I have been a wargamer, by my own definition, since I was twelve, which means I have been obsessing over toy soldiers in a fairly organized way for twenty eight years, more than two thirds of my life. Before that, I was merely very interested in them. Here are my wargaming memoirs, some of them at least, from the Middle Ages. By which I mean the 1970s. My dad was brought up in Birrmngham (the one in England) during WWII, and left school at 14 owing, at least partly, to Hitler's generally discouraging attitude towards the education of British youth. He never had the chance to really complete his education, but was always enrolled in night school courses of one kind or another, and read widely and constantly. He bought me toy soldiers from the time I was old enough not to eat them; 54 mm plastics by Charbens, Cherilea, Herald, Timpo, the odd lead figure (fast fading from the toyshop shelves), later the Britain!s Swoppets and the cheaper versions by Timpo. I had knights - I especially remember some Titnpo crusaders that I associated with a TV series of 'Richard the Lionheart' - the odd Roman and Greek, a set of 'Vikings' with homed helmets, and a wonderful boxed set of Elizabethan seafarers with Francis Drake playing bowls. There was a TV series about Drake, too. How much we owe to the TV planners of yore. Then there were Timpo 18th C. men in red and blue, the swoppet style with pull off white wigs over bald heads. The blue were French (my dad had told me that the French wore blue uniforms), though in retrospect, I imagine they were Revolutionary Americans. But that would have involved moral ambiguity, since I understood the Americans were our friends, and I knew that General Wolfe was killed fighting the French at Quebec. There was a series about that war in the Hotspur or the Valiant. I read those comics religiously, and since my dad worked for the railways, he'd collect abandoned comics from the trains; the Victor (it was always WWII in that one), the Eagle (a bit SciFi for my taste) and the single story 'Combat Picture Library' type. Sometimes he'd get the glossy American war comics of the Sgt Fury type, which were different in tone to the British ones, rather bombastic, less realistic; of course, living among Americans today, I realize this is just how they are! But back to the figures: I had cowboys and Indians, of course, and a figure of General Montgomery in leather jacket and beret. At some point, showing the incredibly poor business acumen I have maintained all my life, I swopped a lot of new figures for a bunch of an older boy's older figures; well, they were new to me! My father was not pleased. When I was seven he took me to see "Zulu" at the local cinema, known exotically as the Essoldo. This became one of the crucial events of my life, like getting married and moving to the United States. As I grew older, perhaps 8 or 10, I had the HO/00 scale Airfix figures, lots of WWII sets. The War, as it was always known, was the seminal experience one of my parent's generation, and (as my friend Tony Berry, who I have known since we were 11, says) all British schoolboys of the 1960s were compelled to recreate it in detail in play. My favourites were the British commandos. I wanted to be a Royal Marine Commando myself. Fortunately this 11 year old urge left me, since I would have been a notably inept commando. I had a number of what American readers will think of as GI Joes, sold in the UK as 'Action Man' (since the original name implied oversexed US soldiers stealing Our Women with nylons and chocolates), though I preferred a copy (by, I think, the Tri-Ang company) called 'Tommy Gunn'. He had better anatomy than the original - his chest looked human rather than robotic - but came in a heavily suntanned colour that I liked as implying tropical service but my friends said made him look orange. There were various cheap Hong Kong soldiers, too, but always very substandard and only able to take up limited poses. They never made it past private in my army; the original Tommy Gunn was promoted by stages to Captain, and had (in my mind) an elaborate history through WWII. I recall making him a long wig and beard from cotton wool, painted brown, and having a game in which he was stranded amongst the Dyaks in deepest Borneo, and the others had to rescue him. My friend Mark Butcher and I would play complex games with plots, but always the 12" action figures on one side against an invisible enemy. As I look back, my 'grown-up' games owe a good deal to this basic 11 year old premise. We had a jeep, which I built up with wood into an enclosed vehicle with a hatch and two heavy machine guns, painted in camouflage. I also built a light anti-tank gun from wood (two pieces of dowel, a plywood shield and two tobacco tin lids for wheels. Then I built a box-like command post, illuminated by a string of Christmas lights, with desks and radio equipment, and dug a trench system at the bottom of the garden. Since I am physically quite lazy (you'd shudder to see my real life garden), the trench system was much less elaborate than the things involving wood and paint. Anyway, at eleven I moved from a small primary school (where I was one of the two smartest kids) to King Edward VI School, a proud and long established (1552, twice as old as the United States, friends) foundation where smart kids could discover there were a lot of folks brighter than they were. Take that, self-esteem! Playing with Tommy Gunn was pretty much frowned upon in the peer pressure of precocious geniuses, but there was something called wargaming. Bill Powell (whose best man I was to be 24 years later) and I began simple games with Airfix Romans and Britons, single combats, die roll defines the winner, no movement measured, certainly no morale. I'd bought the brand new Airfix Waterloo sets (Highlanders, Cuirassiers, French Artillery), and my dad and I painted them one weekend. We'd pointed model aircraft before, so had the basic idea. We bought a few pots of paint on Saturday, lay everything on a piece of newspaper, and I went at it. I made some discoveries. First of all, light blue plus black does not make dark blue, so I had somewhat greyish Frenchmen. Secondly, leaving the face and hands in the original creamy plastic was unconvincing in the extreme, but red and yellow and white together made a decent flesh-tone. The Highlanders were the Gordons, yellow facings, still my favourite Scottish regiment, and I can't believe the last damned Tory government abolished them. Anyway, after that there was no stopping me. I painted the Washington's army set as revolutionary French in bicornes (alright, tricornes, so sue me, I was 12) and the British grenadiers as the 7th Fusiliers, with the queues cut off with a razor blade, and thick grey paint over the breeches to suggest the later trousers. I was getting good at this! The school library had a lot of books with pictures in, and I bought Renee North's classic 'Military Uniforms 1686-1918', which still sits on my shelf When I was in bed with flu, my dad brought me North's "Regiments at Waterloo", now battered and in pieces, but still cherished. I had begun my 'real' historical reading with John Kincaid's wonderful 'Adventures in the Rifle Brigade' - recently republished, Peninsular buffs, read this now! - and was immersed in Napoleonic memoirs. I didn't understand everything I read, and, having read about the Old Guard in red epaulettes and crossbelts', painted another box of the Airfix grenadiers in blue with white breeches, lapels and waistcoats , but red epaulettes and red crossbelts. Have you ever painted white over red, as I did when I found out my mistake? Pink. French grenadiers in pink equipment. Then Airfix put out French Infantry which, with my incredible conversion skills (!) became Prussians, Russians, Austrians, Wurtemburgers -- but no British infantry, guns or cavalry. Airfix Magazine ran a series on Napoleonic conversions, and I followed the instructions on how, by carving away the hat brim and gluing on a front plate of notepaper, you could make Confederate infantry into Waterloo British. They looked terrible, with far too much hair and beards painted out, and Airfix brought out the British infantry two weeks later. I got them mail order from a shop in Chiswick, in West London, my first foray into buying by post, which is hard to do when you are thirteen and have no chequebook -- the British Hussars were my first real experience of the inconsistencies of scale; Airfix had always had some sets larger than others, but the Hussars were notably larger than the Cuirassiers, which subliminally affected my understanding of the difference between heavy and light cavalry for many years (what d'ya mean, +1 for heavies?) Then I met metal figures for the first time. A boy at school brought some in. Ooh, they were nice. And he said the paint didn't come off either (this had happened to me, of course, and on one occasion my guinea pig, Gus, ate the muskets of some Washington's Army). But, of course, they were 7 New Pence each, and I couldn't afford them. There was a shop in Birmingham city centre that sold Hinchliffe 25mms, and I would buy the occasional officer to command my Airfixers. They were much too big, of course, but they looked very imposing. After that Bill Powell and I would rove the model shops buying small handfulls of lead soldiers, he getting Ancients and WWII, me looking for Napoleonics and, by the summer of 1972 (when I was 14), Colonials. I'd just seen 'Young Winston', and the BBC had a series called'The Regimenf about the Victorian period. Most of my redcoats were actually Airfix WWI Germans, the helmet looking vaguely passable when painted tan. I used a lot of spare heads (from crawling figures, i.e. men throwing grenades) to convert artillerymen etc, but the plastic refused to stick very well, and the elaborate drilling technology needed to pin pieces together eluded me. I was good with that precursor to epoxy resin, plasticine hardened with a model aircraft dope known as 'banana oil'. This stuff stunk up the house (my mother was unbelievably tolerant) but did harden at least the outside of the plasticine. My cavalry were Airfix US Cavalry with plasticine sun helmets, saddle blankets, grass bags etc. Plasticine also converted Tarzan natives and Robin Hood figures into dervishes for the Sudan, augmented by the Bedouin Arab set. There were not enough natives' in the Tarzan set for a Zulu army, a genuine tragedy from my perspective. The British were commanded by a Hinchliffe Lord Roberts, who, despite being 5'3" in real life, towered over his Airfix subordinates. I did have some metal figures by Les Higgins (later by Phoenix) which actually matched the HO/00 models, which I got from a shop in Brighton while visiting my mother's family. We'd begun using the most primitive rules, but the discovery of the works of the sainted Don Featherstone, and Young and Lawford's classic "Charge" took us into much better waters. I began writing my own rules, mostly far too complicated (beginner wargamers like 'too complicated' I've noticed; it's the veterans who value simplicity) and based on very limited historical analysis (i.e. like at least half of all wargame rules, even today!). There was a set of Ancient Rules (3rd Edition) by something called the Wargames Research Group, which were alright if you didn't play somebody who wanted to argue about the details. I saw a positive review of a set of Napoleonic rules by a fellow named Steve Tulk, and ordered them. This was the set that appeared in Bruce Quarrie's Napoleonic Wargaming', and (though, in retrospect, much too complex) featured 'national characteristics', an idea I much liked at that time. Ah, those mimeographed rules of old, typed on manual typewriters by somebody's mother -- A great favourite with me was Tony Baths "Setting Up a Wargames Campaign", which inspired me to force Mark Butcher into agreeing that we would create matching mythical 18th Century German states, with maps, economies, political structures etc, and paint up yet more Washington's Army etc for the troops. Mine was called "GrimsteinHolbeck", under its young king Maximilian 11 ('Plastic Max') who was forever at war with his neighbor. I still have the models, rescued a couple of years ago from my parent's attic and brought across the ocean for some putative revival. Mark got tired of the details of running a Teutonic princedom in the Age of Reason - he wargamed for the battles, I for what in hindsight seems like rampant megalomania - and so the thing came to a halt. A boy at school had a book called 'The Wargame', by Peter Young. It was a series of accounts of famous battles, with colour pictures of that battle in progress in miniature. Most of the layouts were by Peter Gilder. I drooled over the terrain as much of the figures, went out and made a series of half-timbered buildings from card. They were dreadful. Still, I had the idea. Another point of inspiration came when I found a copy of Don Featherstone's Wargamer's Newsletter at a model shop near my aunfs house in Sussex. There was an article by the gunslingers at Skirmish Wargames about a western game. They had a whole story built into the scenario, and treated the game layout as a movie set. Within a week I had a box of Airfix cowboys painted up. A few years later I did the same thing with 54mm plastics, gave them away on permanent loan when I moved to Georgia, and have since built an entire American West in 25mm. But it was not only the period that got me (I find that after 25 years I am still recycling the periods that inspired me then), but the approach. Personality. Colour. Feel. Actually winning was and continues to be, quite secondary to me. Around 1973 I saw an advert in Military Modeling for Peter Laing's 15mm figures. I could afford them! Or, at least, some of them, occasionally, but enough to consider an army. Miniature Figurines followed with Napoleonics, and that was it. The plastic Napoleonics were given away to a younger wargamer I was trying to encourage (what do you mean, 'sell them'? I told you I had no business sense) and strips of little men you had to separate from one another began arriving by post. 15mm meant 15mm in those days, laddie! I was doing this with another lad, Adrian Fowkes, at school. Ader was a genuinely gifted painter, who put mine to shame, but always said how great mine looked en masse. I didn't appreciate this meant how terrible they looked close up! Actually, he was a really nice bloke, who probably didn't mean that. Between us, we were going to do the entire Peninsular War in 1/50 scale. I've not accomplished this yet, though I have Ader's troops in my collection, beautifully painted early Minifigs with detail painted where none was ever cast; I have them on loan, have had since 1980, and will give them back when Ader gives me back an Eric Clapton LP. Of course, it's understood he never will, because hasn't wargamedin years. (Or will he return to the hobby, and call me at 4 AM from London?) By this time we had a wargame club at school, every Friday at 4PM. There were a couple of single minded souls who played WWII with great intensity to the exclusion of all others, and would not allow anyone else to play with them (I've not cared for the period since then), incipient fantasy battles (pre D&D) with mixtures of Minifigs first Middle Earth range and anything vaguely ancient or medieval, Ader and myself doing Napoleonics, and all kinds of mid 70s teenage scrapings together. I do recall playing in a refight of Hastings, using the Airfix Roman archers put on horseback and converted into left handed knights, run by Steve Badsey, later merely a distinguished military historian but then a godlike figure four or five years older than me, who let me command the Breton wing. Ader and I played regularly, and the beginnings of the dreaded wargamer's competiveness arose. He would insist on taking every conceivable shot (3 skirmishers at 200 yards, that sort of thing) which meant we seldom really finished before it was time to go home. One day we had an argument over some cavalry disappearing behind some houses and appearing on my flank. After some choice words I picked up my stuff and went home. That same evening I made up my mind never to have an argument in a wargame again, and, the odd minor dispute aside, I have kept to this. After all, it's my hobby; it's far too important to argue over! As I sit here at the keyboard (not a manual typewriter wielded by some caring female person) looking back twenty odd years, through thousands of painted figures from 2mm to 150 mm, two books and a couple of dozen sets of rules, some long and some short, I am filled with a kind of disbelieving amazement for the effort I would put into converting figures - I mean, plasticine pith helmets? tissue cloaks and paper axe heads for 50 figures at a time? - and making notes from library books. Being a Luddite, I knew nothing of photocopiers until Bill Powell showed me; he has a career in computers, I'm mortally afraid of mine. Nostalgia being what it is, and 25mm figures no longer costing 7 pence each, it's tempting to look back on a Golden Age. But I couldn't afford more than a few figures at 7p each, whereas I'm swimming in unpainted lead and pevjter awaiting my brush to a degree that my wife wants to know why on earth I would need more. "I need Visigoths/Afghans/Mexicans", I say, "Those are Vikings / Dervishes/ gunfighters." And I haven't used banana oil in years. It stinks up the house, you know. Still. A few years ago I sold some pieces of desert terrain to Chris Gilder of Connoisseur Figures. His dad, the late Peter Gilder, was the doyen of wargames scenery when I was in my teens. He was the sculptor on those early Hinchliffe figures I bought with my, what, 25p a week pocket money. I felt the way you might if you'd sold a painting to Picasso's kid. Back to MWAN #100 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1999 Hal Thinglum This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com