Three Black Puddings Are Hurled Underhand at a Twenty-Foot Plinth in Ramsbottom on the Thirteenth
The World Black Pudding Throwing Championships are held outside The Oaks on the second Sunday of September. Winners have come from four countries.
The World Black Pudding Throwing Championships are held on the second Sunday of September, which this year is the 13th, outside The Oaks pub on Bridge Street in Ramsbottom, Greater Manchester.
Each competitor gets three black puddings and throws them underhand at a stack of Yorkshire puddings set on a plinth twenty feet up. The score is how many Yorkshire puddings come down. The organisers prefer the word hurling to throwing, on the grounds that the underhand action is not a throw.
The origin story is that in 1455, during the Wars of the Roses, Lancastrian and Yorkist forces ran out of ammunition near here and threw food at each other instead. The story is almost certainly not true, but it has the merit of explaining the props, which is more than most origin stories for these events manage.
The competition as it exists was revived by a pub landlord in 1839 and revived again in 1984 by the Stubbins Community Trust. It moved from the Corner Pin in Stubbins to The Oaks in Ramsbottom, and it draws several thousand spectators. Proceeds go to local causes.
The entry list is more international than the setting suggests. Winners have come from England, Wales, Australia and Turkey. Huseyin Ozluk of Turkey won in 2009 and again in 2013; Andrew Ferrier won in 2018 and 2021. There was no event in 2020.
What separates the good throwers from the rest is height rather than force. A pudding thrown hard and flat hits the plinth. A pudding lofted to arrive at the top of its arc at twenty feet takes the stack down with it, which is why the winners tend not to be the strongest people in the field.