Conkers, Custard Pies and the Cult of Caution
There was a time when the most dangerous thing in a British autumn was a well-aimed conker. Children threaded them on string, soaked them in vinegar, baked them in the oven and smashed them together until one shattered. Knuckles were bruised. Pride was punctured. Nobody died. That was before the clipboard came to town.
In South Tyneside the council decided to fell six horse chestnut trees lining a suburban road. The trees had done nothing wrong except produce conkers. A boy had fallen out of one, and children had been throwing sticks to knock the conkers down. The answer was not to teach children to climb with care, or to throw with better aim. It was to remove the trees. Residents protested. The chainsaws won.
Elsewhere a head teacher told pupils not to walk under a conker tree without a helmet. One imagines a crocodile of small children in hard hats, eyes fixed nervously upward, as though autumn were an air raid. One school introduced safety goggles for children playing conkers.
Schools have been busy elsewhere. At one infants school children were forbidden to make daisy chains in case they picked up germs from the ground. Generations of us made daisy chains. Our immune systems were grateful for the exercise.
Another school banned yo-yos. Another outlawed handstands because one girl had hurt her elbow. A Devon academy went further and suspended ‘all gymnastic activities’ at break time, which is a grand way of saying that cartwheels were cancelled
Snow fared no better. One London head teacher reasoned that if pupils did not touch the snow, they could not throw it. A sack race was stopped at sports day. One school allowed football only with a sponge ball. Another banned leather footballs in case they hurt the boys' feet when they kicked them. And one sports day was postponed because of dew on the grass. Dew, the moisture that has settled on every English field every morning since the Domesday Book.
Councils have not been idle either. A Derbyshire borough had the small wooden canes protecting daffodil bulbs removed, in case someone tripped and fell into the flowerbed. Quite why anyone would be striding through a flowerbed was not explained. On another village green the daffodils themselves were removed. Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud. Today he would be wandering with a hazard assessment.
In Whitley Bay residents were praised by the council for their flower display, then told to take it down for safety reasons. Calderdale banned its gardeners from wearing shorts because they had to deal with ‘sharp shrubbery.’ The councillor defending the ban said it was better to be safe than sorry. That phrase deserves a gravestone of its own. It has buried more fun than any other four words in the language.
The pancake race is a fine old English custom. One council banned it because it was raining. Another insisted it be run at walking pace. A pancake race at walking pace is not a race. It is a procession with a frying pan.
A local event cancelled its custard pie fight. The danger, presumably, was that someone might end up with custard on them, which is rather the point of a custard pie fight.
In Leeds a community bonfire had been held on the same patch of ground for at least thirty years. Council workers arrived and carted off the firewood. Nobody thought to ask who had built it or why. In Biggar the Hogmanay bonfire had kept going through the Second World War, when locals burned a candle in a tin so as not to guide the German bombers. It survived the Luftwaffe. It was then threatened by a gas main, one that had been laid beneath the bonfire site in the 1990s by people who knew perfectly well the bonfire was there.
The grown-ups have not escaped. A restaurant took pork crackling off the menu in case it splashed the chef. A chip shop refused to let customers add their own salt and vinegar. An office banned paperclips. A restaurant would not hand out toothpicks for fear of injury. And an amusement park banned dodgems from bumping into each other. Dodgems that do not bump are simply cars in a queue. We have the M25 for that.
Here is the delicious part. The Health and Safety Executive itself examined hundreds of these cases. In the overwhelming majority it found that no regulation required the ban at all. ‘Health and safety’ was a smokescreen, usually for poor service or plain laziness. In its first hundred cases, more than a third were officials dodging an unpopular decision. Others were about avoiding bad publicity or limiting financial liability.
So the problem is not the law. It is the incentive. The official who bans the bonfire bears no cost when the village loses its evening of fun. The official who permits it bears all the blame if someone singes an eyebrow. Faced with that lopsided ledger, the rational bureaucrat bans. Every time. The losses are spread thinly across thousands of people who never complain to anyone. The risk to the official is concentrated on one desk.
The deeper damage is done to the very people being protected. Children learn about risk the way they learn about everything else, by doing it. The child who falls out of a tree learns which branches bear weight. The child who gets a conker on the knuckles learns to hold the string further away. Small knocks teach us how to avoid large ones. A childhood without scrapes produces adults without judgement, who cannot weigh a risk because they were never allowed to take one.
Lady Allen of Hurtwood, who brought adventure playgrounds to Britain, put it perfectly: better a broken bone than a broken spirit. Bones mend. The habit of timidity is harder to shift.
The remedy is simple. Those who want to stop something should have to show which law requires it. Those who run fetes, races and bonfires should be trusted to manage their own events. And councils that wrongly ban things should pay for the pleasure they destroy, as Lord Young proposed in 2010.
Life, after all, carries a mortality rate of one hundred per cent. I expect a council somewhere is drafting a ban on it.
Madsen Pirie