Jaw forward
The engine of the whole thing. Push the lower jaw out and up as far as it goes. This is the movement that rearranges everything else on your face.
The real thing
Gurning.
QUFC has been running an ugly face contest since 2020 and thought it was being original. It was not. There is a World Gurning Championship, it is held in a small town in Cumbria, and people have been competing in it since before anyone thought to write the rules down.
World Gurning Championships
— loading the calendar…Saturday 19 September 2026 · Egremont, Cumbria
What actually happens
A horse collar and your worst face.
Competitors put their head through a horse collar — in Cumbria it is called a braffin — and pull the most grotesque expression they can manage. The collar is the frame. Whatever happens inside it is the sport.
It is judged on the sheer awfulness of the transformation, which is why it favours faces that started out perfectly ordinary. A small, tidy face that becomes something unspeakable beats a face that was halfway there already.
Definition
What counts as a gurn.
The classic gurn is specific, not just any old face: the lower jaw juts forward and upward, and the bottom lip is dragged up over the top one. The word is Northern English and Scottish, related to "grin" — the English Dialect Dictionary glossed it as to snarl as a dog; to look savage; to distort the countenance.
Bottom lip over the top
The signature. Reach the lower lip up over the upper one — the further the better. One record holder got his lip over his nostrils and held it there for a minute and two seconds.
Commit the rest
Eyes, brows, neck, everything. Champions describe it as a muscle group like any other, and warm it up accordingly.
How it got here
How an apple market ended up crowning a world champion face-puller.
Gurning did not appear from nowhere. It is one event inside the Egremont Crab Fair, and the fair is old enough that the contest has had centuries to turn from a scramble for tobacco into something you demonstrate to a monarch.
- 1267 King Henry III grants Thomas de Multon, Lord of Egremont, a charter for a weekly market and a three-day annual fair. That charter is the reason the fair still runs, and the gurning championship exists inside it — no fair, no world championship. The Lord of the Manor marked the end of harvest by scattering crab apples to the town's children, which is where the name comes from. Nothing to do with crabs; everything to do with sour apples.
- 1852 The first known written record of the face-pulling contest, in the Cumberland Pacquet — which already describes it as an old tradition. It was listed as "Grinn for tobacco", because the prize was a plug of tobacco. So gurning is provably 174 years old and almost certainly a good deal older than that.
- 1966 Mrs Mabel Braddock becomes the first woman to enter. The women's championship that grows out of this is the one Anne Woods would go on to win twenty-eight times.
- 1979 A junior competition is added, which is why champions tend to arrive fully formed. Tommy Mattinson first competed at eleven and took his first men's title in 1986.
- 2000 Peter Jackman has his teeth removed so his jaw can travel further. It is the clearest measure of how seriously this is taken — and it works, because a toothless mouth gives the jaw and the lip nothing to stop against.
- 2008 Tommy Mattinson gurns for Queen Elizabeth II. A contest that began as a scramble for tobacco at a country market is now something you perform for a monarch.
- 19 September 2026 The 759th fair, condensed into a single day. The World Gurning Championships run alongside the greasy pole, hound trails, Cumberland wrestling, pipe smoking and dialect singing — because the fair never stopped being a fair.
The greats
People have dominated this.
Gurning has dynasties. It has records that will not be broken. It has a family that has held the men's title across two generations for most of sixty years.
Men's record
Tommy Mattinson
19 world titles
Started in the junior competition at eleven and won his first men's title in 1986. His father Gordon held the record before him with ten wins between 1967 and 1977.
He works two faces: "Popeye", which is traditional, and "The Wolf", which he invented and credits with most of his titles. He demonstrated gurning to Queen Elizabeth II in 2008.
On preparation: "I'll do a bit of practising in the mirror, stretching my neck and things like that because, same as any other muscle, there's a lot of muscles in the face."
Women's record
Anne Woods
28 world titles
Entered in 1977 because her sons put her name down as a joke, and then won the women's championship twenty-eight times. She missed one contest, for a pregnancy.
She took her dentures out and performed a four-minute routine to a signature song. Guinness ratified the record in 2010. She died in 2015, aged 67, and is still the reason a lot of people have heard of Egremont at all.
Total commitment
Peter Jackman
4 world titles
Won his first in 1998 with a face he called the "Bela Lugosi". In 2000 he had his teeth removed to give his jaw more room to move.
This is not as eccentric as it sounds. Toothless competitors have a real advantage, because there is nothing left inside the mouth to stop the jaw and the lip going where they want to go.
Most recent champions
2025
Ryan Barton took the men's title — his first — and dedicated it to his uncle, Peter Jackman. Lynn Kelly won the women's, beating the multiple-time champion Claire Lister. Kendall Lister won the junior competition, keeping it in the family.
Tommy Mattinson, the reigning champion, was too ill to compete — which is how a nineteen-time champion ends up not being the story for once.
Technique
How to pull one.
You do not need a horse collar and you certainly do not need to have your teeth out. But there is a method, and it is mostly about treating your face like something that can be trained.
1 · Warm up
Stretch your neck and work your jaw before you go for the big one. Cold facial muscles do not travel as far, and the reigning champion warms up in a mirror before every contest.
2 · Lead with the jaw
Push it forward and up first, then bring the bottom lip over the top. Everything else follows more easily once the jaw has moved.
3 · Add the eyes last
Roll them, cross them, squeeze them shut, stare somewhere nobody is. Eyes are what turns an impressive jaw into a face that makes people flinch.
4 · Hold it
A gurn that flickers is not a gurn. Lock it and keep it locked — judges, and QUFC's scoring, both reward a face that stays put.
Practice makes grotesque
Get your gurn scored.
QUFC cannot enter you into Egremont, but it can tell you how far your face travelled. The Face-Off scores your gurn out of 100 by measuring how far every part of your face moved from its resting position, names whichever offence did the most damage, and lets you send the number to somebody who thinks they can beat it.
It runs entirely in your browser. Your face never leaves your device.
A note on the real thing
Egremont was here first.
QUFC is a family joke with a website. The Crab Fair is a 759-year-old institution run by volunteers in a Cumbrian town, and the people named on this page are genuinely brilliant at something most of us only do by accident.
If you are anywhere near West Cumbria in September, go to the actual thing.
Where this came from
Sources.
- Egremont Crab Fair — History — the 1267 charter, the apple cart, the greasy pole, "Grinn for tobacco".
- Egremont Crab Fair — Hall of Fame — champions by year, first woman competitor, junior competition.
- Gurn — Wikipedia — definition, etymology, the braffin, the toothless advantage.
- Guinness World Records — most Gurning World Championships wins — Tommy Mattinson's record and his own account of how he prepares.
- Anne Woods — Wikipedia — 28 titles, the 2010 ratification, her routine.
- Cumbria Crack — 2025 champions crowned — the most recent winners.