Country marks day by flipping for age-old traditions

THE HIGH-JINKS with which Pancake Day has become accustomed continued unabated across the country yesterday.

In Leeds, pupils from the nearby St Peter’s Church of England Primary School gathered outside the Minster for the annual pancake-flipping races. They wore regular street clothes, in contrast to the more formal proceedings at Winchester Cathedral, where boy choristers armed with frying pans were among more than 30 teams that also numbered clergy, councillors and mayors in full regalia.

Traditional Shrove Tuesday football matches took place in the streets of Atherstone, Warwickshire and Ashbourne, Derbyshire, where shop windows were boarded up to avoid accidental damage.

The Atherstone game

Boy choristers with frying pans were among 30 teams that numbered clergy.

honours a match played between Leicestershire and Warwickshire in 1199, when the teams supposedly used a bag of gold as a ball – while in Ashbourne, thousands congregated in a car park to see a ball dropped from a plinth on to the waiting crowds, who then tried to manhandle it to one of the two goals placed three miles apart. The game lasts for two days, concluding today on Ash Wednesday.

Meanwhile, a police force etched the faces on its “wanted” posters on to pancakes, in the hope that their owners might suitably shrive themselves by confessing their sins.

Surrey Police said it had brought in a “crepe artist” to create the portraits, and hoped the stunt might mean that more people would see the faces than would have been the case with a standard appeal.