Thinking of The Great Marble Craze

One hundred and eleven was my target. Why, I can’t remember any more - I’m sure there were other kids who had two, three hundred, or so it seemed to my emulous eyes. Over the last weeks of the craze I counted and counted my marbles …106, 108... At 110 I was sure I’d make it. Then I lost a game. Had to start again, lost again, got further away. Then I had a lucky run, made it at last to the great number. As far as I can remember that was the end for me in the Great Marble Craze.
I’m sure it didn’t happen like that at all.

I kept my marbles in a drawstring bag made of gold-coloured velvety curtain material. In those last days it became crammed with them, I could barely cram the last few in at the top, and the bag swung on the back of the door like a shiny joint of meat. It wasn’t always like that. There were days when it was more like a flap of empty skin and I thought I’d lose even my last few. Of course, I could have addressed the problem directly, gone to a shop, bought a bagful - didn’t have to be normies, I could even have picked up a bunch of oilie moonshines. There was something so smooth and perfect about new marbles. They came in batches of fifteen to twenty, chirping against each other as you lifted the paper label. They lay cool in your palm. I always imagined them somehow always dustless, protected by the plastic string bag, like those you buy oranges in at the supermarket.
But I didn’t buy my marbles, at least not often. I think some of my friends did, but despite the weird appeal of those virgin globes, the real thrill of acquiring them was gladiatorial.
Let’s be clear about when this was… 1985 or thereabouts, when I was in the lower rungs of junior school. Where the craze came from, I don’t know. Why we all fell for it I can’t say. Certainly I don’t remember any dissenting voices, no one who thought marbles were just for losers. We were all in on it (I speak of the boys; I don’t know what the girls were doing then). I think it was about the last time I was cool.
I missed out on the start of it. One playtime I wandered over to some of my friends who were gathered on the grassy bank that separated the concrete playground from the football fields above the school. At first I couldn’t see what they were doing and thought it was something like the bee we’d tried to rescue some time before - but no, there were these gleaming bouncing things clicking in the grass, and serious concentration. I watched. I asked questions. I wanted to play too, but had no marbles. I paced about in frustration. Why couldn’t I have a go? No one would lend me any of theirs (with good reason - the ownership of a marble won or lost while on loan could only be a matter of dispute)…
At last - I had some tin foil from my sandwiches. I rolled it up into a ball and announced myself on the scene. Calculations were made. Eventually it was agreed that I could play for a normie, but only at two for one…

I should explain the jargon. Marbles come in different types and in different sizes, and therefore have different values. This is of great importance for the game.
At the bottom of the pile are normies. These are mostly clear glass with a band of brightly coloured plastic running through the middle. They are the most common form of marble, but only ingénues will play for them.
Next come pixies. These are largely white glass with bright daubs of colour, though there are “black pixies”, which really have the value of a moonshine. Good bargaining chips that put you within realistic reach of the better marbles.
Oilies look like puddles with drops of petrol in them. Often they have a touch of the moonshine about them, but whether this affects their value or not is a matter of debate (before the game).
Moonshines are the best looking. Dark blue or green, held up to the light they contain a strange inverted tinted image of the school buildings. Sometimes there are flaws deep in the glass, flies in sombre suspension…?
Each of these types comes in the standard size, about a centimetre across, or could be a dob - a marble twice the size, and therefore twice the value of the ordinary kind. A mixture of dobs and ordinary marbles is good to run across your hand, a roll of weights and pressures.
Less common, and therefore of somewhat variable value, are such things as ironies (ball bearings) and cats’ eyes. (These last came in a middle size between ordinary and dob, and often there were grooves scored into their snot-green surfaces. Were they really nicked from cats’ eye reflectors in the middle of roads?) There are also mutant or hybrid marbles, whose value can be negotiated, although strangeness generally pushes you up the scale. I have a normie dob with a tint of moonshine - a winner in most circumstances.
For the purposes of the game, the value of the four main types doubles as you progress up the scale: 1 pixie = 2 normies, 1 oilie = 2 pixies etc. A dob is worth double a normal sized marble of the same kind: 1 normie dob = two normies, 1 normie dob = 1 pixie. So therefore if you have a normie you are eight shots off a moonshine and sixteen off a moonshine dob.

What was the game? It was pretty simple. We had none of that messing about with circles. I remember I had to explain to various parents and others several times that it wasn’t the game with the circle. No, ours was straight battle, two players marble to marble, and the whole playground was the arena (though, with us being small and the marbles smaller no game really went beyond a corner or two). Normie versus normie - the player who struck the other person’s marble once won that marble. Normie versus normie dob, it was two to one - the normie had to hit the dob twice to win. The dob only had to hit once.
There were only two types of move, the pick up and under-arm roll along the terrain, and the bomb, where you launched your throw from mid air. You could say “no bombs“ at the beginning of the game. You were supposed to release the marble from the point at which it had come to rest after your last throw, but in practice bombs in particular tended to creep a bit closer to the target. Grass was the most difficult and the concrete of the playground tended to bobble rolls off course. It took a practised eye. One of the best things that could happen to you was if your opponent’s marble fell into the shallow gutter that took rainwater off the playground. You’d be hard pressed to miss then, though there was the occasional bit of gravel that would sling you off course, past the target and leave you a sitting duck further down.
It seems strange to think now of all these little boys crouched intently over such tiny self-manufactured dramas, with all this economy and regulation governing their play - and only rarely arguing. Where did all these rules come from? As far as I can remember they were fully formed from the beginning.
The most common dispute during a game was whether a hit was legitimate - this tended to arise in grass, where vegetation might possibly have got in the way, or a marble that looked hit failed to stir, perhaps because it was firmly wedged in a root system. But most of the time that was obvious. What else? Before a game, we might argue about whether a touch of oilie meant an extra hit, but once it was settled it was settled. I can only remember one person who cheated, claiming every time he lost that it was “practice” but that when he won it was for real. We just stopped playing him. What a strange world that was.

I won my first game with that bit of rolled up foil, striking it lucky by dropping out of the grass and onto a flat hydrant cover where my opponent couldn‘t hide, and acquired a normie. I’d like to say that I then discovered a hidden talent, and swept all before me, but as with almost every game I‘ve played, in reality I spent a long, long time in the doldrums, depending on the good will and charity of good players to keep my head above water in the marble world. I couldn’t hit a dob from three inches on a polished tabletop, let alone cope with uneven terrain or long shots. I did eventually get a bit of skill and set off on my way to the glorious 111, but I never got past mid-table mediocrity. Even so, I always loved the feel of marbles.

The craze disappeared as mysteriously as it arrived. For all the complex architecture we had developed for it, it can barely have lasted more than a month or two. I don’t know anyone who remembers it now, and I don’t know if it reached any other areas of the country or even any other schools in North Staffs. I’d like to know whether we created all this by ourselves, just a bunch of boys being inventive, competitive and playing fair by each other, or whether someone put these ideas into our heads.
It’s been a long time since I really gave the Great Marble Craze this much thought, but it does come back to me in little twitches of memory now and again. Once I found a blue normie dob in my parent’s house, chipped and scarred, small semicircles of glass cracked from its surface leaving fingerprints of the breakage, ripples in what was once a smooth sphere. Another time an orange normie turned up, slightly outsize but pristine, as if fresh from one of those bags in the shop.
Strangely though, I love most to see smashed marbles, ones that have bounced into the road, or been stamped into prickles of glass that would coat your finger end, then cut your cheek. If it was a normie, the plastic lies there too, still relentlessly colourful. If a pixie or a moonshine, the larger bits reflect the light as well as the whole marble did. They’re as beautiful as when they hung in the shop, or when I took up a moonshine I’d played for. I don’t know why I like them this way.