“It helps that I’ve got no teeth,” says Ged Eccles, folding his face in on itself.
His upper lip vanishes and his chin rises to meet his nose, as though someone has pulled a drawstring behind his ears. For a moment, his whole face seems to collapse towards its centre. Then it unspools, and everything snaps back into place. Ged takes a contemplative pull on his vape and slots his dentures back in.
It has just gone 9am in Egremont, a windswept market town on the western edge of Cumbria, and Ged, 55, has just demonstrated the face that he hopes, 13 hours from now, will make him World Gurning Champion.
“I’ve been practising since May,” he confesses. Most of the work has taken place in front of the mirror: loosening the rubbery muscles of his face and experimenting with expressions. Ged has attempted more avant-garde gurns over the years, but this time he is going back to basics. “A traditional gurn.”
Ged was born and bred in Egremont and won the junior championship here in 1985, aged 15. Two years later, he joined the King’s Own Royal Border Regiment, serving until injuries to his legs led to a medical discharge in 1989. He returned to civilian life, working a succession of jobs, mostly in security, including several years at nearby Sellafield. He is now married and retired, with two grown-up daughters, neither of whom has shown much interest in continuing the family tradition. “I used to scare them with it when they were little,” he chuckles.
Ged returned to competitive gurning as an adult and discovered, following the loss of his teeth to gum disease in 2007, that nature had presented him with an unexpected competitive advantage. He has finished third twice. In 2023, he came second. “That was one of the highlights of my life,” he says. But he has never won.
This year might finally be his chance. Tommy Mattinson, the 19-time world champion and great colossus of modern gurning, is absent through ill health for the second year running. Last year’s winner, Ryan Barton, is out too. For the first time in years, the field is open.
As Egremont begins to fill with spectators, Ged is trying not to get carried away. “I just want to be placed,” he tells me. Then he pauses. “This is my passion. It’s the most important thing in my life.”
The World Gurning Championships are the culmination of the Egremont Crab Fair, quite possibly the oldest fair in the world. Its origins are traced to 1267, when Henry III granted the town a royal charter and the local lord distributed crab apples to the townsfolk after the harvest.
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