Across a large swathe of the East of England you can occasionally find a pub that features a skittles table. Although played in a smaller area and less well-known than alley skittles, if you are thinking that skittles on a table must be trivial or less skilful, think again. Pub games don't come better than this, and in some respects, a skittle table confers several advantages over rolling balls down an alley.
Skittle table games are just one branch of the family of miniaturised table skittles games. For the landlord, one advantage is obvious - it takes up a lot less valuable floor space than a skittles alley, and the equipment is small enough that it can be packed away if the space is occasionally needed for some other event. A skittles alley is an expensive investment requiring specialist installers and the result is a permanent fixture. No special floor is required for a skittles table and the throwing area is free for other activities when not in use.
Players of the game will advocate various advantages over the longer game, too. Pins take much less time to reset and the cheeses less time to return to the next thrower, leaving more time for the game, for chatting and for drinking beer. But more importantly, the game has a greater subtlety and skill. Unlike variants of skittles in which a ball is rolled, a table skittles game is played in three dimensions. So, if you need 3 pins to win but 4 will bust, you can lob the cheese over the front pins and pick out the skittles towards the rear of the pin diamond. Certain combinations that are impossible to take down in one throw with a rolled ball become feasible, albeit tricky, by bouncing the cheese off the side cushions before striking the pins at just the right angle. And by certain measures, the game is intrinsically more skilful requiring proponents to strike the front pin at the correct height, as well as being accurate in the other two dimensions.
Top right is an example of Northants Skittles with traditional Boxwood pins ready for play. Made by Blacks, one of the two main table makers in Northamptonshire, this was the first Skittles Table owned by the author.
Next is a map of the historical counties of England showing the areas covered by the games, although it is much more sparse than it once was. Lincolnshire Skittles - Orange (now extinct), Leicester Skittles - Bright Yellow, Northamptonshire Skittles - Dark Yellow, Cambridge Skittles - Ivory, Formerly Daddlums - Light Green, Daddlums - Dark Green
This page outlines the different varieties of skittle table games that still thrive and those that used to exist. Of course, local variations, hybrids of equipment and exceptions abound. A classification is always going to be somewhat subjective - e.g. some people might deem Cambridge Skittles is no more than a variety of Northamptonshire Skittles, but I think one can broadly identify five different skittle table games that are distinctive enough to be separate. Strong clues exist that this genre of pub game used to be played in Suffolk and Essex too, so it appears highly likely that skittles tables in some form were once present in a contiguous region stretching from the South coast of Kent to North of the Lincolnshire Fens.
Northamptonshire Skittles
Also, known as Hood Skittles or Cheese Skittles, Northamptonshire Table Skittles is a miniaturised form of Old English Skittles (see the Alley
Skittles page for more on this venerable game) in which cheeses are thrown at pins on a
table about 8 feet away. It remains popular in Northamptonshire and well known in
Bedfordshire, Warwickshire and into Leicestershire, too. Confusingly, in these counties, the game is just
referred to as Skittles or Table Skittles while, outside this area, it is virtually unknown and Table Skittles tends
to mean Bar Skittles, the miniature table-top version of skittles that involves a ball being swung around a pole.
To the left is a Pepper's Northamptonshire Skittles table. The Pepper family made equipment for the game for many decades but once Gordon Pepper died soon after the turn of the century, table manufacture ceased. His brother, John Pepper continues to make the traditional boxwood pins and cheeses, as at 2024, and his workshop is shown in the other picture.
The author is grateful to Bruce Ward who
plays Northamptonshire Skittles
at the Red Lion, Corby. About their table he says "Here
it is in all its glory, after polishing and ready for a league night. It was certainly there 20
years ago when I first moved into Corby, and no doubt it was there well before then. It's been cared
for (apart from the legs, don't know what happened to them) and lovingly polished since then, and is
still in daily use by customers of the pub, and by league players at least four nights each week".
Most people who've played it,
consider Northamptonshire Skittles to be the best or certainly one of the most enjoyable English pub games around, so it is well
worth popping into a pub featuring the game if you ever have the chance...
The video is a classic clip from a classic 70s TV programme, The Indoor League, presented by Fred Trueman. Bill Maynard very professionally demonstrates a stack - but fails to hide his surprise at the feat and his third throw shows why...
Rules can vary according to the league, but the most common Northants game happens by each side taking turns to set a set a target with three cheeses, followed by their opponent attempting to beat it. A match is played over seven legs and an elegant mechanism exists to settle a drawn leg: the winner is the person who topples the most pins with the first cheese of the next leg. This means that most matches will take much the same length of time although, if the tiebreaking first cheese is also tied, then an extra leg does have to be played.
Leicester Skittles
Around the town of Leicester, the better known Northants Skittles gives way to Leicester Skittles which uses thinner, pointy topped skittles with a kingpin. North of Birmingham,
alley skittles changes form too, becoming Long Alley Skittles, a game with thinner skittles and a kingpin so Leicester Table Skittles appears to be their own
miniaturised form of the Leicestershire Long Alley game.
To the right are the thin, pointy skittles and Lignum
Vitae cheeses of Leicester Skittles with the kingpin clearly shown. To the left a Leicester table side-on showing the different profile to Northamptonshire tables.
The games look pretty similar at first glance but there are various subtle differences. The table itself sits rather lower and the playing surface juts forward
rather more. The pins and cheeses are significantly smaller and, of course, there is the Kingpin, although weirdly this seems to be a cosmetic feature, unlike Long Alley Skittles. Arthur Taylor doesn't give it any special function in his books and Mark Shirley's excellent blog states outright that it is treated the same as any other pin. The thinner pins are lighter, smaller and play quicker than Northamptonshire Skittles, arguably giving the game a less substantial feel.
Cambridge Skittles
To the East of Northamptonshire, in Cambridgeshire, as at 2024, a single league remains for the Cambridge variety of skittles. The Cambridge & District Skittle League has been in operation since 1930 and games are recorded from as early as 1929, according to their website. The leather-bound table is similar to Northamptonshire skittles but is a little smaller (around 80cm wide instead of 100cm) and without a net. The pins are also slightly smaller and thinner although by default made from the same timber, Boxwood. However, game-play is quite different to other skittle table games, being almost identical to the rules for Old English Skittles - Cambridge skittlers play with a single Cheese, the aim is to topple all the pins with the least number of throws and five is the maximum allowed.
Thanks to James Wells for this picture of the Skittle table which, as at 2024, resides at The Ship, Cambridge having been recently renovated and relocated from the nearby Carlton Arms pub.
The Gray family seem to have been a prominent feature in the early days. James Wells, who has been playing for 20 years and currently represents The Ship in Cambridge, says that, in the past, many of the tables in the league were made by Grays of Cambridge (the table in the photo has a higher backdrop so is a later version made elsewhere). A Mr. E. Gray (1929/30) and Mr. T. Gray (1934/5) both played for the Blackamoor Head public house and a Mr. B. Gray also played for 'Man on the Moon' (1970/71).
The league has a fine tradition in that the losers offer to buy the winners half a pint each at the end of a game. In the past, the league gave out tokens for this purpose, which presumably were handed to the losers who could exchange them for their drink at the bar later...
Lincolnshire Skittles
In his 1975 book, Timothy Finn mentions the last known Norfolk Skittles table which resided at the Horse Shoe Inn, Alby near Erpington. Communication with Mrs. Margaret Rushmer (Landlady from 2000 to Feb 2020), revealed that she had attempted to retrieve the table from the Landlord who was in charge of the pub at that time, but he had informed her that the skittles table and cheeses had ended up in the roof of his shed and had all rotted away with woodworm.
Picture shows a stained pine and padded leatherette skittles table, about 2 feet wide, that was auctioned in 2014. Each leather cheese is stamped Le Tall, Grantham. With kind permission, The Bourne Auction Rooms, Golding Young & Mawer (1864).
Both Finn and Taylor in their books on pub games associated this Norfolk game with Daddlums but Daddlums tables are longer and thinner. The Norfolk table looks more like a small Cambridge Skittles table and the pins are shaped more like miniature Old English Skittles. In fact, I think this is an example of a now extinct variety of skittles table game, that I have called Lincolnshire Skittles, because most of the evidence for the game has surfaced in or around that county, and its epicentre appears to have been Grantham.
The leather cheeses on the right are typical of those that seem to have been made around Lincolnshire for many decades.
A
strong distinguishing feature of this game seems to be the cheeses, which are made from layers of leather, rivetted together, although wooden cheeses seem to have sometimes been used, too. The smaller tables, were often only 60cm wide and were usually without legs, designed to be placed on an existing table.
Daddlums
Daddlums is a Skittles Table variant specific to Kent, with a table and 3 & 1/2 inch pins that are the smallest of any skittles table. A Daddlums table is distinctly different to all of the other tables being thinner and the longer area in front of the pin diamond tends to be used to land the cheese on so that it slides along the surface of the table before striking the pins. So in some senses, the game is more like normal alley skittles, and there is little or no opportunity to bounce the cheese of the sides of the table to take down awkward combinations.
Some of the modern Daddlums pins are short, squat and shaped like an electric light bulb, but pictures showing the game in action at the Vigo Inn and the Jolly Drayman shows small thin barrel pins, more like those used in the game of Bar Skittles. Daddlums is distinctly different to other skittles table forms in both equipment and game play which might mean it split from the game further North at an earlier date or it equally might be no more than a random idiosyncracy from a table maker in the mid twentieth century.
While there were once at least two leagues in Kent during the latter half of the twentieth century, this dwindled to just a single pub, the Vigo Inn, Meophan, Kent, after the nearby Green Man removed it's table in the 1960s (acc. to Finn, 1975). The Vigo's table was said to be more than 150 years old but when the Vigo Inn closed in 2014, it was moved to the Jolly Drayman in Gravesend, where it is still use on a weekly basis.
Thanks to Rob McMillan for permission to publish this picture of the table at the Jolly Drayman.
Rules
Description and rules for Northamptonshire Skittles and Daddlums are available for free from Masters Traditional Games
Where to Buy Table Skittles
Full size Skittles sets and Northamptonshire Skittles equipment can also be found on that website.
Pubs
Please see the Skittle Tables Pubs & Leagues page.