Local historians say that the occupant of one of the cottages used to sell beer to passing cattle drovers. At the time — presumably the eighteenth or early nineteenth century — the slang term for an unlicensed beer-house of this sort was tiddlywink...When I was in college in the late '60s, tiddlywinks was an intercollegiate sport. I actually used to be quite good at it (though I wasn't on the team); if my opponent didn't squop one of my winks, I could sometimes pot all of them without a miss. I think we also did bank shots off our ties - although that wasn't permitted in the official rules.
John Ayto, in the Oxford Dictionary of Rhyming Slang, and Jonathon Green, in the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, both suggest that it was originally rhyming slang (tiddlywink = drink). In the way of such slang, it soon became shortened to tiddly as the name for an alcoholic drink, which by the early twentieth century had become the adjective tiddly for the state of being drunk...
The name of the game of tiddlywinks is even more obscure and turns up in print only in 1857, later than the drink sense. The first few references, named as tiddlywink in the singular, are to a game played with dominoes. Tiddlywinks, for the game played by flicking counters into a pot... is not recorded before a trademark application by Joseph Fincher in 1889, though writers at the end of the century claimed it was a traditional English game (and authorities agree it was indeed invented in England).
If there is any connection between the slang name for a low beer-house and these children’s games, the printed record is entirely silent. I can hardly imagine that the two are directly connected. There’s another story here, but nobody seems to know what it is.
Addendum: just checked. I'm rusty as hell, and over the years I seem to have lost one blue wink and the white squidger. Darn.
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