World Singles Tiddlywinks Championship

The Castle is proud to host the 78th World Singles Tiddlywinks Championship!
See raining champion Patrick Barrie from Cambridge taking on challenger David Lockwood.

The game of tiddlywinks can be traced back to late Victorian times. The earliest patent application for the game was filed by Joseph Fincher in 1888, and the subsequent trademark application (for “tiddledy-winks”) filed in 1889. However, the birth of the modern game can be traced to a group of Cambridge (UK) undergraduates meeting in Christ’s College on January 16th 1955. Their aim was to devise a sport at which they could represent the university. Within three years Oxford had taken up the challenge, and the popularity spread from then on. During the sixties as many as 37 Universities were playing the game in Britain. A British Universities Championship was established by HRH Prince Philip in 1961 (the Silver Wink) which is still competed for to this day.