Remember “pinners”?

“I have been reading about ‘pilers’ in your column,” writes Jack Cook of Dundee. “However, I haven’t read anything about ‘pinners’ – by far the favourite game, played by many young boys.

“We would all have a square piece of metal about an inch and a half square in our pockets. We would line up, and pitch for the cundie (a metal drain cover) on the pavement. If you got your pinner on, you were Killer and had the right to hit, or stake, anyone else’s pinner, if they hadn’t made the cundie themselves.

“The players could not go for another pinner until they had first got their own on the cundie. If they were lying close to the base cundie, they would be staked right away and would be out of the game. Smaller, round cundies were safe havens and you couldn’t go for them.

“Sometimes, two or three managed to become Killers (getting on the cundie right away) so if that was the case, we would all pitch away from the base far enough to be at a relatively safe distance from any Killer, but close enough to be able to stake an opponent and go for another.

“If you pitched away behind a stone or kerb for instance, the killer could shout ‘cleish!’, meaning you would have to show your pinner openly. However, if you shouted first: ‘nae cundie cleish!’ you were safe where you were.

“Probably the most well-known was ‘stanny hard bangy, nae bendies’, meaning if a killer was that close to you, he had to throw his pinner down at the target from a practically vertical stance. If he didn’t shout this first, you could simply, reach over and touch his pinner with yours and he was out.

“I lived on the corner of Glebe Street and Watson Street (known as Broonsland) and there were at least 60 to 70 boys around there. We all had pinners to play in the playground at school, or in the street.

“Later in life I toured with men from different countries. I was in a rock band at the time and between cities, when driving, we were often bored.

“I introduced them to pinner and, believe it or not, I had Jamaicans, Englishmen, Americans and Scotsmen all playing the game.

“What laughs at hearing them shouting: ‘stanny hard bangy nae bendies’, or ‘nae cundie cleish’!”

This atmospheric shot, taken by Stan Riley of Dundee, shows the new train station emerging behind Discovery.