Battle '77

 No, not stashing tins of soup and loo rolls, but doing all the boring stuff, like priming and bases, before I can start slapping on the colour.

Black! Black! The colour of the night! Mummy locked me in a cupboard and fed me pins!

All this started with a box of WSS Alliance infantry I bought on a whim. I made them up, primed them black then they sat in the loft for a year before I thought “I’m more likely to flog these if they are painted”.  So, I did and thoroughly enjoyed it. Now, a year later… I have scores of the bloody things! This will probably be the last phase (it’s my third Marlborough’s Wars starter set) if I can just stop faffing about and umming and arring over 12 or 16 figure infantry units and one or two flags per unit.

Alarmingly, I have more infantry sprues waiting for assembly but I’ve run out of painting sticks!

 From Arms & Uniforms Volume 1: Ancient Egypt to the 18th Century by L & F Funcken (a book I had out on near-permanent loan from Virgina Water Library in the early to mid 70s):

 Traditionally (well, since the early 70s), my family always holidayed in the Tregony Holiday Park in Cornwall during the late May Whitsun week. This is because my dad’s factory used to close for that week (along with the August bank holiday) before they allowed the workers to have a choice, but we carried on anyway because errr…. Tradition? Anyhoo, I was nearing the point of desperately not wanting to holiday with my parents but still wasn’t trusted to stay home alone for a week in case I set fire to the house or just ate chocolate. To be fair, that probably would have happened but it did mean I ended up a tad teenagerish and spent most of the week bored. It didn’t help that May 1983 was wet and dull and Spandau Ballet were rampant in the charts.

But all was not lost because I had brought my own entertainment! I’d found a fishing tackle box for a quid in a discount store (for the life of me I can’t remember where) and had stocked it with my Pony Wars card figures, scenery and other useful wargaming stuff. I was also armed with the Newbury Colonial Rules and the April edition of Military Modelling with Stuart Asquith’s article on Cowpens. Well, what do you think I was going to do? Revise for my retakes? Go to St Mawes again?

So I commandeered the coffee table, sorted my carefully curated card bits and bobs into the two armies and went at it. Very slowly… It soon dawned on me that Newbury rules didn’t exactly give me the Loose Files and American Scramble I’d read about (didn’t stop me buying Cambrai to Sinai, though did it? 🤡) and worse, there was no way I would consider it for colonial actions. I played to the bitter end, the Tax Dodgers were given a pounding and then my mum suggested going to St Mawes.

This was something of a low point in the year, but it did teach me something: avoid complex rules. And St Mawes.

But, I still have the tackle box which now contains all my modelling kit. It’s covered in Milliput fingerprints where I created hundreds of 10mm and 25mm figures and gets a sort out every two or three years, when I chuck out something that I find I need the following week.

Where all the magic happens.

So what next? Can I get Recon to work? Will the weather improve? Will I ever practice my French vocab? Can I remember the chemical equation for photosynthesis without surreptitiously scratching it on a pencil?  Will Clare Grogan ever answer any of those letters I send her on a daily basis?

 Find out in the next instalment…

PS The Tregony Holiday Park was actually very nice and would go there again if it hadn’t been sold and turned into a housing estate. Oddly, if you go to the location now you can still make out the park layout.

PPS Always hated St Mawes. Once you’ve seen the castle, that’s it. Nothing else to do if you are a child and worse if you are a teenager because your parents are with you! Last time I visited was on Honeymoon and it’s just a rich twat’s paradise now. We sat across from one of the swanky hotels, slurping cornets and wondering how money seems to go to the most stupid on earth. However, we had a laugh watching some idiot woman, dressed like an ‘I Dream of  Jeannie’ cosplay, manoeuvre a shaded pram containing two ratty dogs up the hotel steps.

 Ok, I’ve bounced backwards and forwards using my heat pump Time Machine (hence the unreliability), but this is a brief interlude before I begin work on the ‘big thing’ of ‘83. There might be another one, but this will do for now.

I must say I’m still a sucker for the shiny cover and paper.

To be more accurate, 7 January (because it was the same day The Fourth Arm started on BBC1). Dad was on 6-2 shift and I finished early from college so off we went to Wickes/Aldershot. With my eye on these shiny rules, I popped into Concorde Models and rifled through the large white drawers at the back of the shop. They stocked a useful supply of wargaming stuff, mostly Skytrex and Minifigs from memory, and on this occasion I left with some Skytrex modern tanks and the Osprey Zulu War book (which I still have). You can see how much I had on the go this year.

I soon managed to paint the tanks up and had a couple of test games but cash flow (more cash spread…), and my success with Pony Wars, had me resorting to card strips to fight my mini-campaign. This was the replacement for my second Pony Wars outing and took place in our conservatory (on the same rickety dining table) to the strains of Let’s Dance during the Easter holidays.

The scenario was a small British Battlegroup holding off Red Forces (of the Purple Moon, if you ever read Frontline UK in Bullet) in an unnamed British protectorate. The British were based roughly on what was used in the Falklands (scary to think it was less than a year earlier) and the Reds/Purple Moon were what my Jane’s Armoured Fighting Vehicles book said the Argentines had, so M47s (gorgeous!), Shorlands, LVTP7s etc.

It sort of went OK, and I managed to get a couple of games out of it but I honestly have no idea how anybody ever managed to finish a game with anything more than a reinforced company! Fair enough, I was new to the rules (and a bit thick) but goodie gumdrops it took ages! If only at the time I had a copy of the simplified modern rules that appeared a few months later in Miniature Wargames, things would have been so different.

Anyway, it all went the way of the plucky British and the decidedly oriental-looking foreign hordes were sent packing. No dodgy human rights lawyers around, obviously.*

With that particular boat floated, I parked the rules and my small collection of tanks and set my mind to Newbury rules and cutting card shields for my pipe cleaner Zulus. But that article in the April 1983 Military Modelling on Cowpens looked rather interesting…

*Especially those who have Ukrainian male models setting fire to their old stuff.

 ….when I was off sick from college.

1983 was, along with 1977, what I considered a ‘formative year’. I grew up a bit, learned much and did a great deal.

Much of this was down to the radio I got for Christmas which freed me from the tyranny of parental control over what I could listen to without one of them moaning that they couldn’t hear the words. This opened a whole new world of individuality. My wargaming life also exploded, boosted by my dad’s regular trips to Wickes in Farnborough and a quick run in to nearby Aldershot for Esdevium Games and Concorde Models. I would end the year joining the Staines club but at this point I was on my own.

Lastly, there was college. I was on retakes, a result of a nightmare educational experience at my awful skool, but I could relax in college and found it rather easy, so I coasted a bit. This is why I ended up pondering Pony Wars, rather than revising for the mocks I was hoping to avoid if I could spin out an extra week. College may have been better than skool, but I was still happier at home!

In truth I had a nasty virus, so it was a week of coughing my insides out followed by an enforced week of rest. And this, dear reader, was when it all happened…

My original copy!

I had Pony Wars for about 6 months. For those unfamiliar with the rules, it was designed as a show participation game and the amount of gear to play it was well above what I could manage. But the suggestion in the back of the book to use card strips for the Indians… Why just the Indians? I had enough coloured card to represent all the various groups by colour code - buff for Indians, blue for cavalry, etc. But I really needed a table and, as luck would have it, our rickety old folding dining table was exactly half the size of the recommended playing area at 15mm.

All I had to do was halve everything! So, In a flurry of activity, coughing and Laura Brannigan, card strips were cut to half the 15mm base sizes (double thickness, pasted together), terrain was cut from an old cardboard box and all measurements were in cm rather than inches. My dad found a sheet of hardboard of the exact size (probably from Wickes) to cover the table (it was still my parent’s property!) and after three days of chopping, gluing and trial/error I was ready for action!

I chose the Homestead game as it seemed the easiest and I had an absolute blast! I had better eyesight and nimble fingers then, so it wasn’t that fiddly (to all intents and purposes it was 6mm) so it all went smoothly, but it was designed to play indefinitely and the end of the second day I was flagging. Not even Bonnie Tyler belting out Total Eclipse of the Heart (video was filmed up the road in Holloway Sanatorium) could motivate me, and when the drums started beating, signalling massive Indian reinforcement and Lord knows how many more hours, I called a halt.

Running something that size, even in rude health, is hard work but it was a fantastic experience with lots of memorable incidents. My favourite was the homestead that found themselves in the path of a large warband with only one round of ammo. They dutifully used the last bullet on the single female and prepared for the worst, only for the Indian reaction roll to be…. Leave the table! A cavalry patrol arrived two moves later, to find four men and a woman riddled with bullets… 

I also played a bit of this with card strips cut to scale. Not my original, but a pristine copy off evilBay.

I planned another game for Easter, but when it came to play I chickened out. The first game was so good, I couldn’t bring myself to despoil the memory with a poorer game. Plus I had moved on to the Zulu War.  I never dumped the rules and I did play again with the Southbourne group’s massive setup. Again it was a lot of fun, although this time I had nothing more than a single troop of cavalry! I think there is still mileage with the game if you reduce it by 2/3 to make things manageable. But I wouldn’t have missed the experience for the world.

Another trip to Aldershot resulted in a set of Newbury Colonial rules and an order to Peter Laing for some Zulu war figures, although the first game I played was a refight of Cowpens (using card strips…) on our chalet’s coffee table whilst on holiday in Tregony. Little did I know what that would start…. However, the summer was approaching and as the weather improved my thoughts turned to the garden and what I could do with all the 1/32 figures I still possessed. But that’s another story.

Not my original but still as complicated.

PS I passed all my exams.

I wonder what this can do…?

Submechanophobia!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submechanophobia

As a kid visiting museums (with varying degrees of interest), I began to notice that I had an increasingly uncomfortable reaction to model sailing ships. Sailing ships only, mind. HMS Hood = no problem.

This grew over the years to the point where I now get a physical reaction. The Airfix classic ship size I can cope with, but as the models get larger I suffer anything from shortness of breath to feeling sick. It’s not only models: things underwater and boat hulls in general (especially water lapping against them) can set me off.

This has led to some rather embarrassing situations as I have worked in a number of navy buildings that often contain a model or two. In one location I was somewhat taken aback to find they had plonked a huge model of Victory next to the Gents. Caught short one day, I had to close my eyes and be led by hand to blessed relief by a bootneck, who I think is still laughing now. Of course, this was after I got married which may well have been different had the Mem not been similarly amused: our third date was a visit to the Mary Rose…

I’ve not met anybody with a similar problem, apart from the occasional agreement that stuff underwater can be a bit creepy, so it’s nice to know it’s not that unusual and there is a name for it.

And you never know - I might even be able to claim a PIP on day and get some of my tax money back. Every cloud, an’ all that.

 As a favour to John who messaged me on LAF, here are the fast play rules from TTG’s Once Upon a Time in the West.