I Decided last month to start up a new project as I had begun building up a few sets of the Airfix Washingtons army and British Grenadiers sets and then splurged out on some Ebay bids including twice when I managed to get over 240 figures for 7 quid!!! All in all I must have managed to accumulate at least 7 sets of each from these various sources, certainly enough to make 7 battalions of each army. One of my kind subscribers also sent me some Revell 7 years war Austrian Artillery which would easily fit in as artillery of the period so I painted those as Continental army gunners. I am also using the 7 years war Prussian command set and both of those sets fit in very nicely added to a box of Imex British artillery and Imex American Artillery. All I am missing now are a couple of squadrons of cavalry.Painting has progressed quite rapidly on this one so the latest video I have uploaded is here:
Starting out in this hobby my first priority was to get enough figures painted in order to actually game with them. I managed to accomplish the task by November 2015 and proceeded to fight my first battle:
This took place before I had really started on creating on terrain so once I had the figures ready I could now concentrate on that aspect instead. After some experimentation with cardboard, filler, coffee stirrers and PVA glue I managed to settle on, what I think, is a very good way to make some Tudor/mediaeval style houses.
These are VERY cheap and easy to make and you really do not need any modelling skills to get good results, I hope you like it and it inspires you to have a go yourselves.
Last weekend in March I finally finished setting up a wargames table using block wood, old pinboards and some astroturf i managed to get from Lidl for 10 quid! All in all the table cost £21.90 which is a bargain by any stretch of the imagination. I have added a short video on my Youtube channel
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Counting up the figures I have very nearly 1000 painted now and if that has taken me exactly 3 years that is 28 figures or just shy of a battalion a month which is not bad at all. Bear in mind I have also been spending some of that time creating videos and terrain so quite an achievement I would say. Hope you enjoy the video and feel free to post any comments.
I can’t remember what spurred me back into action, I suspect it was probably a trip to the National Army museum where I spotted some Airfix 1/32 scale Desert rats so bought them and some Afrika Corps on another visit. Anyway they were my first foray back into painting and I made a decent effort at them.
Just before the release of ‘The Hobbit’ some blister packs appeared in the shops with a really nice figure in them so I had to collect the lot.
Radagast the Brown
These were a joy to paint and at the same time I had a dig through an old box of 1/72 figures a friend had donated to me and found some Airfix French line Infantry and some ESCI French line Infantry so started painting those too.
Now that I was finally back into painting my Dad commissioned me to paint some sailors for his HMS Victory.
So now I was back in full swing again at it was round about April 2014 I decided to go to my first ever Salute convention at the Excel centre.
Well… in my last post I said I’d not done anything for 27 years. That isn’t true I’ve just remembered. In 2000 my son was born and as he grew older I decided that the young chap should see what his Dad USED to do and also to see if said Dad could actually still DO. So in 2007 I decided that I would invest in some Minifigs ECW troops, Cavalry and Artillery and assemble two armies for me and him (when he was older) to battle with.
The miniatures began to arrive and to my great relief I hadn’t lost the knack at all in 20 years. I bought quite a few Parliament troops and had started building up my Royalists when I just gave up. I used to paint them at work during spare moments but then changed jobs and thus the production line I had developed at work went out of the window.
A view of one of the Parliament Guns
One of the nice things about ECW troops is the amount of armour some guys have so they were perfect for drybrushing and the Minifig range have some really lovely sculpted figures.
Cromwell’s cavalry
I decided on painting the pre-new model army era as firstly painting all the Parliament troops in Red seemed VERY VERY boring to me and how much better it would be to have free range on the colour schemes.
The Royalists of The Northumberland Regt stand firm supported by artillery
The Royalists of course also could wear any type of uniform so it seemed ideal to me.
Really need to finish some pikesPikes are so bendy thoughSome Napoleonic men join the action, watched by Gandalf the Grey.These were the full amount of Prince August figures I had painted 20 years earlier.The left flank of the Parliament troops featuring Cromwell.Fairfax on the left wingThe Royalist centre
So quite a few troops done and I may well resurrect this project soon now that I have some extra Revell Swedish and Imperial troops to add in to this collection so watch this space.
So there I was, back in 1983, all set to start Wargaming by building up a collection of lovely Prince August Napoleonics. I’d just left College and got a job working in the local Dole office so was earning the tidy sum of £4000 a year! Within about 6 months I’d paid off all my student debts, those were the days. Then again mobile phones hadn’t been invented yet and there was no internet either really so how the hell did I manage to get a degree without those? In fact I had to use my girlfriends typewriter to type up my dissertation. Curiously when it was her turn to hand hers in two years later she insisted that it could only be done on a Word processor. Funny that. So off we trotted and spent £500 on this…
The wonderful Amstrad PCW 8256
Now 500 quid was expensive at the time but bear in mind that in the UK if you wanted an IBM PC XT (4.77mhz cpu and 64kb RAM) then you would be talking about £2k or more back then so Amstrad really did sell a lot of these as not only did you get the PC you got a workable printer too. A standard dot matrix printer would have sold for at least another £200 back then. In fact I didn’t get my first proper PC until 1988 and I had to steal that. Ahem.
Back to the plot. So there I was working in the Dole office making friends with some of the staff there when one fateful day one of the chaps furtively whispered to me ‘Have you ever fancied playing D&D?’. Whether I’d already broadcast my obvious nerd-dom via my love for Tolkein, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, the sort of music I liked (Prog obviously) and the movies I watched (The Beastmaster, Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings, Hawk the Slayer, the Conan movies) then he clearly believed I’d be well up for that sort of clandestine, behind closed doors activity. And of course he was completely correct.
Dungeons and Dragons
So there it began with me buying some metal figures of Dwarves, a magic user, a Cleric and some Fighters to begin with and started some pitiful attempts at painting them. After about a year we met some other guys and started a regular D&D club and swapped tips on painting. That was when I was shown how to dry brush and do washes which was as if some arcane spell had been passed on to me. You just didn’t read about that sort of thing anywhere. Of course the hobby was in it’s infancy in the UK so we had to buy Dragon Magazine that was imported from the States and supplied by the local toy shop that was beginning to expand it’s range of D&D related products.
The wonderful Dragon magazine, I still have this edition
It was in that Toy shop that I managed to get my own rule sets as they were released
We never got far enough to have to buy the Immortals rules
and it also started supply the excellent White Dwarf Magazine
So after a couple of years I’d built up quite a collection of Character figures plus some Kobolds, Orcs, a Dragon, a Minotaur, a Hydra, some elves and a few others. Some of which I still have, others, sadly, are long gone. Left behind in a mad scramble to leave an ex-wife.
My favourite magazine at the time was called ‘Imagine’ ( basically the UK version of Dragon magazine, produced by TSR but always ran at a loss)and I managed to get every copy of it’s all too brief run. Driven out of business by what was fast becoming the all powerful Games Workshop in the UK market.
Still got every copy ever produced
The first ever edition
This mag was eagerly anticipated round my way in 1983 and so much so it was the first magazine I ever subscribed to hence I have every copy ever produced. I also started subscribing to White Dwarf so have a fair few of those too. But this was by far my fave as it had absolutely everything in it and never mentioned that bloody awful Warhammer or Blood Bowl. Sadly I was almost sitting looking at the letter box in the mornings waiting for this one to arrive in my keenness to read it. So throughout 1983 up to 1987 I was D&D mad. 4 of the happiest years of my life. Unfortunately we were essentially evicted from our council flat so rather than rent somewhere else we decided to buy a flat together instead and managed to get a 2 bedroom flat in Tottenham for the massive sum of £47k leaving behind my D&D chums for ever and that essentially killed the hobby stone dead for me for the next 27 years! Blimey. Not one figure painted or terrain made or scenarios written.
Well the 70’s came and went and I headed off to North London to do a degree in History and Classics. All my board games were left behind apart from my beloved Subbuteo set (still in my loft to this day). As a student I spent many nights playing Risk with my new chums. We didn’t have a TV as a Student Grant (yes they did exist) wouldn’t stretch to buy one or pay the licence for that matter either. Amazingly none of had a car or a mobile phone or laptop either (it was 1981 after all) so how the hell did we survive? Then again none of us ended up with a 45k debt either. After 3 years my overdraft was just over £600 which I payed back in a few months anyway once I got a job. Yes, a job students. I didn’t just swan off back to my parents and sit playing Playstation games all day as they hadn’t been invented either. I did have an Amstrad CPC 464 though that my girlfriends brother had tired of so had a few games on cassette tape for that.
Anyway… one Xmas my girlfriend decided to buy me a Prince August starter set of British Foot Guards infantry with 4 poses, some lead and all the other equipment for casting some soldiers. I still have this some 3o years later and the moulds still work perfectly. The figures I first cast and painted are still here and were intended to be my first step into creating some Napoleonic armies. I cast and painted about 16 figures and then ran out of lead and that was that. I never bought any more lead for years because something else loomed on the horizon and rapidly took over.
Games workshop released Talisman and then a series of expansion sets so I got heavily into playing that but it was around 1985 that I discovered Dungeons and Dragons™.
Now that rapidly took over my life for the next few years as I bought and painted figures, made scenery, designed quests and even ran a Play by mail game as a small business venture. Players would send me their moves, they’d get the results and I’d produce a monthly newsletter. That was seriously good fun but also time consuming.
Now being the eldest of 4 boys we had a lot of board games in our house. Everyone had Monopoly, Cluedo, Mousetrap, Buckaroo, Connect 4 (we never had Scrabble as that was considered far too middle class by my Dad so I never ever played that until I was in my 20’s) of course in the 60’s and 70’s and board games were played very regularly in our house and even more so during the frequent power cuts as there was NO TELLY. Ahhh the smell of candlewax and paraffin as the 6 of us huddled down to a game of Monopoly, shivering. As I got older though other games appeared that held a bit more interest for me.
Vroom Vroom!
I really loved this. Very simple in it’s rules but hours of fun. Particularly if you increased the number of cards and laps. In played this solo too with a league table for the drivers and extra cars on the grid. I also decided that the race track was fine but a bit boring if it was the ONLY track to racve on so I designed a few more tracks on large bits of stiff cardboard so that I had a choice of venues. Hmmmm… my first steps into fiddling with rules and customising games probably started with this one. I still have a copy of this fortunately and it gets an airing every now and then. It did temporarily take a back seat when I got a proper Scalextric set with lots and lots of track. But that is another tale.
Ahaaargh me shipmates!
Now Buccaneer we played a fair bit but the gems and gold bars were a bit fiddly in the ships but that was part of the game anyway as anything that went overboard was lost. It was a rudimentary strategy game really and damn good fun.
England expects every man…
Trafalgar was another fave amongst my gang. Each side had 4 ships, 2 Ships of the line and two Frigates with a set number of guns on each deck. You used the wind which could change each turn and all in all it was quite a well thought out game.
It was round about my early teens that I’d visit my mates, play a new board game then come home and create my own copy using card, paper, coloured pencils etc all from memory until I might be lucky enough to get a real copy as a present so the inner game designer/forger was unleashed.
Campaign
This one was trumpeted loud on TV adverts as the game for Xmas one year and I got a copy to play with my dad. It was a bit chess like and to be honest it didn’t really match up to expectations. I used the pieces to make my own tiddlywink football league game and played that a hell of a lot more with monopoly money, a Striker board for the pitch and built stands so that gate money could be collected. Boy did I play that a lot. Melchester Rovers often faced Queensley in the Final whilst Southport and Carlisle were usually also rans. I used to produce match reports with hand drawn illustrations of the match action so my imagination and creativeness had hit a rich vein at this point. Happy days indeed.
In 1976 Airfix brought out the Gun Emplacement assault set
Take this Fritz!
From what I recall apart from the 4 different armoured vehicles shown on the cover art you got a set of Commandos and a set of British Infantry plus one set of German infantry defenders (if not two seeing as they are seriously out numbered plus some rudimentary sand bag redoubts. I have to say I spent MANY MANY hours playing with this set and I am pleased to say it is still in production. So, I may well invest in a set for nostalgias sake as I really loved that armour so next time I go to the National Army Museum (currently closed at time of writing for a revamp) I’ll see if they have it.
Another thing I spent many hours playing with was the excellent Tank Battle game. There is a great Youtube video about it.
Oberst Fritz Von Pickelhaube takes on the Tommy Cookers
This was a cracker. You got three objective buildings six tanks a a number of anti-tank guns. There were little flags for the tanks too that served some purpose that escapes me now. I think once you killed enough tanks or something you could then move diagonally? Summat like that anyway. There were hidden minefields on there too so a really well thought out game. I buy quite a lot of figures on Ebay and in one batch of unwanted Airfix figures there was one of the anti-tank guns from this game in there which brought a tear to my eye. *Sniff*. Of course the tanks and guns could easily be used with all my WWII airfix men so massive battles could now take place in the back garden with trenches dug and craters created by borrowing my dads hammer.
Airfix 1/32 Scale troops were also very popular among us lads in the 70’s. I had sets of the Afrika Corps, Desert Rats, WWII German infantry…
…Russian Infantry, lots of the Commandos and also fought jungle battles between the plucky Aussies and the inscrutable Japanese in the long grass in my garden. Happy days.
Cor strewth mate!
Got to love the guy with the Panga/Machete, a brilliant sculpt from when Airfix were at their height.
Banzaaiiiiiiiiii!!!!!
All of these figures were available (with extra poses) in the 1/72 scale. I’ve started collecting all these sets again now with the intention of having every 1/72 and 1/32 scale set once more. Only the WWII sets seem to be still in production which is a great shame. You’d have thought with Waterloo this year (2015 so last year now) that as well as producing a commemorative 1/72 scale Waterloo set the 1/32 scale figures could have been re-issued?
So what inspired all this fighting with toy men? Well the war was still very much part of our consciousness in the 70’s and there would be at least one war movie on Tv every day it seemed. The Great Escape, Bridge over the River Kwai, The Dambusters, The Longest Day appeared every Xmas if not Easter too and add to that the older stuff like Reach for the Sky, In which we serve and Ice cold in Alex, for example then we were positively steeped in it. It didn’t stop there. Every lad I knew had a collection of Commando books
We all knew that the Japs could only say Banzai and Aiiiieeeeeee!, the Germans said any combination of Achtung, Gott in Himmell, Vorwarts, Donner und blitzen, Raus, Los and for you ze war ist over. My Commandos would launch daring raids behind enemy lines sneaking up on Fritz and Hans wondering when the war would be over, slip them the dagger, blow up the heavy guns or fuel dump and then disappear back into their canoes. All good Cockleshell heroes stuff.
So we had the movies and the Commando dime novel style books but every lad I knew also collected Warlord and Victor comics religiously.
Achtung!
Up and at ’em lads!
These mags sold in the millions in the pre-internet 24hr kids TV days but I wonder if they would get past the censor in these politically correct days now? The Victor ran until 1992 but I think I stopped getting it when Look and Learn appealed to me more when I was about 12.
Every thing a boy ever needed to know and a lot more
Not only did L&L teach you about how stuff worked, facts and general knowledge (which still helps me get by even today) it had a great cartoon series called ‘The Trigan Empire’
Peric ponders his future
Based on a planet a long time ago in a galaxy far far away (ahem) the story concerned the adventures of Trigo and his family advised by the great architect and scientist Peric. Set in a Graeco-Roman-Byzantine like world it featured great story lines that ran as a series across several issues of the weekly magazine (to make sure you didn’t miss an issue) and the artwork was fantastic. For Xmas or a birthday I was given this book which (for once in this tale) I still have as a treasured possession.
I’ve said this before but I wonder what all the comics and Commando books and soldiers would be worth now If they hadn’t been thrown out?
So now I was back in full swing again at it was round about April 2014 I decided to go to my first ever Salute convention at the Excel centre.
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