Shin Kicking (Part 2): Best Done Among Friends

In the spirit of revival, the organisers decided to resurrect the sadistic sport, if only for show.

Ben was roped in when his best friend, Joe Chamberlain, volunteered. "I didn't mind, I thought it was a bit of fun," he chuckles. "We were young and silly."

Both married and in their thirties, Ben and Joe could have been siblings, what with their hooded eyes and jutting jaws.

In a photo from the time, they're standing side by side laughing, brothers in arms, one in a pinstriped jacket and paisley tie, the other in a flat cap and overalls.

Although Joe worked in town at the chemist's and Ben was a farmer, they lived next door to each other in Campden; the couples would nip into each other's houses for tea and conversation—"very sociable, like".

And shin kicking—even the pretend kind—was best done among friends.

One over-enthusiastic swing would be enough to infuriate anyone and turn a good-natured display into a grudge match. Ben and Joe tried to check their blows, kicking hard enough to make it look realistic but pulling back just before impact. They also had padding sewn inside their trousers.

"Not real padding," Ben says. "It was just a double thickness on our trousers."

"They Call It Sport, But We Say It's Plain Crazy!" a newspaper exclaimed, with a photo of Ben kicking wildly at Joe's bare shins (but missing by a country mile).

Shin kickers of yore supposedly prepared by deadening their legs with hammers. So Ben pretended to do the same for reporters:

"Tom Barnes, a 79-year-old local blacksmith, skilfully swung his seven-pound hammer to fall with a thump on the shinbone of 34-year-old farmer Ben Hopkins. And Ben, he winced a little, then—'A little harder if you please, Tom,'—he said.

Tom obliged."

©J.R. Daeschner

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Shin Kicking (Part 1): Ye Olde Bloode Sport: Shin Kicking at Chipping Campden

Not many men live to dig their own grave, let alone climb out of it. But Ben Hopkins was planning to do just that in the summer of 1951.

The Festival of Britain had revitalised the nation, boosting morale at a time when there were still shortages of food and housing six years after World War Two.

In London, the organisers of the five-month extravaganza strained to look to the future, commissioning fantastical attractions called Skylon, the Dome of Discovery and the Outer Space Pavilion.

However, in the old Cotswold town of Chipping Campden, the locals planned to celebrate their Britishness by doing what came naturally: reliving the past.

The festival's timing happened to mark nearly a century since the abolition of a little-known event that linked England with the ancient Olympian Games and the modern Olympics.

England's very own "Cotswold Olimpicks" had been held since at least 1612 on Dover's Hill outside Campden and survived until 1852, when rowdiness gave the authorities an excuse to shut it down.

Ninety-nine years later, the people of Chipping Campden decided to revive their old-fashioned Olimpicks as their contribution to Britain's Festival.

Instead of standard track-and-field events, these Olimpicks would feature tug-o'-war, sack races, morris dancing, greasy-pole climbing and "throwing the sheaf"—hurling a hay bale with a pitchfork.

But it fell to Ben and a friend to re-enact the most infamous sport of them all: shin kicking, a brutal form of wrestling once common in England, Wales, and parts of America.

Contestants would square off, lock arms and hack at each other's shins until one of them was thrown to the ground.


Photo by Emma Wood

In the old days, shin kickers wore metal toecaps on their boots, leaving losers—and winners—with permanently dented shinbones. Some were crippled for life, and a few even died from their injuries. As a result, the pastime itself died out by the early 1900s.

©J.R. Daeschner

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