The “She Loves Me, She Loves Me not” Contest – Exmoor – Part 3

A separate contest was spawned in 1898 when a distance element was introduced, with contestants having to blow away all the seeds from a dandelion in one puff while standing further and further away from the dandelion. This idea was born when a local called Ben Mergion was asked to blow out the candles on his birthday cake; Ben not only blew them out, he blew them off the cake, along with half the icing. Luckily, everyone whose face was covered in icing was feeling quite hungry that day. One of those present was the previous year’s Shouting Judge, Barry Morgan, and he decided that the dandelion contest shouldn’t just be about accuracy but about distance too.

Not surprisingly, Mergion won the first five distance contests with his record being 140 feet 8 inches in 1901. Later in life Mergion was employed by the RAF to start troublesome propeller-driven aircraft.

For more British Traditions, see here