I got the usual things for my birthday (games, books mostly) but here’s something KLS got me:
It’s a little bag of marbles! Not new ones, but vintage ones from the 1980s. These are more or less identical to the ones I used to play with 40 years ago 🙂
This arose from me reading about an auction recently in which individual marbles from the 1950s – 1970s sold for thousands of dollars. Aside from the fact these once ‘worthless’ items can now be very collectible, reading the story triggered a lot of memories about a hobby I’d all but forgotten!
Back in primary school marbles was one of the go-to games at school. We’d all bring little bags of marbles with us to school and play endless games of marbles with each other. Rain or shine this was a game that could be set up and played very quickly and it was so easy to learn that anyone could participate.
Kids all over the world played marbles, and a quick google search shows the rules varied everywhere and in some cases were different enough to almost be a different game! Here are how we played our schoolyard tournaments:
– Select a hole in the ground, a gap in a wall/fence or if nothing suitable exists choose a big marble (we called them ‘conkers’) and place it about 2 meters away from where we’d roll the marbles.
– Each player selects the same amount of marbles from their collection. They need to be the same sizes and the same assortment of glass or metal ones.
– Each player takes turns rolling their marbles until they get them all in the hole or all of them hit the conker. The first to accomplish this is the winner.
– If playing ‘for keeps’, the winner chooses one of the losers marbles and it becomes theirs.
A search online suggests this is a variant called ‘marble billiards’ but as far as I remember this is the only way we played. I wonder if this was just the Newcastle rules, or if this version was popular throughout Australia?
Everyone seemed to have marbles, since they were able to be purchased inexpensively almost everywhere. We had names for all the different types and styles: ‘milkies’ were opaque glass, ‘cat’s eyes’ were like the ones I got for my birthday, ‘steelies’ were metal balls (usually just repurposed bearings), ‘tiger’s eyes’ were orange and black cat’s eyes. There were others as well that I forget, and again a quick search shows the nicknames were as regional as the game.
Marble collecting seems to be a popular hobby these days, and an entire industry has arisen around identifying and trading rare marbles. Although we had our favourites, we were never precious with ours and after we got a bit older aside from using some of them as ammunition in slingshots I don’t really recall what ever happened to our marbles?
I suppose we gave them away to younger children? Maybe we just threw them away? Maybe Bernard still has them to this day? I just don’t know. Marbles were fantastic in those primary school days, but then they just seemed to fade away very quickly. That said, I think it’s a perfect children’s game, and maybe it’s time for the worlds children to rediscover marbles 🙂
The way we played, you were trying to knock all of your opponent’s marbles out of a circle before they did the same to yours.
I still love the names and how they could be joined together, e.g. a steelie bonker or a coke cat’s eye. Opaque marbles with stripes were snakies. I’m sure there are many more names I’ve forgotten.
What I’ll never forget is when I was in kindy and a rich older kid’s giant marble bag burst, spillling the contents onto the playground. I think everyone present scored one or two new marbles out of that 🙂
‘Bonkers’ is familiar, but I’m pretty sure for us Conkers was more common. A search online reveals that the word probably originated from an actual game called ‘Conkers’ which was initially played with large nuts then wooden balls!
I remember sometimes trying to knock marbles out of bounds as you described, but far more commonly we basically played them as billiards.
We also used to do the old contest of rolling them toward a target from a distance and the winner was the one who got his marble closest. Like lawn bowls or curling with marbles!
I don’t remember what happened to our marbles. We did certainly use them as slingshot ammunition though. I also maintained a ball bearing collection for a time. Many of them rusted.
Been thinking about this topic some more…
Trading was another aspect of marbles for us. You’d scrutinise for flaws before making a trade. Alternately, you might get a really special example cheap because it had a tiny chip.
I want to say we were pretty fair about which/how many marbles were lost in games. Did we go so far as to allow “ransoming”? All these years later, I can’t be sure. But maybe.