Poohsticks fans club together to save the game

Ever since Pooh tripped, lost grip of his fir cone on the bridge at the edge of the Forest and accidentally invented a game, poohsticks has been beloved by both young and old.

Eighty years on, this quintessentially British endeavour, in which participants drop sticks into a river from one side of a bridge to see whose emerges first on the other, attracts worldwide attention.

And no event has done more to export its simple charm than the annual World Poohsticks Championships, held on the Thames in Oxfordshire for the past quarter century.



So there was no little alarm among poohsticks fans when the Wallingford-based Rotary Club of Sinodun, which has loyally kept the championships going for the past 20 years, called time. The 2008 championships, held in March, were to be its last. The reason: its elderly members - average age approaching 70 - felt that they could no longer cope with the physical demands of organising an event which regularly attracts up to 3,000 as well as TV crews from Japan, Russia, Australia and beyond.

The fear was that the championships, held in honour of the game invented by Winnie-the-Pooh creator AA Milne for his son, Christopher Robin, would die out. But a new group of volunteers, the Oxford Spires Rotary Club - average age under 40 - is to step into the breach.

'It just cannot be lost. It is a much loved event locally, and it is known worldwide as one of those slightly quirky, fun, English things,' said Liz Williamson, 33, president of Oxford Spires, who admits to spending her hen party playing poohsticks on the original AA Milne bridge in Ashdown Forest, East Sussex. 'Once these things are lost, it is ever so hard to bring them back again.'