It’s conker season again! We’re celebrating some of the conkering heroes who have smashed records as well as conkers on strings

Most matches played at once
Record held by the pupils and staff of King Edward’s School in Birmingham who played 388 games of conkers (with 776 players) for five minutes on 28 March 2012.

Most victorious untreated conker

The record is held by a conker that won the BBC Conker Conquest in 1954, winning more than 5,000 matches. However, botany experts have their suspicions that the conker might actually have been an ivory or tagua nut and not a standard horse chestnut.

Most conkers hit in one minute

Sam Thompso and Pete Wicks hold the joint record, each hitting 31 conkers in a minute (just under one every two seconds) in a record made on 2 December 2024.

Longest chain of conkers
Brad Malone became the proud owner of this record on 16 May 2025 with a chain of 21,755 conkers measuring 447.78 metres (1,469 feet 1 inches).

Largest collection of conkers
Guiness World Records does not officially recognise this record as they have concerns that people might ‘overpick’ horse chestnuts, but in 2023, Brian Mountford, a retired inventor from Leek in Staffordshire claimed to have the largest collection at more than 10,000. Smashing!

Information courtesy of guinessworldrecords.com. In our October issue, we paid a visit to Peckham Conker Club and met some of their contestants in our ‘Modern Eccentrics’ pages. The words are by Iona Bower and photography by Jonathan Cherry. The issue is on sale now.

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