IT’S a long shot – as King Harold said when the arrow lodged in his forehead at the Battle of Hastings – but we blame the French for most things, so why not pin the first time the game of conkers was banned on them too?

It’s October 1966. Young minds at my primary school have got over the shock of England winning the World Cup – honestly, I lie not, we did win – and the country was awash with stories of the Norman invasion 900 years earlier.

And so our thoughts turned to that most English of games at which we have always been and remain to this day undisputed world champs – OK, so no other nation is interested.

My chum William turned into the most underhand, obnoxious, annoying brat during the conkers season.

Not only did he bend the rules by hardening up his horse chestnut fruit by soaking it in vinegar or baking it in the oven, thus ensuring he never lost, but he would triumphantly strut round the playground, crowing, ‘I’m William the Conkerer’ in tribute to the Norman invader who defeated the English at Hastings in 1066.

Somerset County Gazette:

The Bayeux Tapestry depicts the moment King Harold was killed by an arrow at the Battle of Hastings.

When another pal decided he’d had enough of this preening and accidentally hurled William’s champion conker through the window of the head teacher’s office, a ban was inevitable.

Fast forward to October 2016 and, horror upon horrors, Wellington Prep School stages its fiercely fought annual conker championship involving 80 of its pupils – if only the English had shown the same spirit at Hastings.

This is despite the game being outlawed in many over-zealous schools, with governors and head teachers claiming their young charges could be at risk of serious injury from flying conkers.

But they’re made of sterner stuff at Wellington Prep School, whose headmaster Adam Gibson, said: “Sadly, the game of conkers has declined in school playgrounds over the last 20 years, mainly due to rumoured health and safety issues.

“Such information is nonsense and we are determined to redress the balance and encourage our children to engage in competitive playground activity and traditional outdoor entertainment.

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Wellington School headmaster Henry Price joins in the conkers challenge.

“The children rose to the challenge and enjoyed the competition immensely.

“We encourage them to take risks and the game of conkers is a great opportunity for this.”

It’s actually a classic myth started in the 2000s that the Health and Safety Executive has ever actually banned or even discouraged conkers – you might say it’s an ‘old chestnut’ that rears its head every year.

HSE guidance states: “A well-meaning head teacher decided children should wear safety goggles to play conkers.

“Subsequently some schools appear to have banned conkers on ‘health and safety’ grounds or made children wear goggles, or even padded gloves.

“Realistically, the risk from playing conkers is incredibly low and just not worth bothering about.

“If kids deliberately hit each other over the head with conkers, that’s a discipline issue, not health and safety.”

Obviously there will be times when schools justifiably bring in bans on certain games, such as when the Power Rangers craze took the country by storm in the 1990s, leading to all sorts of ructions at one Taunton primary school, where the head teacher stopped the squabbling by refusing to allow pupils to take the toys onto the campus.

But there are also several ‘elf ‘n’ safety’ edicts that never were, such as office workers being banned from putting up Christmas decorations; trapeze artists being ordered to wear hard hats; pin the tail on the donkey games outlawed; celebrating graduates stopped from throwing their mortar boards into the air. Nonsense, none of those has ever been proscribed.

Yet there are occasions where valid concerns may be raised – returning to Wellington School, senior school director of sport Steffan Jones came up with a solution to avoid students picking up injuries in the increasingly brutal sport of rugby.

Earlier this year he suggested players should be ‘bio-banded’ according to their size rather than age, claiming there is currently too much emphasis on size and power and not enough concentration on the game’s finer skills.

At the time, he said: “The game is American football without the pads or helmets.

“It’s just about joining the dots in terms of the pattern you’re playing and picking beasts.

“The most important person on the staff now is the strength and conditioner.

“For me that’s wrong.

“I say to the big lads, ‘Why do you want to run into someone?

“Isn’t it easier to pass the ball and take out three defenders? Or sidestep like Jason Robinson?’”

Back to conkers.

The winner of the Conker Bear Trophy at Wellington Prep School was Nat Bill, which makes me ponder whether if I could change two facts, conkers might never have been banned – firstly if my erstwhile primary school friend William had thought to shorten his name to Bill, and secondly, if Harold had won the Battle of Hastings, then the Norman invader would never have earned the moniker William the Conqueror.

Somerset County Gazette:

All conker-ing - champion pupil Nat Bill.

But, if the experts are right, conkers could soon be consigned to history anyway.

They reckon horse chestnut trees could disappear from our landscape within 15 years, ravaged by pests called leaf miners, which leave mature trees susceptible to killer diseases such as bleeding canker.