apparent to Hesiod. The New Testament provides no clear allusions, but the prophetic words of Revelation XII, 7 could well have referred to the American tour of England in 1978: ‘And the Dragon fought, and his angels, and prevailed not’. Thes words were also prophetic for the International Match of 2005.

Turning to English literature, we see that by the time of Shakespeare Tiddlywinks had become the civilised way of settling disputes. In Henry V, II, i, 8 we read, ‘I dare not fight, but I will wink’, and in the same play there is a suggestion of an emergent champion in the phrase ‘the winking of authority’. The devastating effect of a sudden pot-out is noticed at Othello II, iii, 78: ‘England, where they are most potent in potting’. Nevertheless, squopping had been recognised by Heywood, who writes in his Proverbs, II,5, ‘The weaker goeth to the pot as all men see’. References in Shakespeare are , however, mostly of a casual type, such as ‘I had rather wink than look upon them’ in The Two Gentlemen of Verona V, ii, 14.

Much later we find that squopping was a less important part of the game, but that it is played in a much tenser atmosphere: thus Fitzgerald in the Rubaiyat writes ‘What, did the hand then of the Potter shake?’, and puts as succinctly as can be the winker’s ultimate identity crisis: Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?’

From epigraphical sources I have found one relevant inscription much used in Staffordshire: ‘Pots are made of what we potters are’ ­ clay, of course, and therefore dust. Put potsherds are notoriously durable, and so are the modern plastics. Does this suggest the game will be known only to archaeologists long after all its practitioners have perished?

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