World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

Is this game well-known enough in Britain and Ireland that readers will know what on earth is being alleged just from reading this article? Or are you expected to have to google it?

Apparently it’s a game where you take turns swinging a chestnut on a string and trying to hit the opponent’s chestnut and break it. Yes, I can see how a steel fake chestnut would be an advantage here, though I’m amazed it wouldn’t be instantly obvious to even a casual observer that the look and sound were wrong. So maybe I’m still missing something.

Yes, conkers is sufficiently well-known enough as a children's schoolyard game that I would expect pretty much every newspaper-reading adult to have heard of it. The fact that there is supposedly an "adult" championship event would be a surprise to most. If you're looking for the "story behind the story", other than the fact that it's a seasonally-specific, light human-interest story: there is probably a slight cultural bias amongst those who most fondly remember the game towards the private-school-educated, upper-class types who combine nostalgia for imagined "glory days" with political conservatism, so this is a good opportunity for the left-leaning Guardian to hand-pick someone who appears to belong to that class and expose them as a ridiculously-dressed scoundrel with childish interests and suspect morals. The subtext is: these are the sort of idiots we want you to associate with Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and co, and thus the Overton Window gets a tiny nudge in the opposite direction.

It never occurred to me that conkers could be a class thing and you could be right. But let it be known that conkers was extremely popular at my state school; me and all of my friends grew up to be pretty left wing too by the way. Also they banned it at my school, along with pogs, yoyos, etc.

It's not a class thing.

Fox hunting, horse riding, polo and skiing... yes. Conkers, No.

Wherever there is a chestnut tree you'll get conkers. I would imagine it's more of a town/village vs city thing rather than class thing.

Which of those are you imagining doesn't have horse chestnut trees? (Conkers come from those, not plain chestnut trees)

I'm sure there are parts of the country where they're less common, but there's huge numbers of conkers falling off trees in big British cities (even if the majority will be in parks) as well as in the countryside. We played with them at my pre-teen city centre school for sure, and the trees are a common sight on roads and in gardens as well as public parks.

edit: the Woodland trust actually says "Though rarely found in woodland, it is a common sight in parks, gardens, streets and on village greens."